The Invention of Happiness and the Palliative Society

Among its other conclusions, the new Global Flourishing Study, a massive study of 200,000 individuals in more than twenty countries, finds that “in general, attendance in religious services is associated with greater flourishing.” Given my views of human nature and philosophical anthropology, I’m not surprised to discover that the social science corresponds with established tradition and experience of the ages. Modernity promised liberation, prosperity, and happiness but delivered fragility and loneliness in a world bereft of meaning and purpose.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in the modern understanding of pain. As Byung-Chul Han notes in The Palliative Society: Pain Today, “our relation to pain reveals what kind of society we are.” As he sees it, “pain is a cipher,” a key to understanding what a society values and fears. And we inhabitants of the contemporary West fear pain. Han writes: “Today, a universal algophobia rules: a generalized fear of pain. . . . The consequence of this algophobia is a permanent anaesthesia. All painful conditions are avoided.” Fear of pain extends even into politics, he suggests, where there is pressure to conform rather than to argue and engage in hard discussions about difficult choices. (The American refusal to even think about, let alone act on, our bankrupt entitlement programs serves as an example.) Consequently, “palliative democracy is spreading” with its preference for “quick-acting analgesics, which only mask systematic dysfunctionality and distortion.” We prefer what is pleasant, nice, and stupefying.

As Pierre Manent has noted, our modern obsession with mastering rather than enduring all problems and trials results in a sense of self-satisfaction or contentment. Ours is not an age producing saints, sages, or heroes since those characters are dissatisfied, wanting more, and willing to endure and struggle. Our desire for the good, conversely, “will be necessarily lukewarm as well, since it will already be essentially satisfied.” Humanity wishes for no more than its immanent contentment and judges that contentment is within reach. Citing Nietzsche, Manent reminds us that the modern goal ends in enervation—“we have invented happiness”— no longer knowing the meaning of “to love” or “to long for.”

Han explores this further, suggesting that our understanding of happiness is “self-optimization” in which pain and suffering “has no place.” Certainly, we find it very odd, bizarre even, to imagine that pain might be “enlivened into a passion, to be given a language” or ritual, in the manner religion tends to do.

The biohacker Bryan Johnson, who spends $2 million a year in a quest to live forever, and for whom the entire point of life seems to be captured in the simple motto, “don’t die,” spends his time in “protocol,” including “hyper-specific food intake . . . 50-plus vitamins, minerals, and supplements, comprehensive exercise routines, regimented sleep routines, red light therapy, blood testing, various monitors . . . plus edgier things like a gene therapy not approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and . . . receiving a plasma transfusion from his teenage son.” He exhibits a sort of passion, or at least a negative passion of what he doesn’t want, namely pain and death, but this is a form of life lacking a language of suffering, having no way to include its inevitability into a positive vision. Death, pain, suffering, all of which are inevitable, are viewed, and cannot but be viewed in such a world, as entirely pointless, as meaningless negation, and as an affront, even an injustice.

Such an endless life, with its endless monitoring of heart rate, respiration, blood pressure, sleep time, and more, is a life of measuring and calculation. Han aptly describes it:

Life is reduced to a biological process that must be optimized. It loses any meta-physical dimension. . . . Digital hypochondria, constant self-measurement with the aid of health and fitness apps, degrades life into a mere function. Life is divested of any narrative that could give it meaning. Life is no longer a matter of what can be recounted but a matter of what can be counted, measured.”

This is bare life, merely existing, rather than the good life, living well.

I am not celebrating pain, and my own religion affirms, in the words of Julian of Norwich, that “all shall be well, all shall be well, all manner of things shall be well.” Pain is not an end in itself. Of course, pain should be ameliorated, avoided, or cured when it is possible, reasonable, and just to do so, and pain should never be inflicted unjustifiably. But for all of us, inevitably, pain will come.

For some, pain will be infrequent, short, and relatively easy; for others, pain is constant and intense, either physically, mentally, or socially. But pain will come. Most of us know someone who suffers in a more than usual way, perhaps with illness or from the actions of others. Most know someone for whom pain seems to relentlessly stalk, with any respite soon followed by another challenge, another tragedy, often through no fault of their own. Some endure pain with stoical passivity, some take arms against their sea of troubles, and others, bearing witness to a graciousness of their very being, display nobility, charity, courage, and steadfastness. They do not seek pain recklessly or unreasonably, but when it comes to them,  their virtue is more evident than their grimace. They are admirable, and how pointless would it be to tell them to take more supplements, try harder, measure more, and “don’t die.”

Such people have lives that can be recounted. They deserve to be remembered for their character, to be emulated, praised, and noted. Parents should tell stories of such people to their own children: be like that man, be like that woman, for she showed dignity; he showed grace in the midst of pain.

Han argues that we have become a society that counts but does not recount, that lacks a story of the meaning of suffering and pain, a way for pain to be redeemed, caught up in meaning, sanctified, and engaged in the language and rituals of hope and longing. For Christians, for example, now still celebrating Easter, Scripture is clear that the resurrected Jesus, even with a glorified body, has still a wounded body, and Thomas is able to see and touch those wounds.

Sound religion overcomes and cures pain and suffering when it can justly be solved, but sound religion notes the inevitability of suffering, the moral inadmissibility of some “solutions,” and does not think pain renders a good life impossible. Suffering can be redeemed and caught up into a pattern of goodness, beauty, and purpose; even into a flourishing life, as the Global Study finds.

For those seeking something less than goodness and flourishing, life is reduced essentially to the satisfaction of a sentient animal, for whom pain is only and always negative and nothing more. A society based on that account, perhaps our own society, according to Han, will see even minor pain as unbearable, for it lacks “networks of meaning, narration and higher authorities and purposes that could capture our pain and make it bearable.” Such a society will be full of those like in The Princess and the Pea, Han concludes, for whom once the “pea is taken away, the mattress will begin to chafe.”

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