What is
suffering? Everyone has an idea, in the first instance from their own
case. Individual humans suffer a
multitude of afflictions. Some come
randomly and we count such suffering a matter of bad luck. I break my arm in an earthquake, crack my
tooth on a stone, stub my toe, or catch a cold.
All manners of things like this just happen to people with statistical
regularity. Other suffering is more
ambiguously the result of an uncaring fate.
I smoke for forty years and get lung cancer or emphysema. Now I
suffer. The same goes for drinking too
much and getting liver damage, or taking in other statistically relevant
carcinogens.
Beyond the
suffering of disease and physical pain, there is the suffering of the heart and
self-esteem, which can be every bit as painful and "real" as the pain of a toothache.
To love and lose is to suffer, as is the discovery of a friend's betrayal, the loss of medical coverage and one's pension, or suffering injustice at the hands of others. The pain of conscience is never far away, a
reminder of things done or left undone to one's own and
others' detriment, moral or spiritual.
So, in one's own case, we find physical, emotional and moral categories of
suffering. They all involve the more or
less passive experience of pain that is common to all suffering. I experience the pain, and I cannot help
feeling it, even if I do not want to suffer.
If I do want to suffer, perhaps as self-inflicted punishment for crimes
committed, still the experience of suffering is passive. It happens to me. If I flog myself, the pain I endure, though
self-caused, is, nevertheless, experienced passively.
So by the
experience of physical, emotional or moral suffering, we get the idea of what
it is. How, then, ought we to relate to
the suffering of others? The temptation,
in normal cases, is to forget about suffering if one is not suffering
oneself. We want to be happy, if we can,
and dwelling on the suffering of others brings us down, makes us angry,
disgusted, sad, despairing, and, ultimately, perhaps, suicidal. Everywhere in the world, there is suffering
beyond belief. Even in countries not
facing social upheavals at the moment, suffering is rampant. Some of it is a matter of bad luck in an
indifferent natural universe. Some is
self-caused, but the bulk is caused by the actions of human beings
themselves. In ancient Athens, the
slaves who were sent to work the silver mines suffered and died in that work,
and they knew when they walked in that they would be released only when they
were dead. This is an unbearable
thought, and yet there were men who forced those slaves to work and die for
their masters. Obviously, the masters, not feeling the suffering of the slaves
themselves, were not concerned about it.
There has to
be a mean between obsessing about the suffering all around us, exploring and
finding in history and current events the evils that men, for the most part,
inflict on other men and women, and ignoring all suffering besides one's own and those of one's family and immediate
friends. We have to accept suffering
that happens to us through living and being able to feel pain, but we do not
have to accept the suffering that we cause to ourselves and even less that
which is caused by one group of men to others of their own species. The outrage that we ought to feel is what can
galvanize us to act to reduce suffering where this is humanly possible. On the other hand, it is wrong to dwell too
much on suffering, and the injustice of the suffering created by our fellows
against the few or against the many. To
dwell too much on these things can turn righteous anger into a blinding hate
that adds to the injustice our anger was roused to eliminate.
No comments:
Post a Comment