When Bad Things Happen to Other People (9 page)

In their introduction to the “Symposium on ‘God’” recently featured in a 1994 issue of 
Critical Inquiry
, Françoise Meltzer and David Tracy remarked that the invocation of God currently seems to work as a point of obstruction, or a limit, in most contemporary critical discourses. As they put it, “the word 
God
, in or outside of quotation marks, has become the last taboo in the postmodern era.”12 Certainly, it could be disarming to hear a neighbor invoke scripture to explain our own (i.e., intrinsic) suffering. A good deal of confusion has surrounded the idea of divine retribution, for the same God who famously proclaimed “Vengeance is mine” also avowed: “...I take no pleasure in the death of the wicked man, but rather in the wicked man’s conversion, that he may live” (Ezekiel 33:11). Nonetheless, the belief in suffering as punishment and as evidence of divine disfavor has often recurred in both Judaism and in Christianity, especially at the level of popular belief. Religious convictions, by virtue of their great explanatory power and reference to justice, can play an integral role in the most contentious kind of 
Schadenfreude
.

But Christianity is a missionary religion based on conversion, as Judaism is not. Like Buddhism and Islam, Christianity has aimed at world dissemination in a way Judaism never has. As early as the sixth century B.C., Buddhist missionaries from India sought conversions throughout Asia. Christian and Muslim missionaries later followed suit, traveling throughout the world for centuries with the express purpose of achieving conversions. Jews certainly developed ethical ideas with an eye to universal application of such ideas, but Jews never mounted campaigns to convert non-Jews to their beliefs. This is because Jewishness rests on a shared historical identity in a way that the other three religions do not.

I do not mean to suggest that Jews cannot feel a religiously charged 
Schadenfreude
. When they do, the pleasure usually issues from the misfortunes of other Jews. The same religious “will to power” that creates strife between religions can lead to division within them. Think here of Luther. Splits within Christianity highlighted the growing problem of how Christians of various creeds could get along with another. It may well be that people are more likely to feel
Schadenfreude
when their fellow believers land in trouble than when adherents of other creeds suffer, for we often expect more of those who claim to share our loyalties than we do of others.

3.
      
The comical

The comical is the source of
Schadenfreude
perhaps the most resistant to analysis, and, when compared to the previous two components, best evinces the enormous differences within this emotion-type. Philosophical attention to comedy will broaden our cultural conception of what qualities a good moral character must include or exclude (by “character” I mean one’s predominant pattern of thought and action, especially with respect to concerns affecting the happiness of others or of oneself). Such attention will simultaneously frustrate efforts to condemn
Schadenfreude
.

Should we hold humor to be fully answerable to ethical considerations? If we do so, life becomes even heavier than it already is. Nonetheless, many moral thinkers have linked humor to evil. In his frequently reprinted essay “
De l’essence du rire
,” Baudelaire identifies as “one of the most commonplace examples [of the comic] in life” a man falling on the ice or on the road, or tripping on the edge of a pavement. Baudelaire deplores the comic, which he considers “one of the clearest marks of Satan in man” (“
Le rire est satanique; il est donc profondément humain
”).13 Comic laughter frightens Baudelaire with the thought, “There but for the grace of God go I.” Indeed, the enjoyment of comedy would seem to depend on confidence that what afflicts someone else will not, could not, happen to us.

Schadenfreude
 is, of course, a function of both pleasure and suffering. Socrates tells us in the 
Philebus
 that all comedy is a mixture of pleasure and pain: “Whether the body be affected apart from the soul, or the soul apart from the body, or both of them together, we constantly come upon the mixture of pleasure with pain.”14 Because the ironies and utter impermanence of life loom larger on the horizon during wars and social crises, comedy flourishes when we might least expect it to. Comedy points to what actually happens, Aristotle tells us in the 
Poetics
, in the interests of what may happen. Aristotle worried about comedy, even as a remedy for human suffering. Comedy naturally aims at laughter, and Aristotle believed that laughter masks aggression toward others.

Hobbes’s reflections on comedy also turn importantly on aggression. In 
Human Nature
 (1650) and 
Leviathan
 (1651) he affirms that selfish motives propel comedy. Laughter, Hobbes says, is the result either of self-satisfaction or the “sudden glory” of the moment in which a person realizes his or her superiority over someone or something. For Hobbes, laughter at the weakness of others reveals a character flaw; it is unfitting for the strong to enjoy a sense of superiority over the weak.

Nietzsche’s terse description in 
The Gay Science
 of laughter as “being
schadenfroh
, but with a good conscience” is indebted to Hobbes, but whereas Hobbes concerns himself specifically with laughter, Nietzsche is more interested in a general attitude toward the world, toward life, and toward oneself. Nietzsche’s aphorism places the roots of the comic in feelings of superiority, a link Freud explores at length in 
Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious
. Freud saw that jokes create problems and then remove them by the act of recognition. “The enjoyment of recognition,” Freud explains, “is joy in power, a joy in the overcoming of a difficulty...Recognition is pleasurable in itself, i.e., through relieving psychical expenditure—and the games founded on this pleasure make use of the damming up only in order to increase the amount of such pleasure.”15 The power of the joke is to succor us, to relieve temporarily the pressures of civilized life. This same sense of overcoming obstacles or resistance figures into Nietzsche’s understanding of why the satisfactions of making others suffer are so sweet. The ability to make others suffer represents for Nietzsche a uniquely gratifying manifestation of the will to power.

Arguing that the comic is invariably somewhat infantile, Freud criticizes Henri Bergson’s influential theory of humor as defective because the underlying comparison involved in humor need not evoke childish pleasures and childish 
play
, but simply childish 
nature
. In the only passage in that work in which Freud refers to
Schadenfreude
by name, he simply shrugs his shoulders and concludes, “certain motives for pleasure in children seem to be lost to us adults...” (
JR,
 p. 279).

Laughter serves such good purpose that moralists hesitate to condemn mirth. Toward the end of the 
Critique of Pure Reason
 Kant praises laughter for helping us withstand the sheer difficulty of living. The same can be said of 
Schadenfreude
.

4.
      
Malice

Malice, or ill will, may either be general, directed toward all persons indiscriminately, or specific, focused on certain individuals or institutions. Because malicious persons are quite apt to revel in the suffering of others, it is difficult to dissociate
Schadenfreude
from the diabolical. Though malicious glee and
Schadenfreude
resemble one another in taking pleasure in the misfortunes of others, they are nonetheless distinct. Ill will is not a necessary condition for 
Schadenfreude
.

Socrates and Aristotle both associated malice with 
Schadenfreude
. In the 
Philebus
 Socrates declares, “one will find the malicious man pleased at his neighbor’s ills” (48 b 7) and that “it is malice that makes us feel pleasure in our friends’ misfortunes” (50 a 1). In the 
Nichomachean Ethics
 (2.7) Aristotle ties pleasure in the misfortune of others to spite (he specifically decries 
Schadenfreude
, 
NE
 2.6.18). Aristotle classifies envy with malice and shamelessness as feelings evil in themselves and for which there can be no golden mean (
NE
 2.6.102 and
Rhetoric
2.9–10.231–43). Here Aristotle neglects the reality that we sometimes approve of and even celebrate the suffering of another for reasons we take to be moral.

Malice frequently causes people to lose a sense of proportion, causing them to hope for or actually to inflict terrible suffering upon another who has committed a fairly trivial offense. Of course, malice need not stem from any offense at all. Malice may subvert any attempt to develop consensus on the appropriateness of suffering in any given context. To make matters worse, cruelty and hatred may erupt indiscriminately, unprovoked by the persons toward whom they are unleashed. This fact further frustrates and impedes efforts to reach agreement on what punishment or suffering any given person may deserve.

The impossibility of reading the minds of others prevents us from knowing whether another feels malicious glee or 
Schadenfreude
. The empirical complexity of human needs and interests blurs the distinction between the two. Commentators on
Schadenfreude
have seized on this ambiguity and taken the easy way out by declaring any pleasure in the distress of another morally off limits. This is not so surprising, given that numerous taboos aim to regulate ambiguities which would further complicate morality.
Schadenfreude
frustrates a moralist’s desire for simplicity.

Low self-esteem, commitments to justice and loyalty, responses to the comical, and dispositional malice, these four are the principal antecedents of 
Schadenfreude
. Only the last unequivocally calls for moral blame. Given the differences among the cognitive components of pleasure we take in the misfortunes of others, it should not seem farfetched to claim that this pleasure takes several forms.

These four sources divide themselves equally between worry and release. With either injuries to self-esteem or commitments to justice, another person (or other persons) threatens the self in some way or triggers a worry about the possibilities for self-realization, self-fulfillment, and happiness. These instances reflect worry about one’s personal safety, possessions, status, or self-respect. In the cases of the comic and malice, however, pent-up emotion is released. Some prior attitude toward another person (or other persons) prompts a need for a release of sadness, aggression, or perhaps both.

What objections might be raised to this account of the genesis of 
Schadenfreude
? The very idea of cutting
Schadenfreude
up into small pieces might itself seem suspect. For one way of taming a threatening idea would be to dissect the idea into so many harmless elements that nothing remains of the threat (as, for example, when Rawls distinguishes among at least six kinds of envy). The threat is all in our minds, the dissection would demonstrate, not in the idea itself. Of course, the threat 
is
 all in our minds, but not in the way that Schopenhauer insists. Schopenhauer makes
Schadenfreude
disappear by collapsing it into malice. In so doing, he makes moral monsters of us all. Schopenhauer fortifies a moral tradition that insists that good people always feel compassion when bad things happen to other people. When a moral tradition produces universal guilt and willful ignorance about that guilt, our personal and social stake in transforming common assumptions is quite high.

This section on the genesis of
Schadenfreude
sets up a framework for assessing morally acceptable examples of pleasure in the misfortunes of others. Far from a knee-jerk reaction,
Schadenfreude
evolves from a thought process that leaves us judges of what other people deserve. In
Schadenfreude
we find ourselves winners: experience has presented us with evidence that the world punishes bad people, or people who have managed their affairs badly.

This framework, focusing as it does on how much we like ourselves, will not lead us to find morally acceptable every emotion of people who suffer from low self-esteem. But our new knowledge should prevent us from hastily condemning the
Schadenfreude
of people who possess little self-esteem and help us make sense of our interaction with other people generally. We are less apt than others to consider our own suffering deserved or trivial. We forget that just as we can assure ourselves that we take a morally acceptable pleasure in the suffering of others (because it seems deserved), so also can others justify their pleasure in our miseries.

When we realize that so-called justice can just as easily work against us as for us, we should think twice about how hard we will allow ourselves to be on others.

Our way of looking at the world possesses extraordinary power: it can make a heaven of hell, or a hell of heaven. That outlook can make others suffer more than they already do. Or less.

II: WHEN REALLY BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO OTHER PEOPLE

TALKING ABOUT THE BAD THINGS that happen to other people raises questions about the experience of suffering. Suffering can harm most deeply by eroding cherished beliefs we hold about ourselves or the world around us. Suffering threatens to rob us of control. Few would dispute that there are 
degrees
 of sadness; I argue as well for a difference 
of kind
 between trivial and significant misfortunes. Another father-son narrative will prove useful here; this one turns on
Schadenfreude
that arises from significant misfortune.

Further, I ask what it is to take suffering too seriously and what it is to take suffering in stride. I then turn to the matter of interpreting suffering as a sign of God’s punishment. The main idea I advance is that interpreting suffering as a message from either God or the invisible hand of justice will almost invariably land us in trouble. We have shown great difficulty in accepting the role of randomness in our lives and in the world.