When Bad Things Happen to Other People (11 page)

Suffering Great and Small

Satisfaction in witnessing the execution of a murderer differs in several important ways from laughing at the sight of someone slipping on a banana peel, but
Schadenfreude
can accurately describe both instances of pleasure.

Kafka’s sister Elli has no voice in 
Brief an den Vater
; we know her only as someone who suffers. (And, later on, as someone who leaves home and establishes herself successfully as a wife and mother, Kafka triumphantly tells his father.) Can we quantify her suffering, and if so, why would we want to do so? In Sophocles’s 
Oedipus Rex
 and 
Oedipus at Colonus
, Oedipus informs the chorus that his suffering exceeds theirs. (“I know you are all sick, yet there is not one of you are, who is as sick as I myself.”) A hero and king, Oedipus believes his capacity for suffering to be deeper than that of his people. Just before Jocasta’s suicide, the line “the greatest suffering is that one brings on oneself” suggests the accuracy of Oedipus’s early statement to the chorus. Later Oedipus’s devastated daughters wonder aloud if it would be better never to have lived at all; they claim to envy the dead, because the dead, which now include their father, do not suffer. It seems unlikely that Kafka’s sister found herself envying the dead in the course of enduring her father’s mimicking, yet she might well have told us that she felt united to Oedipus’s daughters through what she endured.

Suffering is awful. It might seem that only enemies of some sort would take pleasure in each other’s suffering. This pleasure in the suffering of another must be more pervasive than that, though. La Rochefoucauld famously claimed, “In the adversities of our best friends we always find something which is not displeasing to us” (
Réflexions morales
, number 99). La Rochefoucauld does not delimit the idea of “adversities” in this maxim, an unsettling omission. Dostoyevsky carries the ball a bit farther.

In 
Crime and Punishment
 he expands the category of misfortunes capable of generating
Schadenfreude
:

...that strange feeling of inner satisfaction which always can be observed, even in those who are near and dear, when a sudden disaster befalls their neighbor, and which is to be found in all men, without exception, however sincere their feelings of sympathy and commiseration.6

The word “disaster” signifies something beyond trivial suffering. Dostoyevsky, albeit an insightful moral psychologist, probably overstates the frequency of pleasure in the disasters of others. Learning that our quiet, law-abiding neighbor has just been diagnosed with cirrhosis of the liver or made a victim of ethnic cleaning would provide few of us with unfettered delight. Underneath the overstatement, if we want to call it that, we can glimpse Dostoyevsky’s sympathy with the claim that good people may enjoy even the very bad things that happen to others.

Dostoyevsky’s alarming claim in a sense ignites and begins this study, for great suffering makes
Schadenfreude
a much more unsettling and important topic than comedy. Hamlet doesn’t spend his energy trying to make sense of 
bad
 fortune, but rather of the slings and arrows of 
outrageous
 fortune.
Schadenfreude
can accommodate great suffering because the notion of desert that lies at the heart of much
Schadenfreude
can expand infinitely. Note that Dostoyevsky does not state or imply that people feel pleasure in the face of their friends’ disasters out of a sense that justice has been done; like La Rochefoucauld, he acknowledges the phenomenon of pleasure over the great suffering of others but does not account for it. Without a sincere appeal to justice, Dostoyevsky’s pleasure amounts to perversity, cruelty, or both.

Another father-son interchange will make this point more concrete. Like Kafka’s example, this one also comes from an autobiography. In 
My German Question
Peter Gay confesses to the great joy he took in the defeat of the German women’s relay team in the track and field portion of the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. The eminent Yale professor, perhaps the greatest living social historian of our day, bore the name Peter Fröhlich in 1936. His Jewish family, most of which eventually managed to escape to the United States, was suffering Nazi persecution throughout the 1930s.

Gay writes in his autobiography of his “unqualified idealization of the United States” as a boy. In view of Hitler, Gay sat with his father in the stadium and cheered wildly the victory of every American at the Berlin games. “Unfortunately, many German athletes also did well enough to win an array of gold medals,” he remembers. “I took them all as virtually personal insults.” We should not quickly dismiss Gay as merely malicious here, for we generally believe that the wicked do not deserve to flourish.

The success of Nazi athletes in the 1936 Olympics was not complete, however. The German women’s relay team failed and here is how Gay reacted to their defeat:

As long as I live I shall hear my father’s voice as he leaped to his feet, one of the first to see what had happened: 
Die Mädchen
haben den Stab verloren!
 he shouted, “The girls have dropped the baton!” As Helen Stevens loped to the tape to give the Americans yet another gold medal, the unbeatable models of Nazi woman-hood cried their German hearts out. A number of years ago, in a brief reminiscence, I wrote that seeing this calamity “remains one of the great moments in my life.”7

There is an element of ugliness in Gay’s profession here, the same ugliness we sometimes find in others who resolutely hold us accountable for our wrongdoing. Anything that comes at the cost of human suffering may repel us, even justice. That said, I certainly do not wish to incriminate Gay here.

Gay, a native German speaker, makes room for great suffering in his understanding of 
Schadenfreude
. As was the case with Kafka,
Schadenfreude
unites a father and a son in this passage. Note that Gay tells us he does not regret or condemn his 
Schadenfreude
; instead, he relishes it.

If it is true that “Pleasure not known beforehand is half-wasted: to anticipate it is to double it,”8 then
Schadenfreude
should present itself as a comparatively minor pleasure, smaller than revenge and sadism. I think it is true. Curiously, Gay asserts that
Schadenfreude
“can be one of the great joys of life.” How can this be? We love justice so profoundly that we may literally rejoice when we come face to face with it. Gay craved justice and leapt to his feet in jubilation over Nazi humiliation on the race track. In other instances of 
Schadenfreude,
 we may find satisfied a wish we didn’t fully realize we had.
Schadenfreude
can and often does turn on the unexpected.

Before moving on, I ought to explain why I translate
Schadenfreude
as pleasure in the 
suffering
 of another, as opposed to pleasure in the 
misfortune
 of another. Aaron Ben-Ze’ev’s lucid analysis of the emotion deserves such praise that I hesitate to disagree at all. While noting that
Schadenfreude
is usually translated as the former, he suggests that the latter is in fact more appropriate because of the triviality of the injury (and corresponding suffering) involved in 
Schadenfreude
.9 Ben-Ze’ev’s is a more literal translation of the term, one that gives emphasis to the fact of another’s misfortune, as opposed to the probable suffering that ensues from it.

Ben-Ze’ev and I agree that suffering varies according to both degree and kind. In contrast to other theorists of suffering, however, Ben-Ze’ev seems to resist the idea that the misery of suffering stems from a disruption of identity. Indeed, he wants to limit
Schadenfreude
to misfortunes that seem neither particularly unpleasant, nor threatening to personal identity. A mishap such as slipping harmlessly on the ice, while technically a misfortune, can only ambiguously be said to involve full-blown suffering. Ben-Ze’ev prefers to restrict pleasure in the misfortunes of others to trivial harm, although he does not straightforwardly disqualify significant injury from the equation. I explicitly allow significant injury.

William Ian Miller has more clearly restricted
Schadenfreude
to the realm of the trivial.10 Miller’s objection to my characterization of
Schadenfreude
implies discrepancy over the structure of the emotion. For, unlike Ben-Ze’ev and myself, Miller refers to
Schadenfreude
as a kind of malice (even though he puts “malice” between quotation marks). This view is consonant with one he expressed in an earlier work: “For just as our humiliations provide others with the basis for their 
Schadenfreude
, so do their humiliations provide us ours. Such a nice gift, we believe, could hardly do without an equally nice return.”11 Like Ben-Ze’ev, Miller seems to view
Schadenfreude
as akin to white lies, as an inconsequential moral failing. In this spirit and in the name of inevitability, Miller suggests that we are foolish not to accept the pleasure offered us by the misfortunes of others. Miller has a point here, namely the wisdom underlying the exhortation 
Carpe diem.

Miller’s use of the word “humiliation” stands at odds with his insistence that
Schadenfreude
includes only insignificant instances of suffering; nonetheless, he specifically states in his later work 
The Anatomy of Disgust
, “Pleasure in another’s 
major
 misfortune is truly malicious and hateful” (my emphasis). Miller shuts the door to the possibility that we might believe a corrupt political leader deserves impeachment or exile. In this respect his view differs from Ben-Ze’ev’s and mine. Holding that
Schadenfreude
is morally acceptable as an emotional corollary to beliefs about justice opens the door to serious suffering.
Schadenfreude
does not restrict its object to the trivial. The objection to linking serious suffering with 
Schadenfreude
, centering on a cut-off point beyond which
Schadenfreude
is no longer felt, is simply another way of putting the question of the appropriateness of suffering—not a way of circumventing that question.

Although I insist that all suffering (even that involved in comedy) is in some real sense awful, I acknowledge the importance of Ben-Ze’ev’s assertion that persons are more prone to enjoy what they believe to be the minor suffering of others than they are to enjoy the more serious examples of suffering. The greater the misfortune involved, the more likely
Schadenfreude
is to center principally or exclusively on some principle of justice. Outside of the theater, envy and jealousy generally cling to the shallow end of human experience. There must be a point beyond which no one would feel morally justified in taking pleasure in the suffering of others—only malicious people could celebrate the suffering of Oedipus’s daughters—but this cut-off point cannot be specified definitively. Reluctance to link
Schadenfreude
to significant suffering reflects discomfort with competing moralities. Others disagree, sometimes strenuously, with the values we hold. Reflection on the moral beliefs others espouse sometimes makes it more difficult for us to think of them as friends.

Rationalizing Suffering

Explaining the moral range of acceptable emotional reactions to the setbacks of others requires mention of self-awareness. Fear of suffering—our own or someone else’s—may compel us to pretend to ourselves.

The most common mental dodge to
Schadenfreude
must be telling ourselves that we enjoy that another suffers (i.e. that justice prevails), not the actual suffering itself. This rationalization represents a defense in some people, one consciously chosen to ward off guilt and ramp up self-worth. In other people, however, the appeal to justice stems from sincere commitments to a moral order of some sort and should not be considered a rationalization. We might refer to the first group as selfish and to the second as selfless. The second group can astonish us no less than the first with creative struggles to make sense of suffering.

Judith Shklar’s insight into the difference between misfortune and injustice nicely illustrates the most obvious path for rationalizing the bad things which happen to other people. In 
The Faces of Injustice
 she argues that we tend to see misfortune rather than injustice when we are unwilling to act, to respond to a problem.12 Homeless people wandering the streets of our cities, for example, become the agents of their own misfortunes in this mindset, and we thereby distance ourselves from them. The homeless are to blame for their plight. If we view the homeless as victims of an unjust social system that has somehow caused their plight, however, then we can hardly help feeling responsible for their suffering. We are ourselves part of the problem.

Over a period of twenty years, Melvin Lerner directed a series of psychological experiments and surveys on misfortune.13 He found that about two-thirds of all his respondents resorted to a perceptual shortcut similar to the one Shklar follows. People who fear the vagaries of life or sudden reversals of good fortune may rely unduly upon a belief in the invisible hand of justice. When such people come across examples of suffering, they tell themselves that the suffering has happened to a person who somehow deserved it. Lerner concluded that the need to believe that sufferers are somehow bad unites many under its banner. According to Lerner, we see justice where we want to or need to. This mental defense comes at a price: when we suffer, we will know that others blame us for our suffering on some level. This knowledge pulls the people around us into our seemingly private suffering, by making them a part of the bad things that happen to us. In those moments of despondency, when we feel utterly disconnected to other human beings, they are there.

What are we to make of the moral judgments of other people, judgments which often magnify our suffering? When others rationalize our suffering, persuading themselves that we deserve to suffer when they do not really believe we do, cruelty raises its head. The familiar moral objections to cruelty apply to rationalizing the undeserved suffering of others.