What Can Be Made of Schadenfreude?
What Can Be Made of Schadenfreude?
Moral qualms aside, taking pleasure in the suffering of others can be thrilling
I feel tense watching the finals of relay event in track and field.
The baton exchange is so easily mishandled, and the humiliating
consequences of error are so complete for the athletes. Even so, whether
I feel full empathy if a bad exchange does occur has qualifiers. If it is Olympic event, when a rival country other than the United States suffers this mistake, my Olympic spirit goes off the rails. Pleasure mixes with pity.
What should I make of my pleasure, my schadenfreude?
Clearly, taking pleasure in another’s suffering takes one into morally dubious territory. Eulogies never begin with, “Yes, he was a good man, quick to find pleasure in the misfortune of others. We will miss him deeply”
People who confess to their schadenfreude can be excoriated. Just ask “Jane Fenton,” who in a pseudonymized piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago, admitted to occasionally feel happy when one of her students failed. She received a mudslide of vitriol from about half of those commenting on her piece, prompting her to write a rebuttal in her defense.
However, Ms. Fenton’s emotional repertoire is actually quite normal. Schadenfreude, despite its guilt-inducing ways, is a natural, pretty much inevitable emotion permeating social life in both nuanced and bold forms. Why is this? One reason is the brute fact that misfortunes happening to others, in the competitive arena of work and love, can lead to our gain. The evolutionary logic drives home the simple conclusion that any event from which we benefit will please us to this degree. Otherwise, we would not survive as a species. Yes, I want this job dearly, but why don’t you, my rival, go ahead and take it. I’ll step aside. No, this it not the way the world works. And so, if my rivals suffer a setback, a part of me, within my reptilian brain says, yes.
Imagine you are in love with someone. This person is attractive and has a great personality, which largely explains your feelings. But, exactly because of these features, a rival lurks in the wings, causing you fits of jealousy. This person is caught stealing from the company. How do you feel? Unadulterated pity? Secret joy that this person may no longer be a credible rival? Certainly a mix of these feelings. In the mating game, the battleground of adaptive fitness, all can seem fair.
At the same time, we also have a passion for justice. We want good people to fare well and bad people to suffer. Despite the seemingly random, wacky way events often evolve, we want to believe that fate trends toward a pattern of just outcomes – something approaching karma. When someone deserves their suffering, there is something deeply satisfying – and pleasing in this (which, by the way, was when Ms. Fenton felt schadenfreude, when the student’s behavior rendered him or her roundly deserving of failure). This is especially true if misfortune comes to someone who has mistreated us unjustly. Their comeuppance, coming in the form a misfortune, is personal, a kind of revenge consummated by fate. In such cases, the pleasure is sweet in the extreme and probably free of moral alarm.
Consider the boyhood experience of late Yale historian, Peter Gay. He suffered the indignities of persecution as Jew in Nazi Germany, before escaping to the America in 1939, through the prescient ingenuity of his father. Both he and his father were intense sports fans. Indeed sports became a needed distraction from the ever more abominable mistreatment from the Nazis. By the 1938 Olympic games, he and his father identified with America rather than Germany, despising as they did the racist notions of Aryan superiority which the Nazi hoped would be on display during the games. Gay and his father attended many of the events and cheered passionately for the American athletes and felt disappointed when German athletes won.
One event occupied a special place in Gay’s recollection of that time, which he described with fresh enthusiasm in a memoir, written seven decades later. This was the women’s 4 X 100 relay, expected to be easily won by the Germans, a fact that depressed Gay and his father. The race proceeded at expected, with the Germans starting strong and widening their lead with each baton exchange, the American’s a distant second. But, as the baton was passed to the anchor of the German team, a mishap occurred. Gay remembers his father leaping to his feet and shouting “Die Madchen haben den Stab verloren!” (“The girls have dropped the baton!”), as the American runner, Helen Stevens went on to finish first and “. . . the unbeatable models of Nazi womanhood put their arms around each other and cried their German hearts out.”
For Gay, this event remained “one of the greatest moments” of his life. “Schadenfreude,” he concluded, “can be one of the greatest joys in life. Splinters such as these in a time that gave me little pleasure provided instances of pure happiness.”
You can watch the race on YouTube. The passing of eighty years takes little away from the experience. You want an extra dollop of guilt-free schadenfreude? Drink in Hitler and Goebbels’s reactions to the loss.
What should I make of my pleasure, my schadenfreude?
Clearly, taking pleasure in another’s suffering takes one into morally dubious territory. Eulogies never begin with, “Yes, he was a good man, quick to find pleasure in the misfortune of others. We will miss him deeply”
People who confess to their schadenfreude can be excoriated. Just ask “Jane Fenton,” who in a pseudonymized piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education a few years ago, admitted to occasionally feel happy when one of her students failed. She received a mudslide of vitriol from about half of those commenting on her piece, prompting her to write a rebuttal in her defense.
However, Ms. Fenton’s emotional repertoire is actually quite normal. Schadenfreude, despite its guilt-inducing ways, is a natural, pretty much inevitable emotion permeating social life in both nuanced and bold forms. Why is this? One reason is the brute fact that misfortunes happening to others, in the competitive arena of work and love, can lead to our gain. The evolutionary logic drives home the simple conclusion that any event from which we benefit will please us to this degree. Otherwise, we would not survive as a species. Yes, I want this job dearly, but why don’t you, my rival, go ahead and take it. I’ll step aside. No, this it not the way the world works. And so, if my rivals suffer a setback, a part of me, within my reptilian brain says, yes.
Imagine you are in love with someone. This person is attractive and has a great personality, which largely explains your feelings. But, exactly because of these features, a rival lurks in the wings, causing you fits of jealousy. This person is caught stealing from the company. How do you feel? Unadulterated pity? Secret joy that this person may no longer be a credible rival? Certainly a mix of these feelings. In the mating game, the battleground of adaptive fitness, all can seem fair.
At the same time, we also have a passion for justice. We want good people to fare well and bad people to suffer. Despite the seemingly random, wacky way events often evolve, we want to believe that fate trends toward a pattern of just outcomes – something approaching karma. When someone deserves their suffering, there is something deeply satisfying – and pleasing in this (which, by the way, was when Ms. Fenton felt schadenfreude, when the student’s behavior rendered him or her roundly deserving of failure). This is especially true if misfortune comes to someone who has mistreated us unjustly. Their comeuppance, coming in the form a misfortune, is personal, a kind of revenge consummated by fate. In such cases, the pleasure is sweet in the extreme and probably free of moral alarm.
Consider the boyhood experience of late Yale historian, Peter Gay. He suffered the indignities of persecution as Jew in Nazi Germany, before escaping to the America in 1939, through the prescient ingenuity of his father. Both he and his father were intense sports fans. Indeed sports became a needed distraction from the ever more abominable mistreatment from the Nazis. By the 1938 Olympic games, he and his father identified with America rather than Germany, despising as they did the racist notions of Aryan superiority which the Nazi hoped would be on display during the games. Gay and his father attended many of the events and cheered passionately for the American athletes and felt disappointed when German athletes won.
One event occupied a special place in Gay’s recollection of that time, which he described with fresh enthusiasm in a memoir, written seven decades later. This was the women’s 4 X 100 relay, expected to be easily won by the Germans, a fact that depressed Gay and his father. The race proceeded at expected, with the Germans starting strong and widening their lead with each baton exchange, the American’s a distant second. But, as the baton was passed to the anchor of the German team, a mishap occurred. Gay remembers his father leaping to his feet and shouting “Die Madchen haben den Stab verloren!” (“The girls have dropped the baton!”), as the American runner, Helen Stevens went on to finish first and “. . . the unbeatable models of Nazi womanhood put their arms around each other and cried their German hearts out.”
For Gay, this event remained “one of the greatest moments” of his life. “Schadenfreude,” he concluded, “can be one of the greatest joys in life. Splinters such as these in a time that gave me little pleasure provided instances of pure happiness.”
You can watch the race on YouTube. The passing of eighty years takes little away from the experience. You want an extra dollop of guilt-free schadenfreude? Drink in Hitler and Goebbels’s reactions to the loss.
