When Bad Things Happen to Other People (10 page)

Injustice similarly confounds our way of thinking about the world. The violation of a law or a social norm angers us so deeply that we feel we must see the violator brought low, as Kant said. Our institutional response to bad people has been to make them suffer (at the hands of judges we have appointed). We do to others what we do not want done to us. In order for justice to be reasonable, we must have well-founded notions both of what is due us and what is due others.

Those whose suffering we celebrate must possess the intelligence necessary to conform to social standards. We ourselves must realize that it is only fair for others to judge us as we have judged them: the same rationale that justifies our taking pleasure in another’s suffering today may justify his or her taking pleasure in our suffering tomorrow.

Forgiveness and mercy point to a different way out of our bad feelings. Even when we manage to forgive people who have transgressed, though, we may still insist on punishment in order to demonstrate loyalty to our principles. Proper self-respect, so vital to our flourishing, stands in the way of our forgiving readily people or classes of people who have harmed us. Few have been willing to concede that we often possess morally acceptable reasons for not forgiving others. Although we may morally choose not to forgive others, we forget at our peril an ancient maxim: judge as ye shall be judged.

THREE:
The Meaning of Suffering

It is in the response to suffering that many and perhaps all men, individually and in their groups, define themselves, take on character, develop their ethos.—H. Richard Niebuhr

“WHAT ARE THE SORROWS of other men to us, and what their joy?,” Defoe asks in 
Robinson Crusoe
. H. Richard Niebuhr, a towering figure in modern theology, never mentions Defoe but supplies the beginning of what must be the best answer to this, the question from which moral philosophy and moral psychology begin. It is in our responses to suffering—both our own and others’—that we prove our moral worth.

Of all the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, few hurt more than watching others take joy in our sorrow. And of all the ties that bind, there can be few greater than sharing sorrow.

As extraordinarily varied as people are, we become in some real sense the same as everyone else when we suffer. This is particularly true in instances of great suffering. The elasticity of 
Schadenfreude
, the emotional corollary of justice, can accommodate terrible suffering. The awfulness of suffering I discuss here will set the stage for a parallel with the awfulness of justice (or what others consider to be justice for us). I want to probe whether the pleasure we take in the suffering of another does in fact say more about the sufferer than it does about us.

To insist that the happiness of others affects our own is only to acknowledge a truism, not to account for it. Why should the unhappiness of another produce an opposite state in us? That this happens seems obvious enough, given the extent to which both philosophical and religious ethics oppose the phenomenon. Why this happens requires attention to two questions: What is suffering? And what is it about suffering that might give pleasure to someone else? Answers to these questions will help explain why it is that taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes causes moral revulsion.

The idea that it is appropriate to make criminals suffer raises the question of why we should not subsequently take pleasure in that suffering. Our ideas about criminal and social justice inform and shape each other. Underlying them both are difficult questions about central elements of suffering: its causes, its significance, its usefulness. My discussion of suffering will distinguish pain from suffering and show that suffering is not only the absence of pleasure but also a disruption of identity. Although a harmless slip on the ice or on a banana peel might involve such tension (we might pride ourselves on our agility), it is principally in significant suffering that identity disruption occurs. At the heart of
Schadenfreude
lies a celebration that another person may have to re-evaluate his or her self-worth and the principles by which he or she lives. This means that we are unlikely to feel
Schadenfreude
toward people with little or no self-esteem. Only a cruel or malicious person takes pleasure in the injuries of those who do not like themselves.

The suffering of others dominates this discussion, although not to the exclusion of our own suffering. I will examine the idea that we should attribute greater moral significance to others’ suffering than to our own. My argument that our own suffering is no less important than the suffering of others begins with the wisdom at the heart of Freud’s critique of the love commandment. Proper care of the self throws into question the appropriateness of indiscriminate sympathy and, further, makes
Schadenfreude
a badge of healthy self-esteem.

Separating Suffering from Pain

What is the point of claiming a distinction between suffering and pain?
Schadenfreude
centers on suffering for the most part, not pain. To understand 
Schadenfreude
, we must understand its source. To understand this source, we must see how suffering differs from pain.

A toothache exemplifies pain; guilt exemplifies suffering. A toothache has little to do with one’s relation to the human community; guilt that one has transgressed a social norm has everything to do with the human community. The distinction between pain and suffering is a moral one. Why is this so?

Moral problems do not precede us in the world: we bring them to life. Moral problems are not like trees—something we can run into if we drop our guard. Moral problems ride on the coattails of our thoughts. Marrying a person of another race or another social class becomes a moral problem in a world that forbids such things. These days such marriages do not cause the social controversy they did in Europe and the United States in the early twentieth century. Having a toothache has always and likely always will cause pain. Pain affects the way we think of ourselves, to be sure, but suffering affects us much more profoundly. Pain is less interesting than suffering because pain lacks the rich social dimension of suffering.

Pain involves damage or likely damage to the body; it emanates from a particular location on or in the body. By contrast, most suffering involves unlocated emotions. Emotional suffering can be either psychological or biological (as with clinical depression, which is linked to chemical imbalances in the brain), although it tends to be the former. Pain can be mild or moderate, acute or chronic. Emotions can be blameworthy or praise-worthy, and can center on large and small objects.

It would be misleading to link pain to the purely physical and suffering to the purely mental. In a widely lauded study, Mark Zborowski has tied ethnicity to how we respond to pain.1 He found that Jewish-American patients voiced existential, philosophical concern about the pain they experienced and tended to be pessimistic about the course of their pain. Protestant patients, on the other hand, displayed optimism about the course of their illnesses and felt quite confident about the abilities of physicians to help them. Italian-American patients differed from Jewish-Americans in that they did not seem to care much at all about the larger meaning or significance of their pain; Italian-Americans simply wanted quick relief from pain. Pain, like suffering, prompts different responses in different cultures.

Although the common-sense view is that pain entails some degree of awfulness, pain can be separated from our response to it. It is well known that masochists profess to enjoy pain and humiliation and that prizefighters and soldiers will occasionally report that they were totally unaware that they had been severely injured until after the struggle concluded. Because leprosy can destroy the microscopic fibers that carry the sense of pain, someone stricken with leprosy will feel no pain at all if he or she places his or her hand on a burning kitchen stove. These perhaps obscure examples make it hard to say that pain is always or necessarily unpleasant.

As for suffering: do we always want to avoid it? Apparently not, given that people frequently reject relief from grief, remorse, guilt, or unrequited love. This is more serious than simply noting that what distresses others may differ from what distresses us. It won’t do simply to declare anyone who enjoys feeling pain or who dislikes himself or herself neurotic and therefore anomalous. Too many characters from books, theater, film, comic strips, and television, whose troubles in love, honor, and fortune have long held us rapt with attention, testify to the appealing underside of some disagreeable emotional trials. The same may be said of guests on many television talk shows or of many a magazine interviewee. If pain and suffering are not always or thoroughly unpleasant, then, how can it be said that we reasonably seek to avoid them? Given that we might simply be mistaken about our presumption of unpleasantness,
Schadenfreude
might appear either an irrational or an unintelligible response to the suffering of another person.

Schadenfreude
 is neither irrational nor unintelligible. For although it may be that some pains are either pleasant or at least not unpleasant, anyone who objects that pains are not necessarily unpleasant must turn to the marginal cases to prove the point. That so many people seek treatment for or consolation from their physical pain or emotional suffering indicates the reasonableness of the premise that we dislike pain and suffering. That there is a problem both with verifying statements about pain and suffering (we cannot be sure about the accuracy of another’s report of pain) and with the idea that pain and suffering are awful (we cannot be sure how bad a person feels) means that it is difficult to agree on what kind or degree of unpleasantness
Schadenfreude
celebrates.

How much can we really know about the pain of another person? Afflicted people will often complain about the difficulty of communicating their anguish. We may find ourselves perplexed even at the sound of another’s pain, as Proust did:

...one never understands precisely the meaning of an original sound expressive of a sensation which one does not experience oneself. Hearing it from a neighbouring room without being able to see, one may mistake for a chuckle the noise which is forced by pain from a patient being operated on without an anaesthetic; and as for the noise emitted by a mother who has just been told that her child has died, it can seem to us, if we are unaware of its origin, as difficult to translate into human terms as the noise emitted by an animal or by a harp.2

Proust seemed to think that even knowing the cause of another’s pain may leave us struggling to understand what is happening to him or her; the obstacle to understanding, Proust believed, came down to “...the curtain that is forever lowered for other people over what happens in the mysterious intimacy of every human creature.”

Wittgenstein saw pain as a curtain that divides us from others. His ruminations on the sensation of pain, especially in 
Philosophical Investigations
 I, Sections 243–308, have set in place an epistemology of pain.3 Although it would be absurd to say that no one can ever know whether another is in pain or not, or even conceive what it would be for another to be in pain, Wittgenstein concluded, we cannot readily verify either the presence or the extent of suffering in another. But we can certainly 
believe
 that he or she suffers (because it makes no sense to argue with sincere people who insist they feel pain). That belief suffices to generate an emotional response to the pain or suffering of another.

I have said that pain emanates from a location on or in a body, but that suffering does not. The presence of pain is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for suffering. Pain has a felt quality, a felt intensity. Suffering, on the other hand, is not located in the body. The suffering of grief, envy, and anxiety do not relate to the nervous system, as does the sensation of pain.

Numerous writers concur that only bodies feel pain and that only persons suffer. (Bentham held that animals suffer and so possess moral rights, but I do not consider animals here.) This distinction is useful. For example, it helps to put in context the biomedical ethicist Tristram Engelhardt’s approval of the practice of subjecting newborn infants to painful 52

procedures (for example, circumcision) on the grounds that they cannot integrate the experience of pain sufficiently so as to be said actually to suffer.4 I accept this narrowing of the concept of suffering and accordingly stipulate that pain is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for 
Schadenfreude
. That pain often includes suffering does not diminish the point of this distinction, for the converse cannot be said to be true.

Unlike pain, suffering always entails a psychological and/or a social component. This component can change suddenly or evolve gradually: in any event, it is not static. The suffering of children forced to work in factories or immigrant families crowded into dirty, unsafe hovels commands a different popular reaction today than it would have a century, or perhaps even a decade, ago. The legal theorist Richard Posner remarks in 
Overcoming Law
 that, “Slavery just doesn’t mesh with our current belief system, which includes a historically recent belief in racial equality that is held as dogmatically (though secretly doubted by many of its holders) as our ancestors held their belief in inequality.”5 This social dimension shapes and refracts the experience of suffering.

Whereas pain calls out for medication or bandages, suffering waits for sympathy. The experience of suffering marginalizes us all by isolating us from other people. The successful articulation of suffering, in poems, novels, and paintings, serves to move us closer to others whose understanding is a primary source of consolation. The closer we move to others, the more we can feel triumphant over suffering. T.S. Eliot once summed up the sense of hell in Dante’s 
Inferno
 as a place “where nothing connects with nothing.” Hell is a place where people do not, cannot, console one another.
Schadenfreude
brings to light and reinforces distances between people, however temporarily. All this is to say that the 
Schaden
 (literally “injury” or “harm”) of
Schadenfreude
focuses on suffering, on the relation in which we stand to others.