The cutting room floor
I’ll get back to the pope and the Vatican and secrecy and Crimen Sollicitationis – today was a bit rushed – but meanwhile, there is the related, large, vexed subject of suffering, and what to think of it, and what to think of what religion tells us about it and does about it. I did a piece on the subject for Comment is Free – but I didn’t say everything I could have (in a longer piece) or thought of.
I didn’t for instance say that it’s true (as one commenter mentioned) that suffering can teach us sympathy for other people (or it can get us to shut up inside ourselves – it all depends), and that it’s also true that we wouldn’t need sympathy for other people, and other people wouldn’t need our sympathy, if there were no suffering, so we can’t really say it’s good to have suffering because it teaches us sympathy when the sympathy it teaches us is parasitic on suffering.
And yet – I share the feeling, or intuition, that in some sense we would be worse off if sympathy just didn’t exist. What, even if suffering didn’t exist either? Yes, sort of. But the thing about that is, we are what we are, and what we are is an animal that is never immune from suffering, and that (obviously) shapes how we think about these things. So we’re trapped in this circle.
Anyway I don’t think sympathy is worth the worst kinds of suffering, which are all too common. And I don’t think we should make friends with whatever it is that makes suffering inevitable. Natural selection stinks. If you think God did it, you should think God stinks. We shouldn’t let God get away with the ‘suffering is necessary for compassion therefore it’s a good thing’ excuse. We can have doubts about life with no sympathy at all, and still think God stinks.
I didn’t say that at Comment is Free because I said other things. One can’t say everything, though commenters at C is F seem to expect one to. They also ask ‘Why didn’t you say what I would have said instead of what you wanted to say?’ I have great sympathy for them, but I cannot help.
While I agree that suffering per se does not improve people, I think there is a kernel of truth to this myth that needs to be uncovered if we are to throw the rest of the myth away. And I imagine this kernel of truth is related not to the suffering, but to what people do in response to the suffering – whether it is due to disease, starvation or is imposed by other people. I have in mind your comment from December, where you quote a story on how the horrific conditions of Auschwitz led to an important insight among the prisoners. Clearly, this insight represents an improvement. And equally clearly, one cannot for a moment even entertain the thought of using this improvement to justify the treatment of the prisoners (at least I can’t). Yet the improvement is real, even though it was bought at an unacceptable price. I am not saying, by the way, that the individuals so improved would not have been better off had they not been sent to Auschwitz in the first place.
On second thought, maybe this example is too extreme. To pick a more common example, it is often reported that people who suffer a life threatening disease will as a result change their priorities and end up living more fulfilling lives as a result (assuming they don’t die from the disease, of course). Again, in these cases, it is not the suffering that causes improvement, but it provides an impulse for the individual to change for the better.
It is fairly evident in everyday life that people who have neither seen nor experienced suffering have a strong tendency to oblivious self-absorption. We have evolved in a context where response to suffering in others is available to function as a strong check on that tendency. One might cite it as an ironic case of two wrongs making a right. Or point out that it merely demonstrates that we can hardly be made in the image of a perfect god, if we need to watch others suffer in order to achieve ethical self-awareness. All the rest, the CS-Lewisish shenanigans trotted out on every occasion by godbotherers, is merely blither predicated on an illusory concept of cosmic agency.
Five years ago my partner was hit by a car while he was standing at the edge of the pavement. He has suffered chronic pain, 24 hours a day, every day since and spends most of his time in a wheelchair. I suffer the much lesser pain of having to watch this. There are innumerable activities which he now cannot do and which we now cannot do together. Sometimes I just sit and cry.
To anyone who says there is any benefit in suffering I say come and swap lives with us. See how you feel about it after a year or two.
James: When you say “perhaps whatever positive effects there are (if or when there are any) are still outweighed by the negative ones”, I would drop the word “perhaps”. I don’t know of a single case in which the positive effects (if discernible, which in most cases they probably aren’t) of suffering outweigh the negative ones. I hope nothing I said would suggest otherwise! All I am saying is that sometimes positive effects exist, which is not a statement about outweighing the negative effects. Causing suffering in others is always wrong, and worshipping suffering almost more so.
Peter: I am sorry to hear about your situation. I don’t know if your post was a direct response to mine, but if it were, I hope the previous paragraph clarifies my stand. And yes, someone looking at you and your partner and thinking “how wonderful” would surely be sick in the mind.
My point was to add a tiny bit of nuance, not to argue against Ophelia’s point, which I wholeheartedly agree with. (You’re still free to disagree with said nuance, of course.)
Harald
I wasn’t specifically responding to your post. Obviously every situation is different, maybe there are circumstances where some good comes out of suffering, but speaking purely for myself I can see no benefits whatsoever in our situation and only wish things were back the way they were before the accident.
And Peter’s (and his partner’s) dreadful situation illustrates the horror of the archbishop’s infamous “All religious believers hold that there is no stage of human life, and no level of human experience, that is intrinsically incapable of being lived through in some kind of trust and hope.” There are experiences (which is presumably what the archbishop meant by the more orotund ‘levels of experience’) that are intrinsically incapable of being lived through in some kind of trust and hope. There are experiences that are just bad all the way through.
But not, of course, if you have an overwhelming belief in an eternal life of bliss, for which all this agony is just a kind of preparatory fraternity-hazing. Then you can have trust and hope. Might make you feel a bit better. But then so would some really good drugs.
Doesn’t do to overlook the persistence capacity for self-delusion in these matters, OB. Bishops never do, it keeps them in business.
It was those words of the Archbishop of Canterbury that finally led me to cut my ties with the church, as those who read my letters to the ABC will remember. These words:
Anyone who can say this – and this is what Christians really have to believe, after all, or their god is simply a monster – knows nothing about suffering at all, and is not willing to learn.
Christian leaders come in two varieties: worse and worst. The ABC is vying for top place with the pope. It’s very important to them to know the moral law and not to bend it. When they use language in this very odd fashion you know that they are playing games with people’s lives for the sake of the purity of faith. The ABC is not speaking about real suffering, but of suffering as an example in a theological pastiche of words (one dare not call them arguments). He may not have a lean and hungry look, but such men are dangerous.
Dave, no, quite. But what the bishops are doing is treating everyone as if the belief in an eternal life of bliss were relevant, even though they know perfectly well that not everyone shares that belief, and that people who do believe in it will not be impeded in that belief by the availability of a choice to exit early.
Eric, I linked to your first letter to the ABC in the article. Dreadfully relevant.
Sympathy – in its first sense – is about fellow-feeling and not merely in the context of suffering. So sympathy itself can be regarded as a fundamental good without being tarnished by the idea of parasitism on suffering.
What suffering uniquily inspires is pity – a much more ambiguous feeling that can but need not be inspired by sympathy per se. Pity can be patronising…