The Frustratingly Inherent Nature of Suffering
Progress, Buddha, & the Organized Diminution of Suffering
Is suffering an inherent feature of the human condition? Is every human being born bound for some sort of trauma? From starvation to insecurities, I don’t know anybody who isn’t either recovering from, repressing, or living with an affliction. Given the dynamics of consciousness, the diversity of life, why does suffering appear so certain?
This was, of course, Buddha’s stark realization. Dukkha, commonly translated as “all life contains suffering”, perhaps better understood by the Buddhist Dictionary’s translation:
“…the unsatisfactory nature and the general insecurity of all conditioned phenomena.”
In a recent podcast with Tim Ferriss, Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield reiterates that the human embodiment of consciousness is inherently traumatic:
“I carry…the anger that comes with being a human being, a human incarnation…”
Is this really a settled notion, that merely being a human connotes anger? Is existing, by definition, a traumatic affair?
William James on Sick & Healthy Souls
The starkness of Buddha’s claim impels us to consider whether he was just a pessimist. The dichotomy between the pessimistic and optimistic worldview is one that American philosopher & psychologist, William James, took up in his seminal Varieties of Religious Experience. He considers two essential types of mentality, healthy mindedness, and sick mindedness. Of interest is his conclusion, which finds that while the former may be a preferable condition, the latter is a broader insight into the human condition:
“It seems to me that we are bound to say that morbid-mindedness ranges over the wider scale of experience…there is no doubt that healthy-mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it refuses positively to account for are a genuine portion of reality; and they may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest levels of truth…”
James continues to cite Buddhism as a religion that follows these pessimistic insights into maturity, life’s ‘significance and truth’:
“The completest religions would therefore seem to be those in which the pessimistic elements are best developed. Buddhism, of course, and Christianity are the best known to us of these. They are essentially religions of deliverance: the man must die to an unreal life before he can be born into the real life.”
Why Do We All Need Therapy?
I once overheard a bespectacled, bearded man say in a coffeeshop:
“There are two types of people in this world: those who receive therapy, and those who ignore the fact that they should.”
I find myself both nodding in agreement with him, and wondering how something so astonishing could be the case. But maybe it’s not so astonishing. Attending therapy is just an acknowledgment that life’s large enough to require some talking over. That our consciousness is complex enough to remain enigmatic to us.
I don’t know that suffering is inherent to being human, but it does seem convincing that insecurity is. How could insecurity, on an existential scale, not be universal in humans given the confrontation at the core of each human life between a subjectivity scrambling to make sense of things and the vast, unknowable Universe it seeks to understand?
Maybe suffering evolves out of these existential insecurities. Maybe the fact that humans seem capable of asking questions never before asked on earth lays bare how many answers we lack. Maybe the weight of the unknown is too much. Maybe in the face of this unknown, we crave, because we don’t know what else to do. We aspire, desire, and generally fumble about in the dark. Or, and this is likely, maybe this is just my own projection.
Sapiens, Progress, & Cessation of Suffering
Buddha did not claim suffering to be a permanent, inescapable feature of the human condition. He taught that suffering is inherent to craving; he teaches the cessation of craving, and therefore, the cessation of suffering.
I guess this merely shifts the question: is craving inherent to the human condition? If it is, suffering is inherent, but transcend-able. If it isn’t, why do we all crave? Maybe it’s the gap between what we know and where we are, the aforementioned chasm between subjectivity and the Universe. Or maybe we’re still too evolutionarily similar to our survival-driven ancestors, which may pollute our psyche’s with antiquated instincts (a privileged pollution, to be sure, as much of the poverty-stricken world’s survival remains insecure).
Maybe capitalism is to blame, or social media, or greed. Maybe society is just constructed in such a way as to produce human beings with inbred cravings, or conditions newborns so quickly that craving appears inborn. Maybe it’s the natural architecture of the human mind. Or the brain, if those two aren’t the same.
The point is, I don’t know why. Despite our efforts to the contrary, suffering appears a basic fact of the human condition, and the project of life can too often be described as a deliverance from suffering. Historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of the acclaimed Sapiens, describes this deliverance as Buddhism’s raison d’être, as well as its roots in craving:
“The first principle of Buddhism is ‘Suffering exists. How do I escape it?’… once craving arises in a person’s mind, all the gods in the universe cannot save him from suffering.”
Suffering exists across the board, not only for Buddhists. So the question, the project, the organized diminution of suffering, can be repurposed as a benchmark of broader human ‘progress’, that deceptively difficult notion to describe. Such thinking is what gave rise to the U-index in economics, aiming to measure the proportion of time people spend in unpleasant states.
But, aside from this lone, floundering statistic, there’s little interest in such a conception of progress. Harari asks, looking back upon history, if the diminution of suffering is among the most durable, robust goals of human life, how have we done? Strangely, not only do we not know, we don’t seem to care:
“Most history books focus on the ideas of great thinkers, the bravery of warriors, the charity of saints and the creativity of artists. They have much to tell about the weaving and unravelling of social structures, about the rise and fall of empires, about the discovery and spread of technologies. Yet they say nothing about how all this influenced the happiness and suffering of individuals. This is the biggest lacuna in our understanding of history. We had better start filling it.”
This is perhaps the most frustrating aspect of suffering in Western modernity: though it’s everywhere, it is, at the same time, nowhere.
We do not teach theories of suffering’s causes and cures in school (though we do teach history classes). We do not provide an income floor for those in poverty, among the largest and most documented contributing factors to suffering. We do not organize society in thoughtful response to (or even recognition of), perhaps, the single most present and profound principle of human existence. Why not? Are we too distracted?
To the contrary, staples of Western society actually promote things we know to cause suffering (looking at you, marketing & advertising industry). Isn’t this backwards? Shouldn’t the procession of time, something we like to call progress, work towards the organized diminution of suffering, rather than inciting it?
There are difficulties. Suffering is murky; it likely exists in both absolute and relative terms. Even in a utopian organization of society, suffering would probably persist. But this needn’t dissuade us. Oscar Wilde writes:
“A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.”
If anything, suffering’s universality is useful in that it provides a robust marker for human development, immune to being outgrown as markers of the past (economic growth & income) have been. It’s both gloomy and reassuring that whenever and wherever we set sail, the cessation of suffering will likely remain a human destination.
