Abstract
Suffering: eliminable and not. Too much self, too little social. The dance of life. The heart of a heartless world. Being and nothingness and zombies. The science of getting help. The sixth revolution.
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Notes
- 1.
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Witnessing the atrocities of war in Anatolia may have been a formative experience for the 23-year old Hemingway (Long, 2019), but it was not his first one, because it was not the first war that he saw up close. Four years earlier, serving as a volunteer in the Great War (called by H. G. Wells “the war that will end war”), on the Italian Front, he had been seriously wounded and had to spend six months at a hospital. Hemingway’s subsequent lifelong disdain for war and for the military brass who are insulated from its worst consequences was not, however, accompanied by any kind of political awakening.
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The distinction between non-eliminable and eliminable suffering is illuminated in this passage from Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974b, ch.2, p.60):
Suffering is the condition on which we live. And when it comes you know it. You know it as the truth. Of course it’s right to cure diseases, to prevent hunger and injustice, as the social organism does. But no society can change the nature of its existence. We can’t prevent suffering. This pain and that pain, yes, but not Pain. A society can only relieve social suffering — unnecessary suffering. The rest remains. The root, the reality.
Anderson (2015) is a snapshot of the statistics of life satisfaction and the prevalence of suffering all over the world. For further discussion, and some references, see the chapter on suffering in (Edelman, 2020, ch.32).
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6The translations of the two rebetika songs are reproduced with permission from Holst-Warhaft (2018, pp.95-96), who notes (personal communication): “As for the words mete kemile… they have no meaning in Greek or Turkish that I can find. It is an exclamation and so far I haven’t found any more information although I’ve hunted around. So I thought best to leave the phrase untranslated.”
- 7.
Metzinger’s theory of suffering is laid out in (Metzinger, 2017).
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I discuss the aversion to immortality (among other things) in Identity, immortality, happiness: pick two (Edelman, 2018).
- 10.
In their review of the anthropology of death, Palgi and Abramovitch (1984) note that “Death awareness is a natural sequel to the development of self-awareness-an intrinsic attribute of humankind. The consciousness of man’s transience in its known earthly form is thus a universal phenomenon.” The consciousness-limiting move against existential suffering arising from one’s awareness of death is mocked by Zapffe (1933, III):
Here is, by the way, an opportunity for the wildest round-dancing through ever higher ironic levels, into a most embarrassing circulus vitiosus. Here one can chase one’s ego across numerous habitats, enjoying the capacity of the various layers of consciousness to dispel one another.
In his book The Conspiracy against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror (2010), Ligotti (who happens to be a professional writer of “supernatural horror”) extends the mockery to everything that religion, philosophy, and psychology ever had to say about suffering.
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A 208-reference review of the biology, psychology, and culture of sad music (Eerola et al., 2018) paints a “sombre picture” of our (lack of) understanding of how it works.
- 13.
Concerning the relationship between millennarian religious movements and their contemporary politics, James C. Scott (2009, p.294) notes that the two can hardly be separated:
Given their elements of divine intervention and of magic, it is all too easy to exoticize prophetic movements cast in religious garb. This is a temptation that should be resisted. It should be resisted because virtually all popular struggles for power that today would qualify as “revolutionary” were, before the last quarter of the eighteenth century, generally understood in a religious idiom. Popular mass politics was religion, and religion was political. To paraphrase Marc Bloch, millennial revolt was as natural to the seigneurial (feudal) world as strikes, let us say, are to large-scale capitalism. … Ideas of justice and of rights and, indeed, what we might today call ‘class consciousness’ were religiously phrased.
For a more focused treatment of the subject of church and revolution, see (Kowalewski and Greil, 1990).
- 14.
According to Minkov et al. (2020, p.1), “Numerous studies have reported a positive individual-level association between happiness and two psychologically distinct states of mind: religious faith and subjective freedom (a feeling of life control).” For evidence that religiosity eases the perceived burden of poverty, see (Berkessel et al., 2021).
- 15.
The invocation of luck (or rather lucklessness) in this Portuguese song, Ave Maria Fadista, reminds me of a phrase I came across in a book on the history of freedom (de Dijn, 2020, p.329) — “safety net for Americans down on their luck” — behind which there is the assumption that falling into poverty in the U.S. is a matter of some cosmic lottery, rather than systemic economic injustice.
- 16.
Theodicy (Mavelli, 2016; Betenson, 2016) is arguably best approached as a problem not in theology but in social studies and praxis. For instance, Hamilton (2015) applies this concept to the “good Anthropocene” propaganda, which seeks to justify our ongoing destruction of the planetary ecosystem. Historically, it is interesting to contrast the theologies of Martin Luther and of Thomas Müntzer, the pastor who led the rebels in the German Peasant War of 1525 (Toutge, 2018). Unlike his much more famous contemporary, Müntzer joined workers and peasants in demanding a “kingdom of heaven on earth,” the first step towards which would be to ensure livelihood for all; per Toutge (2018, p.19):
Everyone should properly receive according to his need. Any prince, count, or lord who refuses to do this even when seriously warned should be hanged or have his head chopped off.
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- 18.
McCloud (2007) asks whether or not class leads individuals to be attracted to certain religions, answering with “a qualified yes” (p.851). At the same time, religion generally seems to hold a broad appeal in the U.S.: as Solt et al. (2011) reports, economic inequality has a strong positive effect on the religiosity of all members of a society regardless of income.
- 19.
A quick introduction to liberation theology can be found in (Levine, 1988; King, 2016); McLaren and Jandrić (2018) offer a Marxist analysis. For a definitive treatment of liberation theology in the context of psychotherapy, see (Martín-Baró, 1996); I thank Nikolay Kharkov for sharing the syllabus for his Fall 2022 course Political Psychotherapies, in which I came across this and several other eye-opening readings.
- 20.
Marx’s famous materialist take on the relationship between existence and consciousness is found in his Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1977):
It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence, but their social existence that determines their consciousness.
Maslow and Honigmann (1970, p.331) makes a similar connection between existence and religion:
[I]n their religion, societies have transcribed and apotheosized the cooperativeness or the aggressions their cultural life arouses.
- 21.
The socialist convictions of Martin Luther King, Jr. have been well-documented (e.g. Sturm, 1990).
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This line is, of course, taken straight from the Prajñāpāramitā-Hṛdayam Sūtra, or the Great Heart Wisdom Sutra:
Tasmāc Śāriputra, śūnyatāyāṁ na rūpaṁ, na vedanā, na saṁjñā, na saṁskārāḥ, na vijñānam (Therefore, Śāriputra, in emptiness there is no form, no feeling, no perception, no volition, no consciousness)
The nonexistence of the self, anatta, is terrifying to face — if viscerally experienced rather than intellectually contemplated (in the words of Laing (1967, p.35), “ ‘There’s nothing to be afraid of.’ The ultimate reassurance, and the ultimate terror.”). In psychiatry, this experience can be classified as “oceanic self-dissolution” (see Metzinger, 2003, for a detailed discussion of this and other disorders of consciousness), which can be achieved by the administration of psylocybin (Lebedev et al., 2015). Pickering (2019) offers a Jungian interpretation of an integrative “case study” of the dire effects of self-dissolution on a Western Buddhist which, unfortunately, appears to be based on a serious misunderstanding of the concept of śūnyatā. An actual case study of the attitude to death in several religious groups, including lay and monastic Buddhists (Nichols et al., 2018) revealed that the latter experience the most death anxiety, in complete contradiction to the doctrine that they officially espouse.
- 24.
Although the concept of engaged Buddhism has its own entry in a recently published encyclopedia of religion (Gleig, 2021), historically it appears to have been rather marginal among the Buddhist schools of thought. Attempts to develop it have been made by the Anarchist Zen monk Tàixū in the 1930s China and Taiwan (Dessein, 2020) and, somewhat more recently, by the Japanese anti-war philosopher Ichikawa (1963; 1965).
- 25.
According to tradition, this verse (Dhammapada, 1986, 160) was uttered by the Buddha in response to the story of the mother of Kumarakassapa, a bhikkuni who attained arahatship on the same day as she renounced all attachment to her son. A psychologist would point out in this connection that the human sense of affiliation is central to normal development and functioning through the lifetime (Feldman, 2020) and that destroying it is likely to have serious negative repercussions for the “liberated” person’s mental well-being.
- 26.
The rhinoceros verses are from the Khaggavisana Sutta (Sn 1.3 PTS: Sn 35-75), translated from the Pali by Thanissaro Bhikkhu (https://www.dhammatalks.org/suttas/KN/StNp/StNp1_3.html).
- 27.
- 28.
Concerning medicalization, Brinkmann (2014, p.642) comments that “Viewing people’s lives through a diagnostic lens de-politicizes their problems and turns them into a matter of personal health and illness.” The Black Panthers’ food program is described in (Potorti, 2017). For a glimpse of the racism and the other types of injustice perpetrated under the cover of the U.S. “war on drugs,” see (Netherland and Hansen, 2017).
- 29.
- 30.
The quote regarding the need for psychotherapy to acknowledge the primacy of social relations among people is from (Laing, 1967).
- 31.
- 32.
The lines that close this chapter are from Charles Bukowski’s poem and the sun wields mercy, first printed in EPOS 12:2, p.6 (1960).
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Edelman, S. (2023). Self-care. In: The Consciousness Revolutions. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-24012-6_6
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