When Bad Things Happen to Other People (2 page)

Following Schopenhauer, I focus here on mental or spiritual tribulations and neglect torture and sadism. Schopenhauer and Kant both understand that what other people think of us can make us suffer or increase our suffering. A black slave in the novel 
Beloved,
 by the American writer Toni Morrison, silently endures decades of cruelty at the hands of white people, only to announce shortly before her death what she had at last learned from sixty years as a slave and ten years as a free woman: there is no such thing as bad luck in the world, only white people. She restates Sartre’s famous line from the play 
Huis clos
 “Hell is other people” (
“L’enfer, c’est les autres”
). Baby Suggs, Morrison’s fictional slave, does not believe that she has deserved the bad things that have happened to her. More to the point, she affirms that 
people are a part of the bad things that happen to others
. Deliberately excluding natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, I will argue that we are ourselves the bad things that happen to other people—living in community virtually requires us to be so. All of us share responsibility for the social world we constitute; we share responsibility for many of the bad things that happen to other people. We do well to regret that we are a part of the bad things that happen to other people, but not to deny it.

Character drives judgments of whether other people deserve to suffer. That we may disagree with the moral viewpoints of people who suffer leads to the question of how sensitive we should be to other moral viewpoints. Two centuries after Kant, there is something deeply dissatisfying about the 
Zeitgeist
 according to which we ought to embrace different moral stances as wonderful, if exasperating, examples of cultural diversity. This 
Zeitgeist
 is a subset of the notion that we owe everyone compassion.

It is easy to prescribe compassion for every tear another sheds, so easy that our own displays of compassion may strike us as perfunctory and hollow. Those who demonize taking pleasure in others’ misfortunes find in the cultivation of an ideal of compassion a defense against the idea that we cause others to suffer by pursuing our own private goals and projects.

That we can have mistaken and pernicious beliefs is no objection to the claim that we take what we believe to be true. The world remains full of people who believe that Jews, gays, and blacks, for example, deserve persecution, physical assault, or segregation. By discerning and clarifying beliefs about what people deserve, we gain better access to a culture’s general idea of what kinds of suffering deserve sympathy and, accordingly, of what a good person’s character should include or exclude. The ways people think about the suffering of others in any given era contain fascinating glimpses of important cultural forces we cannot plainly see or perfectly control.

In our own time, there would be few court battles or wars if those who suffered simply accepted their plights as deserved. Nietzsche showed how easily we persuade ourselves that anyone who competes with us for a good job, an attractive mate, or a comfortable home is a bad person in some real sense. Nietzsche thought lofty ideas about social justice were just thinly disguised rationalizations for revenge. This cynicism undermines belief in our moral goodness as civilized people. Our insistence that some people really do deserve their misfortunes presents a real problem, in part because the rules and conventions that determine who deserves what change over time and, moreover, regularly provoke disagreements within a society and across nations.

However imperfectly, we distinguish between trivial and serious misfortunes. In comedy, for example, we laugh at what we take to be the trivial misfortunes of others. In tragedy, however, we could scarcely conceive of laughing. What we think about justice guides our emotional responses. Just as people disagree about justice, so do they disagree over separating the trivial from the profound.

Most of us will allow ourselves in good conscience to laugh at the minor embarrassments of others. Consider banana peels. Someone slips on a banana peel and an audience erupts in laughter. Cartoonists have deployed this familiar image of an unsuspecting person flailing and falling to great comical effect. And yet Schopenhauer and other moralists have insisted on the immorality of taking pleasure in 
any
 misfortune another person suffers. This very serious view makes some sense, for the pleasure of comedy frequently arises from the defects, failures, or absurdity of another person or of other groups of people. 
The Name of the Rose,
 by the Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco, played off of and dramatized the vague apprehension of evil in all laughter. Not just Roman Catholic monks of the Middle Ages in Eco’s novel, but a variety of other thinkers as well have detected shades of the diabolic in comedy. Not surprisingly, some of our own laughter may lead us to question the robust-ness of our compassion for others.

The laughter cartoonists elicit through slips and falls turns on a belief in the triviality of some misfortunes. If there were such a thing as trivial misfortune, then taking pleasure in it might be an aesthetic matter akin to worries over taste, manners, and modes of self-presentation. Those who laugh might defend themselves by saying that morality does not or should not descend into triviality. Triviality certainly does suggest limits to the reasonableness of moral inquiry. Laughter at even the harmless slips and falls of others, however, raises important questions about both the starting-point and the structure of justice, guilt, blame, responsibility, and benevolence. We still struggle to cope with suffering—our own or anyone else’s.

Although he died over a century ago, I take Schopenhauer to represent a powerful, conservative moral current in the contemporary West. He vehemently denies that there is such thing as a trivial misfortune. He warns us in 
The World as Will and Representation
 that we should expel from our communities anyone ever caught taking pleasure in the injury of others.

He asks us how, if we take morality seriously, can we both love our neighbor and laugh when he falls? A profoundly difficult question finds a simple answer: play it safe, treat all suffering as though it were a sickness unto death. Surely Schopenhauer’s solution must be wrong-headed, even though it is impossible to draw a clean line between trivial and non-trivial suffering. His position tempts us to a quick and easy resolution, for his denial of triviality in the realm of suffering circumvents the pressing need for a way to distinguish minor from significant misfortunes.

Schopenhauer carefully insists that the only pleasure we may take in the bad things that happen to other people is in the triumph of justice. Religious thinkers and moral philosophers have thought that the object of our pleasure—someone else’s suffering or justice—makes all the difference to moral evaluation of our emotions. Indeed, we are all expected to love justice. Think here of the first Psalm in the Hebrew Bible, where we read, “Happy are those who do not follow the advice of the wicked...
their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day
 
and night
” (my emphasis). Change the “law of the Lord” to “the law of morality” and Schopenhauer the atheist agrees enthusiastically.

The justice people sought in biblical disputes and early courts took as their model the justice God metes out for mortals. Various creeds have endorsed an ideal of justice according to which God punishes the sinful. Religious believers aim to imitate God when they make decisions about the appropriateness of suffering. Can such an undertaking ever succeed? It is difficult to say. According to a negative view of human motivation (for example, Hobbes, Nietzsche, and Freud), beliefs about justice serve the interests of the person who holds them. According to a positive view (for example, Kant and Schopenhauer), people hold beliefs without regard to personal benefits. (It is of course possible that disinterested justice and self-interest may sometimes coincide.) We can assure ourselves that we are good people if the pleasure we take in others’ misfortunes has nothing to do with ourselves and everything to do with God. Religious believers can circumvent the same apprehension of evil many thinkers have located in laughter by attributing their pleasure to the recognition of divine justice, not to the ugly enjoyment of another human being’s suffering.

In most of the modern world, beliefs and principles are more prevalent forms of aggression toward others than physical attacks. In the subtlety of these beliefs and principles lies a conviction that many of the bad things which happen to others are appropriate and that at least some of our pleasure in that suffering is moral. The principles and beliefs by which we organize our lives and make sense of the world lead us into frequently invisible conflict with people who do not share our principles and beliefs.

Aversion to sexual promiscuity or sex between men, for example, may lead us to think of someone bearing the visible scars of syphilis or AIDS, “He deserves that.” Cancer is an even better test of how we work out the “game” of who deserves what. Other people know that our views about appropriate suffering may someday affect them personally; not surprisingly, other people may try to dissuade us of our belief that their suffering, or the kind of suffering they are likely to experience, is appropriate.

A troublesome notion of moral appropriateness emerges as both the solution and the problem here. The Cambridge philosopher C.D. Broad asserted, “It is inappropriate to cognize what one takes to be a fellow man 
in undeserved pain or distress
 with 
satisfaction
 or with 
amusement
 [his emphases].”2 He found this matter “plainly of the utmost importance to ethics and to esthetics,” and lamented that it still awaited an adequate analysis. Several years later the Berkeley sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild issued a similar call: “We need to ask how different sexes, classes, and ethnic and religious groups differ in the sense of what one ‘ought to’ or ‘has the right to’ feel in a situation.”3 And ten years after her advice, Richard Rorty concluded a study of human suffering by asserting that “detailed descriptions of particular varieties of pain and humiliation,” rather than philosophical or religious treatises, are “the modern intellectual’s principal contributions to moral progress.”4 Moral progress comes down to clarifying and testing our notions of the appropriateness of suffering.

Moral philosophers invoke a standard of appropriateness frequently and with varying success, as in discussions of sexuality, just war, or capital punishment. This tendency extends far into the past, certainly back to Plato’s 
Republic,
 in which descriptions of the good life hinge on proportionality. Judgments about both appropriate and trivial suffering depend on judgments about proportionality. No one has managed yet to produce an algorithm for deciding just what suffering is appropriate and what is not.

A decision in the abstract could hardly be of much use; we must attend to the nature of the relationship between the sufferer and the judger. The same is true in comedy, where a joke’s success depends on appropriateness: it would be unwise to tell Polish jokes to Polish people, or “dumb blond” jokes to a blond person. Were a blond person to tell the “dumb blond” joke, however, the humor might well seem appropriate. We notice the attitude of the person who tells the joke and take that into consideration before reacting to the joke. We laugh 
with
 people when we include ourselves among those being laughed at. Determining whether we laugh with others or at them requires self-awareness. And so our sense of where we fit into the world surfaces when we react emotionally to the bad things that happen to other people.

A person who detests Polish people might fail to make us laugh at a hilarious joke about someone Polish. By the same token, we might react with revulsion to a judge who invites a murder victim’s father to pull the switch on the murderer. Justice affects our emotions, despite the reluctance of philosophers to admit as much. The emotions, many philosophers have insisted, should have nothing to do with justice. But they do.

In the course of defending some of the pleasure that comes from others’ suffering, I want to question whether modern justice differs from primitive revenge. If our ideal of justice is not itself entirely moral, then neither is our pleasure that justice has been served when bad things happen to other people.

What if this distinction between justice and revenge were just a fantasy? Or bad faith? Then it would be impossible to find a moral defense for taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others. I don’t think there is much difference between enjoying that someone suffers and enjoying that justice is being served (through his suffering), and yet I allow that there is
some
 difference. Ultimately, it is a vital difference, one that keeps our justice system in business. This difference—or the possibility of difference—makes pleasure in the misfortunes of others morally acceptable.

My own sense, which could hardly be proven in empirical terms, is that most pleasure in the misfortunes of others includes 
both
 objects—knowledge that another suffers deservedly
and
the suffering itself. For this reason my defense of pleasure in others’ misfortunes is an ambivalent one.

My examination of pain and humiliation contributes to moral progress by straining and clarifying conventional standards of the appropriateness of suffering. The point of this inquiry is not to extend the range of permissible hatred by legitimizing emotional cruelty around transgressions of divine law and grave offenses against the state. Rather, the point is to show that those who feel joy when bad things happen to other people can claim they do not feel hatred at all, but rather love for justice. If Kant could speak to us, he would surely tell us that the passage quoted above testifies to his revulsion to injustice, not to any kind of malice.

The distinction between taking pleasure in the suffering of another and taking pleasure in the execution of justice will lead to a discussion of how societies make sense of prisons and institutional punishment. Justifications for penal codes help explain how we can think ourselves high-minded advocates of justice rather than vengeful primitives when we take pleasure in the execution of, say, a serial killer. The distinction relies on finding a moral difference between pleasure which derives from our own well-being and pleasure which stems from the well-being of others.