Hard Times and Liberalism’s Dream of a Painless World

In his devotion to the pursuit of happiness, modern man has forgotten how to suffer.

Michael Knox Beran
Tuesday, December 13, 2011

During hard times, it is only natural that we should spend a good deal of time blaming the villains. For the Left, the authors of the present discontents are (a) President Bush, and (b) the free market. Those on the Right finger (a) politicians who favor tax-and-spend policies that will ensure continued stagnation, and (b) bankers who benefit from self-serving regulation that not only insulates them from the consequences of their greed and stupidity but actually rewards them for it with taxpayer-subsidized bailouts.

Reasonable though our preoccupation with the assignment of blame is, it has obscured a deeper problem that the depressed economy has brought to light. In his devotion to the pursuit of happiness, modern man has forgotten how to suffer.

The dream of a painless world is the great illusion of liberalism. Classical liberalism, it is true, never promised to make men happier; it promised only to make them richer. Adam Smith argued that we deceive ourselves when we suppose that those material luxuries that we associate with happiness are “worth all the toil and anxiety which we are so apt to bestow” on their attainment.

Material wealth is good, Smith says, not because it makes us permanently happier, but because it enables us to dispense, in some measure, with physical and corporeal miseries (hunger, squalor, disease, and the like). In their place we have psychological and spiritual debilities. The primitive man famishes; the civilized man despairs — he experiences the accidioso, the dejection and spiritual sloth, described by Dante, or the noia and “inward death” of Leopardi, or the ennui of Baudelaire. The civilized man is not happier than the savage, but his misery is more polished and elegant, and as a general rule comely things are to be preferred to uncomely ones.

Smith’s classical liberalism has all but entirely given way to a modern liberalism which regards suffering not as something inherent in the very nature of life but as an anomaly to be eradicated by reason and science and social legislation. Thus President Kennedy argued that “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty.” Really, Jack? All forms? Intellectual poverty (stupidity)? Emotional poverty (black-dog despair)? Poverty of the flesh (ugliness)?

The “pain which is essential to life cannot be thrown off,” Schopenhauer says. “The ceaseless efforts to banish suffering accomplish no more than to make it change its form.” If we succeed in removing pain in one of its forms, “it immediately assumes a thousand others.”

Delusory though it is, liberalism’s dream of an anodyne world persists because it appeals to our inner egotism and self-conceit. When something painful happens to one, one’s instinct is to be outraged, as though the universe had made a mistake in abrogating one’s right to an ideal and perfect felicity. But there has been no mistake; we have been created to know joy, and also to know misery.


T. S. Eliot, in his essay on Dante, said that men must “look to death for what life cannot give.” In the same way men must look to suffering for what happiness cannot give. There “is some soul of goodness in things evil,” Shakespeare’s Henry V says, “would men observingly distil it out.” Shakespeare spoke for the old Western idea that pain may paradoxically be a gift — that sufferings, in the words of Chrysostom, “are a perfecting.” It is the idea that animates Attic tragedy and the book of Job, Chartres, and the Divine Comedy. It is the idea that made Dostoevsky at the end of Crime and Punishment say that Raskolnikov did not yet “know that the new life would not be given him for nothing, that he would have to pay dearly for it, that it would cost him great striving, great suffering.” It is the idea which makes the Christian to say, “Intra tua vulnera absconde me” – “Let me hide in Thy wounds.” It is the idea of Hamlet, who after suffering intense moral horror passes from skepticism about the value of agonized being (the “To be, or not to be” of Act II) to a mature acceptance of it (the “Let be” of Act V) grounded in his conviction that pain has a purpose:


There’s a divinity that shapes our ends,
Rough-hew them how we will . . .

The old Western conception of suffering as a necessary and intrinsic part of the human condition is remote from the modern liberal’s belief that it is a freakish deviation from the rightful order of things. Nowhere is the callowness of the liberal philosophy more evident than in its tendency to look upon ever-larger swaths of human suffering as grievances from which people have a “right” to be exempt.

The same superficiality is found in the liberal tendency to regard suffering as an exclusively material and physiological condition, one that can be overcome with exclusively material and physiological remedies. In reality, there is a residuum of suffering for which there is no material or physiological cure; such suffering is a spiritual or existential condition that can be overcome only through spiritual travail. “Depression” is a condition modern liberalism has invented to justify modern man’s inability to accept such travail. A sufferer in spirit must seek a spiritual remedy; but persuading himself that he is merely “depressed,” the modern sufferer vainly seeks a pharmaceutical antidote, and will doubtless soon be discovered to have an inalienable right to one. Only he must remember to call his health-care professional if after swallowing the pill he has thoughts of violence, suicide, or mass murder.

“Do you understand, sir,” Dostoevsky’s Marmeladov asks Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, “do you understand what it means when you have absolutely nowhere to turn?” The Crash has been the cause of much Dostoevskian suffering, suffering which better policies can do something to alleviate. But no more than Shakespeare’s plays are Dostoevsky’s novels pleas for more enlightened legislation. The efficacy of the fix-it mentality is limited where suffering is concerned; carried too far, it becomes indistinguishable from the liberal belief that misery can be abolished by wisdom, or reason, or legislative fiat. The belief is not merely naïve in its denial of one the profoundest attributes of our being — our innate vocation for suffering — it engenders an unamiable arrogance, one which takes the form of what the philosopher Nathan Birnbaum called “the masquerade of little people who play god, and keep sinking into the mire.”