Post-Enlightenment and our Attitudes toward Suffering
In this newsletter I’d like to share some brief thoughts to buttress my claim that our attitude toward suffering in the West has changed. This is important because what we think about suffering affects our mental and emotional well-being, how we engage with it (suffering), and what type of people we may be on the other side of it. Simply put, if we feel entitled to never suffer (or suffer far less than we do), we will handle it poorly when it inevitably comes our way. We may become angry and resentful at God or others, feel it is unjust, that we don’t “deserve” it, etc. Given the inevitability of suffering and the inescapability of some suffering, this attitude is, at the very least, detrimental, and at worst destructive.
Several philosophers have written on the shifting attitudes toward suffering. There are, doubtless, more, but these are the three I’ve “stumbled” across while researching other things. One identified the “central Enlightenment belief in mastery of both human and non-human nature.”[1] With astonishing progress made in so many arenas during this period (e.g., medicine, science, etc.), we came to view ourselves as masters of our own destinies: we could mold and shape our lives and our world according to our desires and, when we couldn’t, we sought to discover a new way to do so.
Another philosopher identified a shift at the time of the Enlightenment toward what he called a “negative model of suffering.”[2] This contrasts with the “positive model of suffering,” which acknowledges that value can be gained from suffering.[3] He argued that it was “the rise of medicalization, bureaucratization, and secularization” which exacerbated the shift from which “human discontent has increasingly become less a matter for spiritual, moral, or philosophical consideration, than for biological, behavioral, political, or psychiatric understanding and intervention.”[4] Indeed, if certain spheres have managed to eradicate much of the suffering we used to experience prior to advances made during the Enlightenment, this might naturally lead us to view our suffering primarily as a “problem” to be “solved” solely by the professional spheres listed above, rather than additionally considering spiritual and/or moral aspects from which we might cultivate meaning, value, and purpose.
The final philosopher I’ll mention, writing in the 1970s, focused on the shift in the medical system in the 19th-20th centuries.[5] While medical progress has always been striven for, the shift he pointed to resulted in our attitudes being one of feeling morally obligated to pursue every medical solution possible to stave off death as long as possible. He argued that now, rather than being allowed to suffer and die well,[6] we feel we are doing something immoral if we do not exhaust all plausible medical solutions to stay alive as long as possible. He claimed that, spanning various cultures, individuals (in their families and communities) previously felt more autonomy to decide when treatment was no longer desirable rather than the pressure from the medical community, society, and family to undergo all or most available treatments.[7]
To be clear, I am not asserting that, prior to the Enlightenment, we were sanguine toward suffering and suddenly, post-Enlightenment we’re entitled Westerners. Obviously, humans have never been delighted with or even neutral toward suffering (e.g., see ancient biblical book of Job, which is thousands of years old.) Humans have always wanted to reduce or eliminate suffering. The shift has been that we think we can (possibly or eventually) eliminate suffering and that our lives ought to be free from it.
These are extremely abbreviated thoughts on how our attitudes toward suffering have changed, and much more can—and should—be said about it. My primary motivation in offering these initial thoughts is to plant the seeds that 1) historically, the human attitude toward suffering has not always been what it currently is in our modern, Western milieu, and 2) it’s possible that our attitude toward suffering is incorrect—and is detrimental to us.
[1] Barry, John. (2012). The politics of actually existing unsustainability : human flourishing in a climate-changed, carbon-constrained world. Oxford University Press. P. 37
[2] Davies, James. (2011). Positive and Negative Models of Suffering: An Anthropology of Our Shifting Cultural Consciousness of Emotional Discontent. Anthropology of Consciousness, 22(2), 188–208. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1556-3537.2011.01049.x. P. 191
[3] Davies. “Positive and Negative Models.” P. 190.
[4] Davies. “Positive and Negative Models.” P. 191.
[5] Illich, Ivan. (1976). Medical nemesis : the expropriation of health / Marion Boyars Publishers, Ltd.
[6] Illich. Medical nemesis Pp. 127-128, 131-132.
[7] This relates to an additional argument in the same book that I do not have the space on which to elaborate: that we have relinquished to medical authorities determinations as to when we are healthy, when we are ill, and what we should do about it.