Only once we have actually seen our sorrow can we begin to see it for what it is

The End of Suffering: Who’s Right: 

Ancients, Moderns, or Christians?

By Joseph Woodard

Before our present day, until even a generation ago, human beings generally seemed to accept suffering as a natural part of life. People cried coming into the world, cried living in it, and cried leaving it. But all of these tears were not thought incompatible with joy and an appreciation of life. They may even have been thought necessary. From time beyond memory, generation after generation, common folk ground their bodies into dust, struggling most immediately in the hope simply of leaving things a little better for their children. Against this pervasive, almost unnoticed acceptance of suffering, our present generation clings to the fervent belief that human agency can eradicate regret, pain, poverty, and all of the various forms of human grief.

In the last few generations, our intellectual and political elite has dedicated itself, not merely to the alleviation, but to the final eradication of human suffering with an altruistic fervor and overweening ambition unparalleled in the frequently dismal course of human history. The results have been decidedly mixed. Indeed, many attempts to end suffering have caused a great deal of pain. Each new advance in medical technology seems to bring us closer to a black market in still warm human body parts. Repugnance at institutional oppression abandons the elderly on the street, like unwanted pets, and care for the young consigns them to the zoos of the foster care system. Honest attempts at international relief are perverted into tyrannical exercises in population control, with peoples being herded across Africa like so many cattle. Promethean aspirations to restructure and rationalize societies have resulted in the gross exterminations of whole populations, as in Cambodia and Ukraine. Obviously, there is something wrong with the translation of our good intentions into practice.

Even successful analgesia exacts a cost. In the attempt to eliminate our own misery, we in the comfortable West have grown increasingly, pathologically soft and sensitive to the slightest annoyances.

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