What Suffering Does
Over
the past few weeks, I’ve found myself in a bunch of conversations in
which the unspoken assumption was that the main goal of life is to
maximize happiness. That’s normal. When people plan for the future, they
often talk about all the good times and good experiences they hope to
have. We live in a culture awash in talk about happiness. In one
three-month period last year, more than 1,000 books were released on
Amazon on that subject.
But
notice this phenomenon. When people remember the past, they don’t only
talk about happiness. It is often the ordeals that seem most
significant. People shoot for happiness but feel formed through
suffering.
Now,
of course, it should be said that there is nothing intrinsically
ennobling about suffering. Just as failure is sometimes just failure
(and not your path to becoming the next Steve Jobs) suffering is
sometimes just destructive, to be exited as quickly as possible.
But
some people are clearly ennobled by it. Think of the way Franklin
Roosevelt came back deeper and more empathetic after being struck with
polio. Often, physical or social suffering can give people an outsider’s
perspective, an attuned awareness of what other outsiders are enduring.
But
the big thing that suffering does is it takes you outside of precisely
that logic that the happiness mentality encourages. Happiness wants you
to think about maximizing your benefits. Difficulty and suffering sends
you on a different course.
First,
suffering drags you deeper into yourself. The theologian Paul Tillich
wrote that people who endure suffering are taken beneath the routines of
life and find they are not who they believed themselves to be. The
agony involved in, say, composing a great piece of music or the grief of
having lost a loved one smashes through what they thought was the
bottom floor of their personality, revealing an area below, and then it
smashes through that floor revealing another area.
Then,
suffering gives people a more accurate sense of their own limitations,
what they can control and cannot control. When people are thrust down
into these deeper zones, they are forced to confront the fact they can’t
determine what goes on there. Try as they might, they just can’t tell
themselves to stop feeling pain, or to stop missing the one who has died
or gone. And even when tranquillity begins to come back, or in those
moments when grief eases, it is not clear where the relief comes from.
The healing process, too, feels as though it’s part of some natural or
divine process beyond individual control.
People
in this circumstance often have the sense that they are swept up in
some larger providence. Abraham Lincoln suffered through the pain of
conducting a civil war, and he came out of that with the Second
Inaugural. He emerged with this sense that there were deep currents of
agony and redemption sweeping not just through him but through the
nation as a whole, and that he was just an instrument for transcendent
tasks.
It’s
at this point that people in the midst of difficulty begin to feel a
call. They are not masters of the situation, but neither are they
helpless. They can’t determine the course of their pain, but they can
participate in responding to it. They often feel an overwhelming moral
responsibility to respond well to it. People who seek this proper
rejoinder to ordeal sense that they are at a deeper level than the level
of happiness and individual utility. They don’t say, “Well, I’m feeling
a lot of pain over the loss of my child. I should try to balance my
hedonic account by going to a lot of parties and whooping it up.”
The
right response to this sort of pain is not pleasure. It’s holiness. I
don’t even mean that in a purely religious sense. It means seeing life
as a moral drama, placing the hard experiences in a moral context and
trying to redeem something bad by turning it into something sacred.
Parents who’ve lost a child start foundations. Lincoln sacrificed
himself for the Union. Prisoners in the concentration camp with
psychologist Viktor Frankl rededicated themselves to living up to the
hopes and expectations of their loved ones, even though those loved ones
might themselves already be dead.
Recovering
from suffering is not like recovering from a disease. Many people don’t
come out healed; they come out different. They crash through the logic
of individual utility and behave paradoxically. Instead of recoiling
from the sorts of loving commitments that almost always involve
suffering, they throw themselves more deeply into them. Even while
experiencing the worst and most lacerating consequences, some people
double down on vulnerability. They hurl themselves deeper and gratefully
into their art, loved ones and commitments.
The
suffering involved in their tasks becomes a fearful gift and very
different than that equal and other gift, happiness, conventionally
defined.
