Our Neurotic Fear of Suffering

[Valin]

On The Square:

Wesley J. Smith

8/23/12

 

Never in human history has suffering been more readily relieved than today. And yet, paradoxically, we have never been more afraid of suffering.

 

Our forebears would find this very odd. For them, horrendous suffering was ubiquitous, the bane of rich and poor alike. For example, before anesthesia, the agony of surgery may have killed more patients than surgical procedures helped. As Thomas Dormandy put it in his splendid medical history, The Worst of Evils: The Fight Against Pain, “the searing pain of knife and saw” almost always caused patients to fall “into a state of shock on the operating table . . . Speed was essential. Prolonged pain not only hurt. It also killed.” No wonder John Adams, after witnessing the searing agony of his daughter’s one-and-a-half hour mastectomy, said he felt “as if he were living in the Book of Job.”

 

Pain was an integral part of life: If a man suffered appendicitis, he died in agony. If a man contracted bone cancer, he died in agony. If a man became infected with tuberculosis, he died in agony. Then there were the non-terminal illnesses and injuries like gout, carbuncles, migraines, arthritis, and broken limbs. Suffering was the hard price one paid for being alive.

 

Happily, those bad old days are mostly long gone, at least in the developed world. Thanks to tremendous breakthroughs in modern medicine, suffering has been pushed largely into the shadows......

 

(Snip)

 

That paradox used to make me wonder: Why euthanasia now, when there is less “need” for such drastic action than ever before in human history? The bioethicist Yuval Levin provided a very plausible answer in his 2008 book, *Imagining the Future, in which he makes a fascinating observation about suffering and culture:

 

The worldview of modern science sees health not only as a foundation but also a principal goal; not only as a beginning but also an end. Relief and preservation—from disease and pain, from misery and necessity—become the defining ends of human action, and therefore of human societies.

 

 

This is a crucial point, because as Levin also notes, “Any society’s understanding of the foundational good necessarily gives shape to its politics, its social institutions, and its sense of moral purpose and direction.”

 

And therein we face a significant ethical menace: Once avoiding suffering becomes the primary purpose of society, it too easily mutates into license for eliminating the sufferer. More, the meaning of “preventing suffering” itself becomes elastic. Thus, we increasingly hear advocacy for ending the lives of cognitively devastated patients, not because they are in pain, but to relive the anguish of their families. Some have even argued that there is an explicit “duty to die” to protect loved ones from the emotional and financial consequences of disability, illness, or age-related debilitation. I have also seen promotion of death as a way of preventing the empathetic suffering that doctors and nurses experience when caring for devastated patients.

 

(Snip)

 

So, how should society best continue the struggle against “the worst of evils?” Rather than a headlong neurotic flight from pain, it seems to me that we should instead refocus our energies and emphases. By all means, combat suffering—but do so morally, by recommitting ourselves to the higher calling of righteousness and virtue as the “defining ends of human action, and therefore of human societies.”

 

* Imagining the Future: Science and American Democracy (New Atlantis Books)

Yuval Levin