BY STEWART SLATER

The below is part of a series considering how society has come to adopt, and in some cases, celebrate the Seven Deadly Sins. Here below I list 4 sins with the other 3 of the 7 to follow next week.

The Angry Society

There is a paradox about anger – experiencing it is a sign of impotence, expressing it is a sign of power.

For we feel anger when the universe fails to conform to our desires. Few (outside certain discrete premises in Soho) wish to feel pain, so we feel anger to those who cause it by standing on our toes. We want our sports teams to win, so feel anger when they lose. We wish to occupy a certain piece of road, so we feel anger when someone cuts us up. Anger is our reaction to experiencing something we do not want, but have been powerless to avoid.

What we do with this anger, however, depends on the situation. If we think we can display it without consequence, we do. A scrawny bloke who spills another’s pint is much more likely to receive their anger than a seven-foot, muscle-bound gym bro. An underling who messes up is much more likely to be screamed at than a boss – “Where have you been, you f***ing f***wit? Get your f***king arse over here” was a phrase which often greeted an old flatmate’s arrival on the trading floor. Oddly, he never used the same expression back to his boss…The expression of anger situates us in the pecking order.

We generally ascribe ourselves a higher status than we deserve, so these reminders of our relative unimportance sit poorly with our self-image. They discombobulate us. This is why anger is so flexible in its targets – having been thrown off balance, we will do anything to regain it. We throw things when sports matches go against us – we cannot hurt the universe but, sure as eggs is eggs, we can teach that beer can a damn good lesson. After a bad day at work, we spend the evening narking at our partners. Having been diminished ourselves, we re-elevate our position by diminishing others – ego demands no less. Reminded of its impotence, it must show its potency.

We may, or we may not, live in a particularly angry time. We see marches, riots and demos, but we have always seen marches, riots and demos. The Nika riots in sixth century Constantinople lasted a week, destroyed half the city and left 30,000 dead – a feat beyond even the modern world’s acknowledged champions of rioting, the French. We certainly might find it easier to be angry. No longer believing in Fate, God’s Will or whatever name we give to a deterministic universe, we no longer have a ready reason for the universe not doing what we want. From here, it is an easy step to believing we have been wronged when it does not.

Where we do, certainly, differ from our ancestors is our attitude to anger. Representative of most human thought is Confucius’ dictum, “Whatever is begun in anger ends in shame”. For thinkers across cultures have been unanimous in seeing it as a no-no. That it is one of the Seven Deadly Sins gives us a handle on Christianity’s view. The philosopher Seneca wrote a three volume work, De Ira (On Anger), against it and then a tragedy, Medea, for those slow on the up-take  – she was the ancient world’s poster child for the dangers of anger; miffed at being dumped by Jason, she kills his fiancée. And then her own children.

More recently, however, we have changed from focusing on the consequences of expressing anger to the consequences of not expressing anger. Dating perhaps to Freud -most bad things do- we now believe in “letting it all hang out”. “Unexpressed emotions will never die. They are buried alive and will come forth later in uglier ways”. If we are angry, we will always be angry, so we may as well get it over with.

Both of these approaches can be consistent. Anger has traditionally been bad, no matter who felt it – that numerous saints experienced it did not turn it into a virtue. To Freud and others, repressing it is bad, no matter who feels it. In the modern world, however, our attitudes to an individual’s anger depend on our attitudes to the individual. To The Guardian, Donald Trump’s mugshot made him look like “a foolish old man with anger issues” – not, we may assume, a compliment. “Male anger problem needs radical action” asserted a letter in the Sydney Morning Herald a few weeks ago. On the other side of the gender divide, “How women and minorities are claiming their right to rage” (The Guardian), “The craze for feminine rage” (Post Magazine), “Rage Becomes Her” (Refinery29) and “Female Rage: The brutal new icons of film and TV” (BBC). It is not that we no longer disapprove of anger, but that we only disapprove of the wrong people being angry. For them, it is a sin. For us, it is a virtue.

Our view of anger has become bound up with our view of power. If we consider the latter “problematic”, then using it to express the former must be too, so it must be stigmatised. There can be no consideration of whether it might be justified, indeed, if it comes from a place of “privilege”, it can never be justified – Donald Trump, with his wealth and advantages, has no legitimate reason to be angry about anything and Donald Trump being able to express his anger is a sign of what is wrong with the world. By contrast, the anger of others is to be celebrated because expressing it is a sign that they have power, which they may have lacked previously, and they may use it to gain more. Anger from their group is to be decried because it might help them get what they want, anger from our group to be celebrated because it might help us get what we want. In our zero-sum, dog-eat-dog world, where anger is not always a sin, the right to be angry has become yet another front in the culture wars.

But there is an irony here. For, even if we treat the expression of anger as a sign of power, experiencing it is still, ultimately, a sign of weakness. Not only have we failed to order the world in a way we find congenial, but we believe this hurts us as we can only thrive if it is. A strong mind, Marcus Aurelius tells us, “always adapts itself easily to practicality and the given event. It has no favoured material for its use…and turns any obstacle in material for its own use…A small flame would be extinguished, but a bright fire rapidly claims as its own all that is heaped on it, devours it all and leaps up yet higher in consequence.” Those who are truly strong and know they can flourish whatever may come don’t get angry, those who do are those who believe they cannot cope, those who cannot stand straight but believe they need the world to hold them straight.

We celebrate anger because we think it will allow us to master others, but we have forgotten that it is mastering ourselves which is true power.

The Envious Society

Hard though it may be to believe given the deluge that greeted me this morning, the summer holidays will shortly be upon us. Which means, of course, that our social media feeds will soon be filled by photos of our friends (acquaintances/people who we don’t really know but they seem to know us so it would be rude to turn down their friend request) on their holidays/vacation/hollybobs (those who use the last expression should, of course, instantly be unfriended).

The type of images you see will depend on the type of connections you have. Perhaps you will be treated to pictures of a shirtless acquaintance, plastic pint glass in hand, each daily update a new hue for their personal colour chart of corpulence. Perhaps it will be a post-lunch restaurant table in some French town square, festooned with empty plates and a bottle of the darling local rose. Perhaps they will show the pool at a Tuscan villa, perhaps a landscape across which the individual has walked/run/cycled or on which they have shot something.

But, whatever they show, they will all show the same thing. Because most social media posts show the same thing – that the poster has an admirable lifestyle. The differences between them are purely due to the fact that different groups have different definitions of what this is, based on different experiences and different budgets. Whatever their group believes to be the right way to live one’s life, an individual’s social media posts will endeavour to show. For, contra that staple of chick-lit psychology, whether or not we want to be seen, we all want to be admired and we all need to be envied.

To this end, social media is a great boon, allowing us to craft a never-ending montage of our greatest hits as we appear to waft seamlessly from restaurant to bar to hotel to villa, in our own (probably poorer and certainly more obscure) version of the classic ‘80’s American series, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Look at us, we say. Look at the things we do. Look at the things we have. We’re doing it right!. It is for this reason that social media life is but a fraction of real life. Posts show the pool in Marbella (Marbs, before which there should be no carbs, I believe), they do not show the screaming kids on the 5am Ryanair flight to get there. They show cocktails in a chi-chi bar, they do not show the conversations with God on the porcelain telephone which so often follow. Every social media user is, on social media, a swan, gliding gracefully across the surface, the furious paddling beneath ignored because it would shatter the illusion.

Envy is an odd sin compared to, say, wrath – none of us wants to be wrathful and none of us wants  others to be wrathful towards us. But if we do not want to be envious, we do generally want others to be envious of us; it is a sin we are happy for others to commit. Because while wrath can be felt in any direction (even if, for pragmatic but not entirely praiseworthy reasons, it is only generally expressed downwards), envy can only be felt in one. Upwards. We envy those above us in the pecking order, we cannot envy those below. Being the recipient of envy thus becomes a badge of honour, confirmation of our elevated status compared to those who experience it.

As the old social structures have collapsed, envy has become both easier and more important.

For not only has mass media given us a greater awareness of what others have – a Chinese peasant would have no idea what the Emperor wore since he would almost certainly never see him, a quick trip to Google will tell you what the King was wearing, who made it and how much it probably cost – but we have come to allocate status and its symbols on budget alone.

Many societies have allotted their citizens into classes or castes between which there was little or no movement, and allocated certain goods accordingly. A Roman plebeian might have fancied a thick purple stripe on his toga but since he was not a Senator, that was tough. A Chinese peasant might have fantasised about feeling smooth silk against his skin, but until the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) it was illegal for him to own it. A Japanese merchant might be the richest man in his village, but the law dictated his house was less grand than the local Samurai.

By contrast, nothing is now off limits to anyone. We can all have what we want, assuming we work hard enough. But this increase in opportunity comes at a cost; for status has changed from being a permanent accident of birth to being the ephemeral result of our most recent efforts. We can be up, but we can also be down. A Japanese Samurai always knew where he stood, a modern Westerner must always look over his shoulder.

And so we hare around society’s hamster wheel, desperately seeking the prizes society tells us to pursue. And when we acquire them, we display them, cajoling our acquaintances into agreeing with our self image, each “like” prompting a frisson as they confirm we are doing things right, each “lucky you!” or “I’m so jealous” a positive shiver, cementing our view of our superior place in the pecking order. What was once a sin has become a vital feedback mechanism. A way for us to reassure ourselves of our position.

Traditionally envy has been condemned because of its effects on those who experience it but is it, as we implicitly seem to believe, good for those who are the subject of it? As we noted earlier, being envied comes at the cost of not fully being known, only those experiences which we think others would like to share can be revealed. Social media has given us the power to control how we are seen but the logic of its status game dictates that an ever smaller portion of us should be seen.

But envy has another price – conformity. Consider influencers. They all look the same – bottle blonde women and bulky blokes. They go to the same places – Dubai. They eat in the same restaurants – Salt Bae. And they do the same thing – drink expensive cocktails and buy cars. For this is the problem with envy – if we wish to inspire it in others, we must show them that we have what they want, not what we might want. We must outsource our desires to the crowd, no longer sovereign individuals free to choose, but followers of society’s path and doers of society’s bidding. Such a life may be comfortable, but it is stagnant, its members unable to break the shackles of societal desire which bind them. Just as social media gives others a shrunken image of us, so too does the pursuit of envy give us a shrunken image of ourselves, never encouraging us to strike out on our own path, to come to know who we really are.

So, if you haven’t yet booked your holiday, ask yourself, are you considering the destination you want to go to, or the one that will look best on your socials?

The Lustful Society

Lust is a sin I find it difficult entirely to condemn – none of us, after all, would be here without it…

It would be easy, looking at the leather hot pant-clad dancers at Eurovision, hook-up culture and internet porn to write a pulpit-thumping screed on how the world has degenerated into some form of depraved techno-Sodom. After all, the Daily Mail does so every day. But it would also, I think, be wrong. For most things puritans would decry are but modern versions of long-term phenomena.

Under-dressed women in Northern nightclubs? Minoan women went topless (their climate was, to be fair, rather more congenial to this than Newcastle’s). “Booty Calls”? The Roman Epictetus writes of a young man so enamoured of a female that he wants to visit her day and night “even when it is so late that your slave refuses to go out with you”. Pornography? Look at the frescoes in Pompeii. The porcelain plaques illustrated with scenes from a Chinese sex manual I once came across with my seven year old daughter in a Singaporean antiques shop were certainly artistic, but left so little even to the juvenile imagination that a hasty retreat was the only option. I suspect, though cannot prove, that the amount of sex people have had has stayed reasonably constant across time, all that has changed is their willingness to talk about it – Victorians may have covered the legs of their pianos, but lived in cities awash with teenage (and younger) prostitutes.

They were, of course, well-known hypocrites, but in our own way, so are we. Lust is all around us but, despite claiming to have shrugged off the shackles of a prudish past and let it all hang out, we insist on denying this and force others to join us in doing so.

For being the object of lust is advantageous. There is a raft of studies showing so-called “pretty privilege”. Those deemed attractive earn more, have more friends, more partners, more children, are seen as more likeable and more trustworthy etc. etc. And there is a good reason for this. If we are, as science tells us, merely machines for passing on our genes, then we should engage in behaviours which will encourage those we deem suitable candidates to assist us in that endeavour.

But, if science is now our method for understanding the world, our understanding of how we should live in it is still, primarily, derived from religion. And religion has been reluctant to see passing on one’s genes as the be all and end all of existence.

Recently, a woman won a sex discrimination claim after her boss invited her to a meeting with a client because, “he likes pretty women”. “Is that all I get recognised for that I am attractive??? If [the client] were coming in, I should also have been consulted and or at least told straight away. I answer 50 plus queries for [the client] daily” she emailed a senior colleague (punctuation claimant’s own). The comment was “demeaning”. In the finest Victorian tradition, quietly inviting her to the meeting on the basis of her looks would have been fine, it was telling her which caused a problem.

The claimant was reflecting the beliefs of her society. Hard work and talent are to be valued more highly than looks and are, in some way, mutually exclusive. A puritan in New England would have thought no different. But a modern person should.

For we know that hard work and talent are just as genetically based as looks. They are not morally praise-worthy attributes of good people, they are characteristics inherited from parents. Those who have the golden triangle of intelligence, conscientiousness and resilience are just as much winners of the genetic lottery as a cover model in Vogue. Reasonably, therefore, they should be treated in much the same way as looks and success earned through the latter seen as equally praise-worthy. Attractiveness is not a different, lower category of attribute, it is merely a different attribute of the same order.

Far from demeaning her, therefore, inviting the claimant to the meeting because of her looks was an acknowledgement that in that particular circumstance, she had a unique value, something extra she could bring to the party. A man could not do what she did because, since the client was heterosexual, he would not have been swayed by his looks. If anyone is being demeaned, it is the client – he is weak, the claimant is strong and has the power to persuade him to do what she wants.

It is because of this power that, at the other end of the attractiveness spectrum, those not currently (these things change, as a quick glance at a Reubens nude shows) thought of as beautiful, have, over recent decades, been so keen to change this fact. The rise of body positivity (fat, we are told, is beautiful) is an attempt to insist that those who do not currently receive lust are fully deserving of it (and its associated benefits) and to shame those who withhold it as “fat-phobic”. Those who do not receive lust believe, correctly, that it has a value and those who do receive it believe, wrongly, that it has none.

If they appear to differ, they lead to a common outcome – both insist on their right to choose how others perceive them. Those who are attractive wish to be seen as competent and nothing more, allowing the story they tell themselves about their success to align with the story society tells them, those who are unattractive wish to be seen as attractive to gain the advantages society bestows. Others, they assert, must act in a way which coheres with their self-conception.

This is, however, a fool’s errand. When we meet someone, we take in a range of information – we analyse what they say (and how they say it – we are, after all, snobby Brits), we think about what they do and how they do it. We think about how they smell. We form a holistic view of the person in front of us, we do not concentrate on one single aspect of them, because to do so would be to miss out on potentially important information. And one of the things we pay attention to is how someone looks. Because, like it or not, individuals can play different roles in our lives and one of them is as potential partners.

But if the attractive cannot stop us thinking they are attractive, neither can the unattractive force us to see them as good-looking. Attraction and lust are not the type of feelings one can be reasoned or shamed into. We like whom we like.

Both ends of the spectrum make the same mistake. Science has, for two centuries, told us we are just clever animals, behaving like clever animals. But while they might accept this in other, more personally congenial areas, when it comes to lust, both the attractive and the less so hark back to an earlier time when Man was on a pedestal and believe we can act with far greater self-control than we actually can.

As society has opened up, there are more opportunities for lust – an old colleague of mine was known as the best-looking woman in the City in the seventies, her successor today would have rather more competition –  and the benefits to receiving lust are greater – a pretty milkmaid might have been able to marry the local farmer, her descendant can conquer Hollywood. There is nothing we can do about this, it is how we are made. Perhaps the time has come to acknowledge this.

The Proud Society

The “curse” of Sports Illustrated was invented when eagle-eyed readers noticed that the athletes who featured on the magazine’s front page often suffered a catastrophic decline in performance shortly thereafter. This is, of course, the product of probability, not mythical woo-woo – a streak long enough to attract the attention of the media is probably a streak which is closer to its end than its beginning. Life may have flows, but it also has ebbs and one follows the other as sure as the words “Conservative Loss” follow “By-election called”.

It is for this, pragmatic, reason that pride has generally been discouraged. The cockier you are at the top, the stupider you will look at the bottom – nemesis having followed hubris since at least Greek times. Better to smooth things out, cutting off some of the peak to limit the extent of the fall.

Sensible though this advice may be, it runs into two unfortunate facts about human psychology. Firstly, we tend to overestimate our abilities and ascribe our successes to our own efforts rather than acknowledge the healthy dose of luck which is often involved. While fortune may come and go, we believe that talent is eternal and thus that our run of achievement will carry on, somehow immune to the vagaries of chance. Other people, we tell ourselves, may suffer reversals but we will not because what they earned by luck, we got by skill.

Secondly, under-discussed in psychology, we all have a strong need to feel good about ourselves. We wish to believe that we are upstanding, successful people, and we devote much time and effort to maintaining this belief. The psychologist Jung argued that we are all composed of two parts: the persona – the positive, successful face we present to ourselves and to the world, and the shadow – the shameful deeds and inclinations we hide from ourselves and others. All human beings are both, but most human beings believe they are solely the former, their inner monologue the equivalent of a greatest hits show on the radio,

Throughout most of history, religion has been a useful counter-weight to these impulses. For, across a vast range of societies, people have believed that their lives will be subject to some form of post-mortem judgement. They may have thought they were good but they could not know they were good until God or the gods had had their say, and their verdict was final – an Egyptian who failed the “weighing of the heart” could not refer the matter to the ancient equivalent of the European Court. Moreover, most belief systems have denied that most people could be perfectly good – we are, after all, all sinners. Even those which have seen it as a theoretical possibility make it clear that it is vanishingly unlikely – a Buddhist will almost certainly not achieve Enlightenment during this lifetime; appearing once every 500 years (if that), any given Stoic is almost certainly not the Sage.

Religion has also been keen to remind us of the role of external factors in our lives. Just a few lines into The Iliad, the reader is informed that everything “transpired according to the will of Zeus”. Later on in the work, it transpires that even he is subject to the Fates. “Deo Volente” was once as common in the West as “inshallah” remains in the Muslim East. The Chinese believed that everything happened in accordance with the unfolding of the impenetrable Dao. Man has traditionally sought divine favour because Man has traditionally believed he can accomplish little without it.

Taken together, the impact of these beliefs was religion sitting humanity down and saying, “You ain’t all that”.

As the world has secularised, it has lost this check on our impulses. We no longer have anything telling us we cannot be good and we no longer have any all-seeing, external judge who will decide if we are good. We have forgotten about chance, fate or divine will and made ourselves the motive force of the universe.

This may or may not have made us happier – think of those (generally socialist) intellectuals promising sunlit uplands once the dead hand of religion and religious guilt was removed from humanity – but it has come at a cost. For always wanting to think we are perfectly good, and now believing we can be perfectly good, we have come to think everything about us must be good.

Broadly speaking, things can be divided into three camps: the good – helping old ladies cross the road, the bad – pushing old ladies under buses, and the neutral – going to the supermarket. It would be understandable to be proud about the first – it is a sign one is a good person, it would be wrong to be proud about the second – seeking to murder pensioners is always a bad idea, and it would be bizarre to be proud of the third – it is neither a source of pride or its opposite, shame, it just is.

What we have seen over recent times is an explosion of pride – gay pride, fat pride, bald pride etc. etc. But, many (and possibly all) of these are genetic – they are not the outcome of an individual’s conscious choices and efforts, they are just who they are. They could not be otherwise. They are, therefore, neutral, neither, properly, a source of pride or shame in the same way that having brown eyes is neither a source of pride or shame.

What these characteristics share is that they have long been the subject of social stigma – wrong, in the case of homosexuality, unattractive in the case of obesity, faintly comical in the case of baldness. Pride movements seek, reflecting individuals’ need to feel good about themselves, to correct these historic attitudes, but in doing so, they over-correct, taking what should be, according to their proponents’ arguments, neutral (and, in the case of obesity given its health risks, unfortunate) facts about humans just to be acknowledged and turning them into positives to be celebrated. And, since no reality check can be allowed to burst individuals’ bubble (God may no longer be our judge, but society can often be an inconvenient jury), everyone else must agree, under penalty of being labelled “phobic”.

It is not a large step from celebrating the neutral to celebrating the negative. Rachel Reeves, caught committing plagiarism, reasoned herself into a position where she was “really proud of that” – wishing to believe she was good led to the conclusion that everything she did was good, and thus, in her case, plagiarism had to be good – news to every academic in history.

This is the reasoning of the teenager, elevating that which is currently convenient to one’s ego to a new moral order for all, but teenagers are not, despite their insistence to the contrary, fully grown humans. Nor are those who tout their pride – it is by confronting our flaws that we grow, not by seeking to justify and spin them. One of the few academic models of spiritual growth, Kasimierz Dabrowski’s “Positive Disintegration”, sees individuals undergo a period of intense shame as they realise how they have failed to live up to their values but those who do not do so remain forever trapped at lower levels of development. It is by losing the need to feel good about oneself that one progresses and comes to know oneself.

It is paradoxical, and, to the individuals in question probably incomprehensible, but those quickest to tout their pride, are those most deserving of pity.

Stewart Slater works in Finance. He invites you to join him at his website.