I disagree. I'm strongly in favor of continuing this "war on suffering," if it really needs to be framed that way.
So was the Buddha. His entire goal was to reduce the suffering of himself and others.
To me and many others, reducing the suffering of others makes life meaningful.
Doing so can also create suffering for yourself, but your own suffering is not the point. Helping others is the point. If you can help others with less suffering for yourself, go ahead. No shame in getting the epidural!
Of course, in many cases short-term suffering is necessary for long-term wellbeing. We don't want to get too soft. But wellbeing is still a good goal. Let's keep going in that direction.
The problem with the 'war on suffering' is that it increases, rather than decreases, suffering.
Physiologically, pain and pleasure sensors are related and context sensitive. If you experience a lot of pleasure, you become less sensitive to it; pain, more resilient. The point Boyle gets at here is that we've eliminated enough suffering from our lives now to lose a crucial 'layer' of resilience against everyday pain. Eliminating the things that cause us pain now would lead to that getting worse, as smaller and smaller stimuli create the same amount of distress (because of the hedonic treadmill, don't know if that's capitalized), while also, paradoxically, leaving us in a more precarious position for if (when) a technological hiccough strikes and we're left without the comforts that allowed us to 'get soft.'
So, there's a constant amount of suffering in life that is fixed by psychological baselines, and then there's our sensitivity to the outside world. The former remains fixed (say, in the medium term) no matter what, but the latter actually GROWS as technological sophistication does (the more things that have to go right are required to maintain modern 'quality of life,' the greater the risk that at least one goes wrong). Even more, the more our EXPECTATION of being without suffering grows, the worse we feel about raw negative sensation. I think Boyle might actually care more about that one than the precarity one.
I think she wants to reduce suffering in the same sense as the Buddha: She favors the development of beliefs and narratives ('resilience') that help us 'deal with' felt-suffering, which I think she would say are more sustainable than just avoiding raw brute pain (as in most of the examples) or trying to wash it out (as with SSRIs). Or, that's what I got from it.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply :-) I think I see what you're saying, and I agree that cultivating resilience plays an important role in reducing suffering.
Let me try to restate. The second section of the article seems to say that as we have chased reductions in suffering, we have sensitized ourselves to new forms of suffering. The only two examples of increased suffering actually offered are mental health disorders and opioid overdoses. But can we really casually attribute these tragedies to some generalized singular "war on suffering"? Seems to me like their causes are a lot more complicated.
Did the development of antidepressants cause increased depression? Boyle doesn't explain. And of course fentanyl caused overdose deaths, but it was not through people becoming more sensitive to pain, it was through a bunch of complex social factors. Boyle's examples don't really support the "sensitization" story.
Then in part 3, Boyle argues that the effort to eliminate suffering has left us lacking a source of meaning or purpose. This is where I disagree most strongly. As I said, it's exactly backward - the effort to eliminate suffering and help others PROVIDES meaning. And I reject the idea that climate/nuclear/AI/etc. are "synthetic suffering." These are real causes with real things at stake, and working on them provides people with meaning in their lives! And if you'd rather find meaning by alleviating suffering closer to home, there's no shortage of homeless shelters and nursing homes filled with real suffering that could use help.
I think that any crisis of meaning among people today is not because people aren't exposed to suffering, but because (for a variety of reasons) they are choosing not to be altruistic and reduce the suffering of others.
So, to sum up: I agree that resilience is important, I think Boyle's examples of sensitization and a generalized "war on suffering" are weak, and I think that waging such a war *provides* the sense of meaning that we crave. <3
Wonderful piece. I think you would find both C.S. Lewis’ essay, The Abolition of Man, and more recently, Why We Are Restless by Ben and Jenna Storrey, to be deeply related to this topic. And congratulation on a second child!
I’m grateful for the teachings of my parents and religion that taught me to find purpose in adversity.
Great, thought-provoking essay. I would throw into the mix that the Latin root of “passion” is passio, meaning suffering (eg Passion of the Christ). To our youth, we proselytize “finding your passion” while altogether missing the fact that the root of passion is that which you would suffer for; by minimizing passio, in a very real way, we are removing people’s abilities to derive meaning from and connection with the world.
Suffering is bad. It's almost tautological. If you want to frame a moral or ethical theory, you have ground it in something. Why is poverty bad? Why is Guinea worm bad? Why is an earthquake bad? Why (if you're religious) is sinning bad? No matter how much deontology you subscribe to, you have anchor your moral theory to the notion that pain/suffering/dolors are things to be avoided.
When I look at the structure of the universe, I have to pray there is no omniscient/omnipotent deity, because otherwise, it is undoubtedly the greatest enemy of anything with a conscious mind. The Epicurean trilemma cannot be solved without accepting that the Creator desires great suffering.
I suppose that for some people that is enough to call suffering "good", if it is divinely intended, but I think that is a debasement of the word "good".
If there's a point where I agree with this essay is that we should inure ourselves more often to suffering, since many wonderful things are sadistically locked behind a door of pain.
First, it is straightforwardly false that deontology bottoms out to caring about suffering. None of your examples are bad wholly and exclusively for the suffering they cause--to "ground" a moral theory in a single primitive, it must be that the primitive exhausts explanation. It can't just be that suffering is "involved" in all bad things. Bad things would need to be bad exactly proportionally to the suffering they cause(d), which I feel like often isn't the case. (Doing harm unintentionally doesn't seem as bad as doing it intentionally, say, when the victim doesn't know the difference. Or it's less bad to make evil people suffer than innocent ones).
Second, if you want to say that 'suffering = negative sensations by definition,' then you're no longer talking about suffering as the opposite of brute pain (because of the intrinsic coincidence of certain kinds of pleasure and pain, e.g., masochism, and, importantly for this essay, the distinct experience of finding-meaning-in-pain or overcoming-by-force-of-will, as in athletics or survival situations and so on). So, either suffering is bad fully tautologically (not "almost"), or it is simply not intrinsically bad. And the former definition is just word games. Then again, I could be being pedantic. Maybe there's a middle-ground definition of suffering that can accommodate pleasure-in-pain or pleasure-from-pain (or whichever) as well as brute physical pain without just referring by stipulation to desirable mental states.
"pleasure in pain" has positive valence, so is actually just pleasure.
Language games are indeed being played here. Negative valence (real suffering) is whatever the agent in question would prefer, in whole, to stop. So, a masochist experiencing nociceptive input that is actually interpreted in a positive light is not actually suffering.
I'm not going to get into deontology vs consequentialism in the comments section of a blog post, but I've delved into it over decades and I've come to the conclusion that you really can't build a moral theory without anchoring it to a notion of hedons/dolors.
This is great. Christianity teaches how suffering can bring us closer to God, and that Jesus, God incarnate, took on human form and understood human suffering in the most vulnerable ways. Suffering is not bad in and of itself, though too often people who suffer because of evildoers then turn away from God.
I certainly agree with your conclusions - that we have forced ourselves into concentrating on replacing that suffering with ailments that may or may not truly be ailments. But I also think that in not truly suffering, we don’t learn just how good the good is in our lives - essentially that we can’t recognize the sweet if we don’t know the bitter.
I have loved every article you’ve ever written, so please keep them coming as often as you are able amidst the forthcoming sleepless nights :) congrats on your second!
I disagree. I'm strongly in favor of continuing this "war on suffering," if it really needs to be framed that way.
So was the Buddha. His entire goal was to reduce the suffering of himself and others.
To me and many others, reducing the suffering of others makes life meaningful.
Doing so can also create suffering for yourself, but your own suffering is not the point. Helping others is the point. If you can help others with less suffering for yourself, go ahead. No shame in getting the epidural!
Of course, in many cases short-term suffering is necessary for long-term wellbeing. We don't want to get too soft. But wellbeing is still a good goal. Let's keep going in that direction.
The problem with the 'war on suffering' is that it increases, rather than decreases, suffering.
Physiologically, pain and pleasure sensors are related and context sensitive. If you experience a lot of pleasure, you become less sensitive to it; pain, more resilient. The point Boyle gets at here is that we've eliminated enough suffering from our lives now to lose a crucial 'layer' of resilience against everyday pain. Eliminating the things that cause us pain now would lead to that getting worse, as smaller and smaller stimuli create the same amount of distress (because of the hedonic treadmill, don't know if that's capitalized), while also, paradoxically, leaving us in a more precarious position for if (when) a technological hiccough strikes and we're left without the comforts that allowed us to 'get soft.'
So, there's a constant amount of suffering in life that is fixed by psychological baselines, and then there's our sensitivity to the outside world. The former remains fixed (say, in the medium term) no matter what, but the latter actually GROWS as technological sophistication does (the more things that have to go right are required to maintain modern 'quality of life,' the greater the risk that at least one goes wrong). Even more, the more our EXPECTATION of being without suffering grows, the worse we feel about raw negative sensation. I think Boyle might actually care more about that one than the precarity one.
I think she wants to reduce suffering in the same sense as the Buddha: She favors the development of beliefs and narratives ('resilience') that help us 'deal with' felt-suffering, which I think she would say are more sustainable than just avoiding raw brute pain (as in most of the examples) or trying to wash it out (as with SSRIs). Or, that's what I got from it.
Thanks for the thoughtful reply :-) I think I see what you're saying, and I agree that cultivating resilience plays an important role in reducing suffering.
Let me try to restate. The second section of the article seems to say that as we have chased reductions in suffering, we have sensitized ourselves to new forms of suffering. The only two examples of increased suffering actually offered are mental health disorders and opioid overdoses. But can we really casually attribute these tragedies to some generalized singular "war on suffering"? Seems to me like their causes are a lot more complicated.
Did the development of antidepressants cause increased depression? Boyle doesn't explain. And of course fentanyl caused overdose deaths, but it was not through people becoming more sensitive to pain, it was through a bunch of complex social factors. Boyle's examples don't really support the "sensitization" story.
Then in part 3, Boyle argues that the effort to eliminate suffering has left us lacking a source of meaning or purpose. This is where I disagree most strongly. As I said, it's exactly backward - the effort to eliminate suffering and help others PROVIDES meaning. And I reject the idea that climate/nuclear/AI/etc. are "synthetic suffering." These are real causes with real things at stake, and working on them provides people with meaning in their lives! And if you'd rather find meaning by alleviating suffering closer to home, there's no shortage of homeless shelters and nursing homes filled with real suffering that could use help.
I think that any crisis of meaning among people today is not because people aren't exposed to suffering, but because (for a variety of reasons) they are choosing not to be altruistic and reduce the suffering of others.
So, to sum up: I agree that resilience is important, I think Boyle's examples of sensitization and a generalized "war on suffering" are weak, and I think that waging such a war *provides* the sense of meaning that we crave. <3
Wonderful piece. I think you would find both C.S. Lewis’ essay, The Abolition of Man, and more recently, Why We Are Restless by Ben and Jenna Storrey, to be deeply related to this topic. And congratulation on a second child!
I’m grateful for the teachings of my parents and religion that taught me to find purpose in adversity.
Great, thought-provoking essay. I would throw into the mix that the Latin root of “passion” is passio, meaning suffering (eg Passion of the Christ). To our youth, we proselytize “finding your passion” while altogether missing the fact that the root of passion is that which you would suffer for; by minimizing passio, in a very real way, we are removing people’s abilities to derive meaning from and connection with the world.
Suffering is bad. It's almost tautological. If you want to frame a moral or ethical theory, you have ground it in something. Why is poverty bad? Why is Guinea worm bad? Why is an earthquake bad? Why (if you're religious) is sinning bad? No matter how much deontology you subscribe to, you have anchor your moral theory to the notion that pain/suffering/dolors are things to be avoided.
When I look at the structure of the universe, I have to pray there is no omniscient/omnipotent deity, because otherwise, it is undoubtedly the greatest enemy of anything with a conscious mind. The Epicurean trilemma cannot be solved without accepting that the Creator desires great suffering.
I suppose that for some people that is enough to call suffering "good", if it is divinely intended, but I think that is a debasement of the word "good".
If there's a point where I agree with this essay is that we should inure ourselves more often to suffering, since many wonderful things are sadistically locked behind a door of pain.
First, it is straightforwardly false that deontology bottoms out to caring about suffering. None of your examples are bad wholly and exclusively for the suffering they cause--to "ground" a moral theory in a single primitive, it must be that the primitive exhausts explanation. It can't just be that suffering is "involved" in all bad things. Bad things would need to be bad exactly proportionally to the suffering they cause(d), which I feel like often isn't the case. (Doing harm unintentionally doesn't seem as bad as doing it intentionally, say, when the victim doesn't know the difference. Or it's less bad to make evil people suffer than innocent ones).
Second, if you want to say that 'suffering = negative sensations by definition,' then you're no longer talking about suffering as the opposite of brute pain (because of the intrinsic coincidence of certain kinds of pleasure and pain, e.g., masochism, and, importantly for this essay, the distinct experience of finding-meaning-in-pain or overcoming-by-force-of-will, as in athletics or survival situations and so on). So, either suffering is bad fully tautologically (not "almost"), or it is simply not intrinsically bad. And the former definition is just word games. Then again, I could be being pedantic. Maybe there's a middle-ground definition of suffering that can accommodate pleasure-in-pain or pleasure-from-pain (or whichever) as well as brute physical pain without just referring by stipulation to desirable mental states.
"pleasure in pain" has positive valence, so is actually just pleasure.
Language games are indeed being played here. Negative valence (real suffering) is whatever the agent in question would prefer, in whole, to stop. So, a masochist experiencing nociceptive input that is actually interpreted in a positive light is not actually suffering.
I'm not going to get into deontology vs consequentialism in the comments section of a blog post, but I've delved into it over decades and I've come to the conclusion that you really can't build a moral theory without anchoring it to a notion of hedons/dolors.
Everybody gangsta till they are 1% that dies at childbirth.
You might enjoy this post discussing the 'War on Suffering' piece - https://castaliajournal.substack.com/p/curator-5eb
Discussion about halfway down the post.
This is a brilliant essay. Hard stop. Thank you for taking the time to express it.
This is great. Christianity teaches how suffering can bring us closer to God, and that Jesus, God incarnate, took on human form and understood human suffering in the most vulnerable ways. Suffering is not bad in and of itself, though too often people who suffer because of evildoers then turn away from God.
“Westerners” now are weak and ignorant. Most Americans wouldn’t understand sacrifice and so in a real emergency would quickly fall into panic.
I certainly agree with your conclusions - that we have forced ourselves into concentrating on replacing that suffering with ailments that may or may not truly be ailments. But I also think that in not truly suffering, we don’t learn just how good the good is in our lives - essentially that we can’t recognize the sweet if we don’t know the bitter.
I have loved every article you’ve ever written, so please keep them coming as often as you are able amidst the forthcoming sleepless nights :) congrats on your second!