During hard times, it is only natural that we should spend a good deal of time blaming the villains. For the Left, the authors of the present discontents are (a) President Bush, and (b) the free market. Those on the Right finger (a) politicians who favor tax-and-spend policies that will ensure continued stagnation, and (b) bankers who benefit from self-serving regulation that not only insulates them from the consequences of their greed and stupidity but actually rewards them for it with taxpayer-subsidized bailouts.
Reasonable though our preoccupation with the assignment of blame is, it has obscured a deeper problem that the depressed economy has brought to light. In his devotion to the pursuit of happiness, modern man has forgotten how to suffer.
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The dream of a painless world is the great illusion of liberalism. Classical liberalism, it is true, never promised to make men happier; it promised only to make them richer. Adam Smith argued that we deceive ourselves when we suppose that those material luxuries that we associate with happiness are “worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow” on their attainment.
Material wealth is good, Smith says, not because it makes us permanently happier, but because it enables us to dispense, in some measure, with physical and corporeal miseries (hunger, squalor, disease, and the like). In their place we have psychological and spiritual debilities. The primitive man famishes; the civilized man despairs — he experiences the accidioso, the dejection and spiritual sloth, described by Dante, or the noia and “inward death” of Leopardi, or the ennui of Baudelaire. The civilized man is not happier than the savage, but his misery is more polished and elegant, and as a general rule comely things are to be preferred to uncomely ones.
Smith’s classical liberalism has all but entirely given way to a modern liberalism which regards suffering not as something inherent in the very nature of life but as an anomaly to be eradicated by reason and science and social legislation. Thus President Kennedy argued that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty.” Really, Jack? All forms? Intellectual poverty (stupidity)? Emotional poverty (black-dog despair)? Poverty of the flesh (ugliness)?
The “pain which is essential to life cannot be thrown off,” Schopenhauer says. “The ceaseless efforts to banish suffering accomplish no more than to make it change its form.” If we succeed in removing pain in one of its forms, “it immediately assumes a thousand others.”
Delusory though it is, liberalism’s dream of an anodyne world persists because it appeals to our inner egotism and self-conceit. When something painful happens to one, one’s instinct is to be outraged, as though the universe had made a mistake in abrogating one’s right to an ideal and perfect felicity. But there has been no mistake; we have been created to know joy, and also to know misery.
Eloquently put, Rich. Suffering has been dumbed UP in our society. Suffering now means that you have only a 46-inch flatscreen when you wanted the 96-inch model. Suffering now means that your two-year old does not yet have his (or her) own cell phone. Suffering now means that you are required to adhere to commitments and agreements that you may have inadvertently swerved into. You know, pesky things like marriage vows, work contracts, and even promises to yourself. Before long it will be too much trouble to even breathe.
As an example of the insanity of liberalism…
Once upon a time ‘health’ meant absence of disease.
Now days according to the World Health Organization, ‘Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.
Just think about that definition and its impact on the implementation of a national health care system.
The system would be required to not only ensure complete physical and mental well being…already an absurd impossibility, but additionally will be required to ensure complete social well being .
What is social well being? How can a medical system provide it? It can’t but this is the rubric for liberals to compel us all to obey and conform to their will (for our own sake of course).
The only way I know to ensure an absolutely 100% physical and mentally healthy population is to kill those who are not. As for social well being, might as well just kill those who complain, there you have it a perfect healthy and socially well society.
I was so overcome with remorse about my stinky, degenerate life style after reading your article about suffering that I sold everything I had, packed up what few belongings I allowed myself, and am now on my way to New Mexico to become a Penitente. God Bless you my son, and may I experience the utter joy of real suffering as I whip myself, and whip myself, and ........
There is enough suffering in the world as it is. The mission/goal of Conservatives and Liberals alike should be to relieve it! Suffering is a human problem that should not be a political football.
Literacy rates. Slavery. Infant mortality. All mortality. Medical technology/access to medicine. Starvation/malnutrition. Rate of extinction of species of animals and plants.
You may think the world's gotten awful because you're forced to see it in the news or on your phone. The immediacy of suffering and depravity doesn't correlate to the fact that the world has, in fact, gotten exponentially nicer to live in over the last 2000 years.
Only after I started reading National Review and the comments to its columns did I realize that, unbeknownst to me, it was an article of my faith that man is perfectable and that I was hellbent on establishing heaven on earth.
"But there has been no mistake; we have been created to know joy, and also to know misery."
"Created": therein lies the key to this wonderfully insightful article, and the true flaw in modern humanist liberalism. Because the liberals insist they are not created, but instead the unintentional descendants of protoplasm and apes, they have every right to define and continually redefine themselves, and what is good for them, as they see fit. There are no existential boundaries or properties that apply to them.
Interesting how, as the western world has adpopted the liberal humanist view that they are the creators of their own reality rather than the created, suffering is continually unleashed on the world in greater and more extreme quantities.
As but one example, liberal conceit reacted to the suffering of World War I by engineering conditions that would supposedly make any further similar suffering impossible. Believing their laws and procedures could make war illegal, and therefore impossible, the conditions they imposed upon Germany in denial of reality took but a single generation to generate suffering such as the world had never seen, the Holocaust. Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot and on and on killed millions upon millions, all in the name of creating their utopias that would end suffering.
The modern liberal welfare system was intended to alleviate material suffering, but instead it destroyed the work ethic and two biological parent family, thereby yielding more, not less, suffering. The UK's liberal welfare system left no one in material want, allowing the children raised in that system to text one another with the location of the next location to riot and steal designer clothing, iPads and iPhones.
Only when the dominant view in the west returns to viewing ourselves with humility as created beings required to live according to the external realities of the rest of creation (including moral realities inherent to the Creator), instead of as masters of the universe not subject to those realities, will the pattern of liberal humanists creating more suffering by trying to end it cease.
What a curious reading of history. Ideologues who try to view history as a dichotomous struggle tend to go to ludicrous lengths to fit the myriad of events and motivations into their simplistic formulae. Thus, die-hard Marxists who insist on viewing history as a struggle among economic classes lose the genuine value of such a perspective by insisting on applying it where it doesn't belong. Similarly, those who try to explain everything in terms of 'liberalism vs conservativism' or 'humanism vs religion' will distort reality to fit their dogma. The horrors of the Second World War did not arise from some liberal impulse to make war impossible; they arose from the impossibly harsh and revenge-minded conditions of the Versaille Treaty. There was nothing 'liberal' about the French invasion of the Ruhr in 1923, an event which idled a third of Germany's workforce, ruined its currency, and humiliated its people. Most of the ills you note are not the result of humanism per se, but of our collective attempts to deal with the burdens of an ever-increasing population. At the risk of falling into the futile trap of swapping stories of religious vs non-religious atrocities, it is probably worth pointing out that the centuries of the Crusades, marked by intolerance, violence, and injustice, were hardly the work of humanists, and their spiritual brethren are at work in the world today in the form of Muslim extremists. The point here is not to engage in a competitive body count, but to point out that the mindset to which you propose we return as a cure for today's ills has proved no better at dealing with them than the 'liberalism' you despise.
It is probably also worth pointing out that a great deal of the comments about 'liberalism' here seem to be straw men. It is perfectly reasonable for someone to adopt the point of view that one should do all that one can to address physical want and suffering without having adopted the position that one thereby can solve every problem humans can be subject to. In other words, Kennedy was perfectly correct to point out that we have the means to eliminate poverty in the world, and the fact that this would not thereby eliminate sadness, ennui, sickness, rage, or any number of other problems to which we are prey does not mean that the impulse to do what we ARE able to do is somehow less noble or useful than simply accepting our fate - nor is it particularly a 'liberal' vs 'conservative' question.
