[lit-ideas] Re: What is the cumulative suffering of mankind?
- From: Eric Yost <mr.eric.yost@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 02:07:22 -0400
Phil: Talk of 'millions', especially the
'millions' over 'there', is so abstract and
demands so little of me except that I make the
proper, politically-correct noises. Most of us
abhor the genocide occurring in Darfur, and who of
us isn't willing to say so? However, compare this
with the experience of meeting a Sudanese woman
who was raped and whose husband and children were
hacked to death in front of her. What does one
say in that situation?
Eric: As a phenomenology of politically correct
noises easily made, where do our minds go when we
entertain thoughts of immense suffering?
A mental blur of grimacing faces, ashen body
heaps, mothers holding dead babies in mud huts,
rooms where the lonely are battered into
fortuitous shapes (Auden), brokenhearted bridge
jumpers, the clinically depressed, accident
victims with extensive third-degree burns, and so
on in grotesque variations that slideshow through
our thoughts up to the limit of our capacity to
entertain the suffering of others.
And these images of horror are ... what? Our
culture teaching us to be kind to others? Our
response to our culture's teaching us to be kind
to others? Is it a knowledge?
Yet we respond to these abstract imaginings as if
the suffering were real in our personal lives. We
may presume that our imaginations can encompass
them in some outline of awareness. Yet for us, we
who are safe not sorry, they are merely cautionary
signs; or perhaps in a better phrasing, they are
symbols of our capacity for compassion. The
reality is beyond us.
That the reality of "all the suffering in the
world" is beyond us does not, as Robert suggests
for Lewis, immediately send us dodging the problem
of pain. It brings us to Phil's question of "What
does one say in that [individual] situation?"
Maybe that's where the "perverse comfort" of
entertaining mega-pain over micro-pain enters. Do
we prefer the lesson (i.e., the symbols of our
capacity for compassion") to the field work (i.e.,
actually trying to comfort one person in pain)?
Is it true that:
"We'd rather have the iceberg than the ship,
although it meant the end of travel."
Yours in imaginary icebergs,
Eric
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