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Here Nietzsche cuts off at the knees the whole enterprise of seeing suffer-
ing in terms of cause and effect. The urge to find meaning in suffering
amounts to superstitiousness. The bad things that happen to other people
are not the sign of the invisible hand of justice: these bad things have no
supernatural or hidden meaning. For better or for worse, he also under-
mines confidence in our ability to make sense of the world. The things
that we see happen around us do not reach out to us with a message; we
simply impute meaning to them. Here Nietzsche exposes Schadenfreude
as basically irrational. Schadenfreude continues to be rational, however,
insofar as we disagree with Nietzsche that effects have no causes.
Nietzsche s final insight seems to undermine the distinction I have
sought to establish between pleasure in the suffering of another and plea-
sure in justice. Because Nietzsche considers justice a fantasy, a flamboyant
64 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
projection of our own interests, for him there is no substantive difference
between pleasure in another s suffering and pleasure in the spectacle of
justice. I differ from Nietzsche in that I have greater (although far from
complete) faith in the idea of objective justice.
Just as we assess what other people deserve, so we assess whether they
really suffer. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl begins an insightful study of preju-
dice with a sensitive and serious discussion of the suffering her Asian-
American college students endured in the shower room after a wrestling
match, while other competitors joked about the allegedly modest genital
endowments of Asian men.16 Anyone who might counter that these young
men did not in fact suffer, Young-Bruehl contends, demonstrates not only
emotional obtuseness but also a fundamental ignorance of the profoundly
personal nature of suffering. Determining whether another person really
suffers, Young-Bruehl advises us, must not become a function of what we
ourselves deem awful, as opposed to, say, unpleasant. But it remains that
we do make judgments about not only the degree but also the kind of suf-
fering that confronts us. We insist on an important difference between the
suffering of a soldier who returns home from the war impotent and the
suffering of Young-Bruehl s students. We want to dismiss her description
of the emotional experience of the wrestlers as unimportant or even silly.
At other times we may dismiss some descriptions of suffering as senti-
mental. The Bloomsbury Group members were frequently falling in love
with one another and just as frequently expressing themselves on that sub-
ject. The unrest which Vita Sackville-West expresses in a love letter to Vir-
ginia Woolf might not seem large enough to qualify as suffering at all:
Like a little warm coal in my heart burns your saying that you miss
me. I miss you oh so much. How much you ll never believe or
know. At every moment of the day. It is painful but also rather
pleasant, if you know what I mean. I mean, that it is good to have
so keen and persistent a feeling about somebody. It is a sign of vi-
tality.17
Of course, Sackville-West is talking about her own suffering here, not
someone else s. It may be tempting to dismiss Sackville-West s pangs as
The Meaning of Suffering 65
merely sentimental, but we should not, for they return us to the impor-
tance of how we think about the suffering of others. Sackville-West enjoys
that she is distressed, which is different from the enjoyment of her dis-
tress. The word suffering implies the presence of distress, and it is logi-
cally impossible to enjoy suffering. Marginal examples aside, no one likes
to suffer. Can it be that no one likes others to suffer either? Surely not.
When we take pleasure in the suffering of another, we celebrate a mis-
fortune we ourselves hope to avoid. To say that suffering is aversive, how-
ever, is not to say that it is pointless. Nietzsche appreciated just how much
persons strive to attach meaning to suffering, both their own and others .
We can sometimes discern value in suffering as well, precisely by calling
into question what we take to be problematic values or beliefs. Adjust-
ments to a coherent personal identity, then, need not be considered
entirely baleful. Education and imagination can similarly initiate or accel-
erate moral growth. We may naturally hope that our moral growth, or
that of those persons about whom we care, will result principally from
education or imagination, rather than suffering. Attention to the suffering
of others its genesis, longevity, and demise is itself an education
of sorts.
Although I argue that we don t need to worry about Schadenfreude as
a threat to social coherence, I nonetheless acknowledge that it can be un-
pleasant to realize that one s own suffering has made someone else happy.
A crisis of identity or self-esteem is made only more painful by the knowl-
edge that someone else views this crisis with approval and perhaps even joy
(approval and joy, as I have said, differ significantly). Apprehension of the
indignation of others may bring on this same crisis; we may perceive that
others believe we do not deserve our good fortune (which may amount to a
belief that we deserve to suffer, even though we do not). Learning of the
disapproval of others can compel us to revisit values and ambitions, exam-
ine their usefulness, and question whether those values or ambitions may
threaten or oppress others. Schadenfreude reminds us that others may suf-
fer just by virtue of our having convictions. The possibility of inspiring
Schadenfreude can collapse only when our own beliefs and principles do,
for beliefs and principles are forms of aggression. Especially in the context
of moral and social disagreements, others are likely to interpret our mis-
fortunes as a leveling action wrought by the invisible hand of justice.
66 When Bad Things Happen to Other People
Suffering beneath Rules
With the exception of the Sackville-West passage, we have largely looked
at extrinsic suffering to this point, that is, at the suffering of others. I have
argued for the inherent unpleasantness of suffering and have suggested
that persons regularly take pleasure in the suffering of others, principally
through seeing that suffering as somehow condign.
I have suggested that suffering may result from any number of differ-
ent causes, in any number of different contexts. I have focused on the no-
tion of identity disruption as the key to understanding suffering. Specific
persons or groups of persons are often responsible for challenges to our
own identities. Michel Foucault tells us in The Subject and Power,
Generally, it can be said that there are three types of struggles: either
against forms of domination (ethnic, social and religious): against forms
of exploitation which separate individuals from what they produce: or
against that which ties the individual himself and submits him to others in
this way (struggles against subjection, against forms of subjectivity and
submission). 18 What interests me is this first form of struggle, one that
binds the individual to the moral judgment of others.
We do not choose the moral standards of the communities into which
we are born. Communal moral standards resemble various systems of
domination. It is not difficult to understand how someone might suffer
underneath the weight of social or moral rules. To the extent that we can
be said to live in a heterosexual society, for example, gay people must
wrestle with the moral judgment of non-gay people. Similarly, women
must make their way in a man s world, despite there being more women
than men in the world. Non-Christians must accommodate what they
think a Christian society expects. A non-Christian in particular may suffer
as a result of the distance between what Christianity expects of good per-
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