When Bad Things Happen to Other People (12 page)

Why would anyone rationalize in this way? To survive, we have to make some sense of our world. Dividing people into categories of “us” and “them” facilitates an easy but untenable conclusion about appropriateness: they suffer because they and their kind are bad. I and people like me will not suffer, because we are good. Beyond that, we might rationalize the suffering of people like us because our emotional attachment to or investment in them might not be whole-hearted. Self-interest can divide us even from people we like. If Freud succeeded in any way, it was in illuminating the fundamental ambivalence of our psychic lives.

We ought not to dismiss the mental defense of seeing justice where we choose to before acknowledging its merits. In 
The Wisdom of the Ego
 Harvard psychiatrist George Vaillant draws a compelling analogy between the body’s immune system and the mind’s defenses. Far from condemning the emotional and intellectual dishonesty underlying these defenses of the mind, Vaillant praises them as “healthy” and “creative” means of coping with life’s misery. Milton writes in
Paradise Lost
: “The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.” Vaillant holds out Milton’s insight as perhaps our best defense for coping with events which would otherwise overwhelm us. Vaillant emphasizes the survival value of such defenses. It would be all too easy to maintain a moral hard line and, against Vaillant, to condemn such mental defenses as weaknesses. Rallying behind this moral hard line, we hide from the fierceness of suffering. To continue with our lives sanely, we sometimes feel entitled to tell ourselves stories imaginatively.

We need to remember that two opposing perspectives are at work here: that of a person suffering and that of another person, who may or may not be suffering. It might seem preposterous to maintain that we can deceive ourselves about whether suffering is deserved. Can we really make ourselves believe something when we know it is not true? Yes, from either a first-person or a third-person point of view. Self-loathing happens, particularly among the disenfranchised. To make sense of the world, we may come to identify with our aggressors. By the same token, we may persuade ourselves that a particular person or an entire class of persons must surely deserve the bad things that happen to them. Our motivation for persuading ourselves might be either fear of the idea of random suffering or fear of standing apart from the community that has taught us certain beliefs about appropriate suffering.

We can learn something from reflecting on the kinds of people whose sufferings bring us pleasure. We rarely celebrate the bad things that happen to the poor, the crippled, the powerless, unless we have identified them in some other way that we may find objectionable (Larry Flynt or George Wallace, say). We celebrate the bad things that happen to people who compete with us in some way or to people who have what we want (beauty, wealth, fame, talent, social position). Our
Schadenfreude
reveals what really matters to us. And rationalization of
Schadenfreude
indicates our emotional investment in what we care about.

The Meaning of Suffering

Many people think suffering happens for a reason: it does not, could not, befall us randomly. A belief about the presumed meaning of our suffering may increase or decrease its intensity. Just as we do, others are likely to adopt a belief about the meaning of our suffering. If suffering has no meaning, what I call
Schadenfreude
could not arise (because
Schadenfreude
relies on the belief that someone else deserves to suffer). If people did not think that
Schadenfreude
involves beliefs about justice, then no one could defend
Schadenfreude
as morally acceptable. In a sense, my defense perpetuates the problem of
Schadenfreude
, even enacts it. If the randomness of suffering could be proven once and for all, then no one could affirm the rationality of 
Schadenfreude
.

As it is, people in the West are as likely to stop thinking of suffering in terms of cause and effect as they are to abandon belief in a divine authority who administers punishment for wrongdoing.
Schadenfreude
, a social emotion, says something about the milieu in which it circulates. People habitually seek meaning in suffering.

In the final section of 
On the Genealogy of Morals
 Nietzsche tells us that mankind’s curse is not suffering itself but rather the 
meaninglessness
 of suffering. We believe we could bear a great deal of suffering, provided it served some good purpose. Whether thinking about our own or others’ suffering, we grope for some comprehensible purpose for it, such as patriotism, foolishness, or ignorance. The suffering or pain of a soldier wounded in war, for example, is easier to bear—both for him and for his family and friends—than the suffering of the same soldier seriously hurt by an injury during basic training or through foolish behavior.

Ecclesiastical penance, at least in its original form, institutionalized meaningful suffering. The distress incurred and then released by penance atoned for sin. The satisfaction of penance signified extinction of sins and thus made reconciliation possible. Priests tailored penance to fit given sins. This practice triggered considerable anxiety, for it was only a matter of chance whether a precisely equivalent penance was found for any given sin. Believers feared God’s wrath more than any earthly penance and thus accepted a penitential system of draconian severity on the theory that the harsher the penance in this world, the smaller would be the punishment in the next. Penance evolved from and enforced a belief that bad people will get what they deserve.

Nietzsche takes issue with the practice of penance, or “ascetic ideals,” in 
On the Genealogy of Morals
, reasoning that it is pointless to make life worse by voluntarily increasing what persons would otherwise try to avoid. Nietzsche does not miss the difference on which penance turns: meaningless suffering is unendurable, but suffering we inflict upon ourselves comes with a clear meaning on its face, a meaning that can be extended to the rest of life. What is that meaning? That we are the cause of our own suffering:

Human beings, suffering from themselves in one way or other...uncertain why or wherefore, thirsting for reasons—reasons relieve—thirsting, too for remedies and narcotics, at last take counsel with one who knows hidden things, too—and behold! they receive a hint, they receive from their sorcerer, the ascetic priest, the first hint as to the “cause” of their suffering; they must seek it in themselves, in some guilt, in a piece of the past, they must understand their suffering as punishment. (
GM
 III, Section 20)

The ascetic priests cannot eliminate suffering, but they can explain why it is inevitable. The suffering they prescribe gives adherents a sense of control over the rest of life’s suffering. In
The Varieties of Religious Experience
 William James articulated from a quite different perspective the great attraction of a sense of control over suffering: “There are saints who have literally fed on...humiliation and privation, and the thought of suffering and death—their souls growing in happiness just in proportion as their outward state grew more intolerable. No other emotion than religious emotion can bring a man to this peculiar pass.”14 James and Nietzsche both view asceticism as a function of religious devotion. Nietzsche thought the love of ascetic ideals masked a pathological fear of happiness and beauty. For him asceticism was akin to cruelty, insofar as it entailed taking satisfaction in the creation of suffering. Because Nietzsche deplored all suffering, self-imposed suffering seemed to him perverse. Nietzsche further opposed attributing the cause of suffering to divine justice. He affirmed that religious believers preferred feeling guilty to feeling helpless.

Despite the enormous differences among various examples of suffering, one aspect remains constant: he who suffers believes that he has to some extent lost control of his world. Even suffering out of sympathy for another person or cause can cause us to lose grip of our self-identity. Suffering signals that the rules we live by are somehow inadequate or no longer valid. Suffering challenges the vision and the assumptions upon which identity is based.15 The suffering of a mean-spirited or hypocritical person might be considered good, insofar as the rules by which he or she lives seem unfair or uncharitable. The suffering of an ostensibly kind-hearted person is another matter entirely. What is immediately at issue is how we judge a person’s moral worth, which in turn colors our ideas of what a person might deserve.

Nietzsche offers us a final, crucial insight into the meaning of suffering. Emotional identification with the alleged perpetrator of the suffering of others can explain why the injury of another person would afford us any satisfaction at all. Because of the competition between belief systems, we identify with the force we imagine to have caused another’s suffering. This force may be God, reason, or the invisible hand of natural justice.

Whatever we perceive this force to be, we identify with it and celebrate its strength. This emotional identification that Nietzsche nods to in various writings would seem to reveal justice and not suffering as the object of 
Schadenfreude
; however, Nietzsche is careful to leave room for both objects in the experience of 
Schadenfreude
. In fact, he says explicitly that to observe suffering causes pleasure, but to cause it delivers an even greater pleasure.

Schadenfreude
, an emotional corollary of justice, offers us something for nothing, as does the Roman Catholic notion of grace. Like grace,
Schadenfreude
testifies to a higher power. Nietzsche does not need a higher power than himself; not surprisingly, he also has no need of grace. In
Beyond Good and Evil
 he tells us: “The concept ‘grace’ has no meaning or good odor
inter pares
; there may be a sublime way of letting presents from above happen to one, as it were, and to drink them up thirstily like drops—but for this art and gesture the noble soul has not aptitude” (Section 265). Our investment in a system of belief may be so strong that the desire to find meaning in suffering drives us to conclusions that surprise and infuriate others. At this level of social interaction,
Schadenfreude
thrives. Although Nietzsche wants to say that he is above this, he cannot really be, for he espouses a system of belief about desert as well, albeit one that he takes to have created himself.

Religious thinkers have remarked on Nietzsche’s idolatry; their skepticism produces
Schadenfreude
. Of course, one need not be religious to experience
Schadenfreude
: utilitarians, vegetarians, and humanitarians may well search for the kind of external justification for their beliefs that
Schadenfreude
represents. Nietzsche’s response to anyone who would include him in the cycle of this kind of
Schadenfreude
pierces to the heart of the matter. In one of his most famous passages Nietzsche says:

For just as the popular mind separates the lightning from its flash, and takes the latter for an action, for the operation of a subject called lightning, so popular morality also separates strength from expressions of strength, as if there were a neutral substratum behind the strong man, which was free to express strength or not to do so. But there is no such substratum: there is no “being” behind doing, effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything. The popular mind in fact doubles the deed; when it sees the lightning flash, it is the deed of a deed: it posts the same event first as cause and then a second time as its effect. (
GM
 I, Section 13)

Here Nietzsche cuts off at the knees the whole enterprise of seeing suffering in terms of cause and effect. The urge to find meaning in suffering amounts to superstitiousness. The bad things that happen to other people are not the sign of the invisible hand of justice: these bad things have no supernatural or hidden meaning. For better or for worse, he also undermines confidence in our ability to make sense of the world. The things that we see happen around us do not reach out to us with a message; we simply impute meaning to them. Here Nietzsche exposes
Schadenfreude
as basically irrational.
Schadenfreude
continues to be rational, however, insofar as we disagree with Nietzsche that effects have no causes.

Nietzsche’s final insight seems to undermine the distinction I have sought to establish between pleasure in the suffering of another and pleasure in justice. Because Nietzsche considers justice a fantasy, a flamboyant projection of our own interests, for him there is no substantive difference between pleasure in another’s suffering and pleasure in the spectacle of justice. I differ from Nietzsche in that I have greater (although far from complete) faith in the idea of objective justice.

Just as we assess what other people deserve, so we assess whether they 
really
 suffer. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl begins an insightful study of prejudice with a sensitive and serious discussion of the suffering her Asian-American college students endured in the shower room after a wrestling match, while other competitors joked about the allegedly modest genital endowments of Asian men.16 Anyone who might counter that these young men did not in fact suffer, Young-Bruehl contends, demonstrates not only emotional obtuseness but also a fundamental ignorance of the profoundly personal nature of suffering. Determining whether another person really suffers, Young-Bruehl advises us, must not become a function of what we ourselves deem awful, as opposed to, say, unpleasant. But it remains that we 
do
 make judgments about not only the degree but also the kind of suffering that confronts us. We insist on an important difference between the suffering of a soldier who returns home from the war impotent and the suffering of Young-Bruehl’s students. We want to dismiss her description of the emotional experience of the wrestlers as unimportant or even silly.

At other times we may dismiss some descriptions of suffering as sentimental. The Bloomsbury Group members were frequently falling in love with one another and just as frequently expressing themselves on that subject. The unrest which Vita Sackville-West expresses in a love letter to Virginia Woolf might not seem large enough to qualify as suffering at all: