When Bad Things Happen to Other People (13 page)

Like a little warm coal in my heart burns you’re saying that you miss me. I miss you, oh so much. How much you’ll never believe or know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vitality.17

Of course, Sackville-West is talking about her own suffering here, not someone else’s. It may be tempting to dismiss Sackville-West’s pangs as merely sentimental, but we should not, for they return us to the importance of how we think about the suffering of others. Sackville-West enjoys
that she is distressed
, which is different from 
the enjoyment of her distress
. The word “suffering” implies the presence of distress, and it is logically impossible to enjoy suffering. Marginal examples aside, no one likes to suffer. Can it be that no one likes 
others
 to suffer either? Surely not.

When we take pleasure in the suffering of another, we celebrate a misfortune we ourselves hope to avoid. To say that suffering is aversive, however, is not to say that it is pointless. Nietzsche appreciated just how much persons strive to attach meaning to suffering, both their own and others’. We can sometimes discern 
value
 in suffering as well, precisely by calling into question what we take to be problematic values or beliefs. Adjustments to a coherent personal identity, then, need not be considered entirely baleful. Education and imagination can similarly initiate or accelerate moral growth. We may naturally hope that our moral growth, or that of those persons about whom we care, will result principally from education or imagination, rather than suffering. Attention to the suffering of others—its genesis, longevity, and demise—is itself an education of sorts.

Although I argue that we don’t need to worry about
Schadenfreude
as a threat to social coherence, I nonetheless acknowledge that it can be unpleasant to realize that one’s own suffering has made someone else happy. A crisis of identity or self-esteem is made only more painful by the knowledge that someone else views this crisis with approval and perhaps even joy (approval and joy, as I have said, differ significantly). Apprehension of the indignation of others may bring on this same crisis; we may perceive that others believe we do not deserve our good fortune (which may amount to a belief that we deserve to suffer, even though we do not). Learning of the disapproval of others can compel us to revisit values and ambitions, examine their usefulness, and question whether those values or ambitions may threaten or oppress others.
Schadenfreude
reminds us that others may suffer just by virtue of our having convictions. The possibility of inspiring
Schadenfreude
can collapse only when our own beliefs and principles do, for beliefs and principles are forms of aggression. Especially in the context of moral and social disagreements, others are likely to interpret our misfortunes as a leveling action wrought by the invisible hand of justice.

Suffering beneath Rules

With the exception of the Sackville-West passage, we have largely looked at extrinsic suffering to this point, that is, at the suffering of others. I have argued for the inherent unpleasantness of suffering and have suggested that persons regularly take pleasure in the suffering of others, principally through seeing that suffering as somehow condign.

I have suggested that suffering may result from any number of different causes, in any number of different contexts. I have focused on the notion of identity disruption as the key to understanding suffering. Specific persons or groups of persons are often responsible for challenges to our own identities. Michel Foucault tells us in “The Subject and Power,” “Generally, it can be said that there are three types of struggles: either against forms of domination (ethnic, social and religious): against forms of exploitation which separate individuals from what they produce: or against that which ties the individual himself and submits him to others in this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and submission).”18 What interests me is this first form of struggle, one that binds the individual to the moral judgment of others.

We do not choose the moral standards of the communities into which we are born. Communal moral standards resemble various systems of domination. It is not difficult to understand how someone might suffer underneath the weight of social or moral rules. To the extent that we can be said to live in a heterosexual society, for example, gay people must wrestle with the moral judgment of non-gay people. Similarly, women must make their way in a man’s world, despite there being more women than men in the world. Non-Christians must accommodate what they think a Christian society expects. A non-Christian in particular may suffer as a result of the distance between what Christianity expects of good persons and how he or she sees him- or herself. And we cannot take as a given that white, heterosexual, Christian men who have followed all the rules of society into which they were born do not suffer beneath the weight of these rules. So many societal pressures are always in effect, and social experiences vary widely.

Freud insisted that the progress of civilization in general and that Christianity in particular comes at a high cost to individuals. He investigated unconscious consequences of attempting to follow traditional principles or rules, and his conclusions bear importantly on ethical inquiry. For Freud, aggression is innate. The aggression that was circumscribed by the increasing number of laws and social codes in various civilizations had to be displaced somewhere. Humans instinctively began to repress aggression as they organized themselves into communities; this repression enabled humans to get along with one another more easily but caused their greater unhappiness. This aspect of Freud’s legacy—the notion that the development of civilization has violated our behavioral instincts—surfaces regularly in psychological literature.

Freud demonstrated that striving to follow the love commandment may prove exceptionally costly in terms of the moral principle of non-injury to self or others. Religious commentators have noted that while Freud illuminated pathological forms of religiosity—moral masochism, a cruel conscience, blind obedience to coercive religious leaders, and unquestioning submissiveness to church authority—these pathologies distort proper religious devotion and faith. Still, Freud remains one of the most trenchant of all commentators on the social consequences of religious practice. The suffering rules can cause disturbed Freud.

Exactly how can rules make us suffer? The love commandment requires us to love others.19 Freud argued that forcing oneself to feel sympathy entails a psychic cost. In
The Future of an Illusion
 (1927) Freud portrayed religion as demanding from mankind unnecessary sacrifices of happiness in service of irrational beliefs. Religious rules and laws cause human suffering, Freud warned, to which we must attend if we are to ease existence.

Consider that one of the most famous of all rules in the West, the love commandment, aims to reduce suffering in the world by compelling us to love others, to treat them as we ourselves wish to be treated. Perhaps the most penetrating critique of the love commandment emerges in
Civilization and Its Discontents
. It can be painful for anyone to believe or even to fear that he or she is not living up to the ideal set in place by the love commandment, Freud shows us. This fear can induce severe and unrelenting reproaches of conscience.

A committed Christian, Kant had maintained over a century before Freud that we have a duty to share in the suffering of others. Kant urges us to view as our neighbors all persons, not just family, friends, or those living in proximity to us. The idea that it is morally objectionable to favor our family and friends over others has bothered many philosophers. Carol Gilligan, for example, claimed to hear in women’s “different voice” the capacity for affiliation, not a generic love of humanity.20 Freud objected as much to the idea that we should regard every person as our neighbor as he did to the idea that we should (or could) love strangers and even enemies. A rule that commands us to love might instead impel us to resent, or even hate.

Ernest Wallwork has clarified the strengths and weaknesses of Freud’s exposition of the psychological and psychoanalytic problems posed by the love commandment.21 What interests me particularly is the sense of shame that underlies the failure to live up to its standard. Although mainstream Christian theology has always stressed the sinfulness of human nature, the love commandment can cause suffering through inducing shame in those who cannot or do not meet its requirements. The suffering (to us) caused by the love commandment has not been considered as morally important as the suffering (of others) it seeks to eradicate by exhorting universal love.

Guilt calls for punishment, whereas shame, being a condition of dis-honor or disgrace, invites ridicule and opprobrium. Regarded as subjective states, guilt is an emotion one feels over disobeying a rule or command whose authority one accepts, whereas shame is an emotion one feels over falling short of a standard of worth or excellence with which one identifies. More succinctly, guilt is felt over wrongdoing, shame over shortcomings. Freud’s five lines of criticism of the love commandment in
Civilization and Its Discontents
 concern both guilt and shame (any departure from the love commandment is an occasion for the intensification of guilt feelings, even when the departure is merely a thought or wish), but I shall focus on shame.

As Wallwork explains, Freud’s criticisms of the love commandment are often misread, in part because Freud is thought to be impugning all forms of other-regarding behavior. In fact, however, Freud discusses only selected versions of the love commandment. The excessive scope attributed to Freud’s argument derives in part from the ambiguity of his purpose in critiquing the morality of “civilized society.” It is easy to misinterpret his aim as a desire to attack the psychological foundations of morality as such, that is, on our very capacity to care about other people at all, given our underlying narcissism. But Freud’s real target is not our ability to be moral. Rather, he takes aim at what he deems excessively demanding moral requirements, such as the Christian view that agape requires both thoroughgoing selflessness and equality of love for all persons alike, including enemies (Matthew 5:44; Luke 6:27–28). Freud questions whether strangers are as worthy of love as family and friends.

According to Freud, inability to love strangers as much as favored familiars constitutes a valid reason for bestowing our sympathies on others as we see fit. The sheer impracticability of the love commandment justifies disobedience. As Wallwork makes clear, however, much of what Freud says about the impracticability of the commandment is compatible with orthodox Christian doctrine, which has long held that the highest ideals of the love commandment (e.g., selflessness and love of enemies) cannot be fulfilled (at least by fallen creatures, without divine assistance of some sort). The chief difference between orthodox theologians and Freud is that the former hold that an impracticable commandment has a valid theological and ethical function, as a way of convicting persons of sin and as a spur to higher ethical achievements. Freud holds to the contrary that an “ought” is unreasonable unless it is psychologically possible to comply with it. Many Christian theologians maintain that human beings are responsible in some sense for failing to reach moral perfection, whereas for Freud, the fault lies with the commandment, not with human beings. Because we cannot be reasonably blamed for failing to do what cannot be done, he finds feelings of sin and guilt deplorable. Freud also points to the unexpected, often unconscious, ways in which the inevitable feelings of guilt brought about by unrealizable moral standards damage both the self and others. It follows that the cure for Freud is not repentance combined with additional moral effort, but a foreshortening of the moral horizon.

Wallwork suggests that Freud’s strict interpretation of the love commandment and incautious use of language in 
Civilization and Its Discontents
 is partly a product of his animus against Christianity, an animus triggered in this context by Christianity’s claim to cultural superiority over Judaism on the basis of its universal reading of the neighbor as every person in the commandment to “love your neighbor as yourself.” Freud is determined to puncture this grandiose assertion of the superiority of Christianity. “Reciprocity,” in the sense set out in the Hebrew Bible, is the key to Freud’s ethic, not universal love. The centrality of reciprocity explains why Freud finds it unfair to disregard special obligations to family and friends by treating strangers on a par with them. In this ethic, too, reciprocity determines responsibilities to strangers, but it is significantly qualified by non-maleficence (that is, the duty to avoid harming), as well as by principles like promise-keeping.

Wallwork argues that Freud stops considerably short of declaring the psychological impossibility of other-regarding behavior, and indeed commends it as an essential ingredient of mature affection. Far from repudiating the love commandment in all its variations, as some passages seem to imply, Freud ends by interpreting it along lines that resonate with the ethics of Judaism (at least in its covenantal aspects) more than with those of Christianity. The middle position between the extremes of self-sacrifice and self-absorption is a form of reciprocity or mutuality that is the key to a healthy relationship. This is the gist of Freud’s suggestions for improving the Christian model.

Because we live in a Christian milieu, the discovery within ourselves of the “defect” Wallwork describes better than Freud himself can increase the likelihood of self-contempt, an inherently miserable mindset. If the world tells us long enough that we deserve contempt, we may break down and agree with the world. We may, in Anna Freud’s words, identify with the aggressor. In our endeavors to make and present ourselves, shame’s power is great indeed. Freud’s critique sensitizes us to the way in which a rule designed to decrease the total sum of suffering in the world can increase the total suffering of a particular individual. Freud’s thought poses the question of the moral worth of intrinsic suffering relative to extrinsic suffering. Freud views the focus on others that underlies the Golden Rule as deleterious, to the extent that it can be seen to slight the interest we have in ourselves and in our own welfare. If pleasure and pain, respect and disrespect, are what matter morally, then consistency demands that love of self have moral weight equal to that of love of others.