By Christopher DeMarcus (Contributor) – Email
Print Edition: March 26, 2014
UFV’s Dr. Hamish Telford was featured in a Globe and Mail article this past Thursday. He is a contributor to the national paper, but this time the article was about him.
Dr. Telford is having trouble paying his mortgage bills, despite his $86,000 yearly salary and tenured job security. He and his wife have separated, leaving him to pay for the remainder of the mortgage, as well as childcare costs for their seven-year-old son. To top it off, his mini-van needs $2,000 in repair. Despite his modest consumption, he can barely afford his home.
How does that make you feel?
After the article did its rounds on social media this week, the cloud’s comments quickly shifted into two camps. Most chanted, “Sell your fucking house!” On the other side of the argument were shouts about the housing market: “Let the bubble burst!”
Those desensitized to Dr. Telford’s plight see the professor as spoiled; they demand he adjust his lifestyle to new circumstances. Meanwhile others related to the personal side of the story: if this guy can’t make the middle class life work for him, who can?
This debate reminds us of the fight between union and non-union workers. Many non-union workers despise union workers’ benefits — advocates for the destruction of unions demand that solidarity be dropped in favour of free market equality.
If online comments are any indication, the majority think Dr. Telford should move into a basement suite with his son, sell his mini-van, and suffer like the rest of us.
But it doesn’t have to be this way.
I would like to live in a society that can allow a man who possesses high levels of intellect and skill — a man with a PhD in political science and who is the head of a university department — to be able to afford a house and a minivan for his child.
I would like to live in a society that is not driven by market forces to such an extreme that we blame Dr. Telford instead of a bloated market.
Our society should be that of regulated markets, a society of socialism; not a society based on the pure morals of capital accumulation.
However, the online comments on Dr. Telford’s story highlight a key problem in socialism: envy.
The folks who wanted Dr. Telford to sell his home, in a real sense, wanted a man with a PhD to fall from the ivory tower. For the crowd, the market is their guiding principle; even when our government’s traditions and policies promote ideas of economic equality.
Yes, we must regulate capital. Yes, we must institute laws of economic equality.
But here, in envy, we have the flaw of leftist movements and Keynesian economics. If we use tax money from the top one per cent to help Dr. Telford and his family — and keep him in the business of teaching us what we need to know about political institutions — the lower class will explode with envy.
An old Slovenian joke by philosopher Slavoj Žižek describes this eternal problem. A genie comes to the house of an old farmer and says, “I will give you whatever you want, but I will also give two of the same to your neighbour.” The farmer replies, “Then poke out one of my eyes.”
In the past, we used religious methods to regulate envy: it’s the sixth of seven deadly sins. The church, when it was our government, installed rules around the individual’s pursuit of property and the effect on common good.
But even divine law could not control the envy of humankind. The constant lust for the destruction of things that others possess infects all institutions — especially those masked in ideas of absolute, fundamental goodness.
In our secular age, the call to economic ethics is only answered by childish ideas of progress and technological determinism. Sam Harris, our current ethical flavour of the week, roots ethics in his simplistic understanding of neuroscience’s role in social interaction. As if a series of chemical reactions can explain Dr. Telford’s problems with market forces and the crowd’s jealous apathy.
This is why the political and economic right is winning against the left. Modern conservatives have a poor, but working solution. For them, greed is good. The market is the divine principle. And the masses accept their fate in it.
For the left, envy is wishfully thought away.
Dr. Telford’s story teaches us that we need to find a better way of handling envy in society, even in a socialist economy. We need to build mechanisms that have us concerned about his son more than the square footage of his house.
