Don't Look up in Anger. The Decline of Resentment in Contemporary Society

• Autores: Andrea Erizi
• Localización: On Resentment.: An Interdisciplinary Workshop on The History of Emotions, 26,27, 28 October, 2011 The Louis-Jeantet Auditorium, Geneva / coord. por Dolores Martín Moruno, Javier Moscoso Sarabia, Bernardino Fantini, 2011, pág. 7
• Idioma: español
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• Resumen

  • This paper takes issue with widespread understandings of contemporary Western societies as characterized by massive resentment, by arguing the provocative thesis that this emotion does not play a major role in our present social life.

    The framework of this diagnosis is an anthropological perspective challenging a view of emotions as universal, unchanging, embedded in human nature. In fact, according to an outlook which I find developed in Max Weber's sociology of religion, emotions and, generally speaking, the features of subjectivity (their interests, purposes, capabilities) are entrenched in both material conditions and the world view (Weltbild) of a society, and hence historically variable. Not only the form and the object of emotions depend on the cultural treatment they are subjected to, but their very emergence is regulated by the overall climate (material as well as cultural) of a society.

    As against this anthropological background, my stance is that some changes which have occurred in late (post-) modern societies are leading to the progressive decline of resentment as a widespread social emotion. Here I would like to draw attention on three figures which represent a sign of the times as far as the passing of resentment is concerned.

    - Lifestyle: the hyper-individualism of consumption turns into the proliferation of strictly personal lifestyles, among which no comparison (and hence, no envy-resentment) is possible. Paradoxically, to base one's self-esteem on consumption protects from a competition based on objective criteria: lifestyles cannot be hierarchized according to their worth.

    - Facebook: thanks to devices like the social networks, social recognition is no longer a scarce resource:

    everybody gets their little bit of visibility (either esthetical, or intellectual), whereas in the past some selection was needed to gain access to the public sphere. And obviously, selection used to produce exclusion, which may well give rise to resentment.

    - Big Brother: these shows function as a social lottery which fuels the perception that desirable status is accessible to anybody by non-challenging, non-enduring strategies. Instead, resentment flourishes in societies in which the fixity of social hierarchies seems to condemn to a lifelong inferiority.

    However declining resentment may be, this is not to say that competition and comparison-based identities are bound to fade as well. They are rather probably more dominant as ever, but they do not generate resentment, nor any emotions addressed to those who are somehow superior.

    In particular, they do not excite rage, which is the emotion involved in the perception of something unjust. This allows a brief excursus on the relationship between resentment and rage. The spectacle of inequality excites rage when this unfairness violates one's moral convictions, whereas I assume resentment as the feeling associated with the awareness of other people's deserved excellence. Though some authors tend to make the two conceptsemotions collapse, I would keep them distinguished: if someone experiences anger or indignation because a situation clashes with their idea of justice, I would not label this "resentment".

    However, rage is just as culturally situated as any other emotions, and the contemporary world view does not leave any room for it either. A dominant feature of present representations of social reality is an attitude I would call "realism", that is the reversal of the theological stance Weber defined "theodicy of fortune": not so much "I won because I was right", as "I am right because I won". Within such a view, no perception of injustice, and hence no rage is ever possible.

    Thus, my final assumption is that the subjectivity which used to feel resentment and/or rage towards those above them has been substituted by a subjectivity which growls at those below them (either migrants, minorities, or convicts).