(Ig)noble Suffering and the Persistence of Faith

I have suffered too much in this life not to expect another . . . . All the subtleties of metaphysics will not make me doubt the immortality of the soul for a moment; I feel it, I believe it, I want it, I hope for it, I shall defend it to my last breath. J.-J. Rousseau

Noble suffering we can endure. Perhaps it is for a worthy ideal that we suffer, perhaps at the hands of a brutish tyrant who would crush our spirit and vanquish our will. In the face of such suffering, we stiffen our resolve and harden our hearts and know that we will not be broken. We know that the pains we suffer today will be rewarded tomorrow with glorious redemption. Our suffering will be recognised as worthy and righteous. And knowing this, we can endure it.

But most suffering is nothing like that. Most suffering is appallingly mundane. Maliciously quotidian. Disastrously ordinary. Bills must be paid. Rent found. Mortgages kept up. We make our weary way to work. We are anonymous among the anonymous crowd. Our fellow-sufferers. We toil at our jobs, unsure why. We make our way home, minds numb, souls worn.

A bit late for prayer?

None of this produces the obvious and grand signs of suffering, of servitude, of punishment. There are no marks of the lash across our backs, no chains about our feet, nothing to suggest that here is noble suffering. There is nothing noble in eternal tedium and the knowledge that tomorrow will be unrelentingly like today. And this simply makes the suffering harder to endure. There is no promise of redemption, no promise that one day someone will say, ‘See how he suffered for his cause. See how he endured and how he fought for freedom or justice or something decent on the TV’. There is, that is to say, no point to our suffering, and it is this—this abject pointlessness—which so strips it of anything noble. The worst malady a human can suffer is an abiding sense of pointlessness. Without a reason why, the smallest pin-prick can become a torment worse than anything imagined in Dante’s hell. But give us that reason, explain to us why, and then we can endure.

Those latter-day prophets of rationalism like Richard Dawkins or the late (and tediously boorish) Christopher Hitchens who shriek hysterically about the evils of faith are like an excitable teenager who has just discovered Nietzsche and goes around daringly proclaiming to the world that God is dead. While it’s excusable in a teenager, it becomes less so once a person is of more advanced years, say twenty. From the comfortable and lofty heights which zealots such as Dawkins proclaim their message, it is easy to be unbowed by the meaninglessness of it all, but if your life is not quite so privileged, or yours is a disposition—unelected—which simply can find no comfort in science and reason, then faith in something unseen, glorious and transcendent may be all you have to make this life bearable. And so be it.

In Search of the Good Times

As the world drifts increasingly into dark waters, the peoples of the world's great democracies cry out to the heavens, beseeching someone to do something to make it all safe again. Usually the someone is a politician, a leader of virtue and a beacon of hope, upon whose powerful shoulders we can place our burden and rest our fondest wishes.

But politicians today are accustomed to doing their work by doing nothing. They have graven on their hearts the mantra let it be and so they do. But when a ship is listing alarmingly to port, it is no time for the captain to be standing by and letting things be; the crew expects commands, directions, at the very least some helpful suggestions as to which ropes to pull and which sails to hoist. It is one thing to have one's hands off the tiller when the sailing is smooth, quite another when the waters are rough. And so we turn to the politicians to do something, to guide us through the rough waters to a haven, sweet and gentle. Which, all things considered, the politicians seem to find rather a dashed nuisance.

John Key and Bill English chuckle at the thought that they might actually do something.

Out of dubious nostalgia and unrelenting despair, we look back to the golden age of the post-war years—the years of innocence and ease, luxury and contentment—and ask ourselves what it was that our wise leaders did then that the leaders of today are failing to do. For it is obvious, we think, that the good times came about through wisdom and forethought, sound planning and rational analysis. The notion that the good times might have been little more than a serendipitous turn for the better, jollied along by a cracking good world war, does not tend to cross the minds of most; and if it does have the temerity to do so, usually at some ungodly hour when we are most vulnerable to unsettling thoughts, we muster all our mental forces to turn it out and send it packing, for it is no use to us. Our faith in reason and the ability of our leaders to work things out, it must never waver, for it is all we have left us.

The Whirling Dervish of Rationalism

The progress of Enlightenment is limited. It hardly reaches the suburbs. The people there are too stupid, too miserable, and too busy. There it stops.—Diderot, 1759

In Diderot’s lament, we hear the anguish of all those who have resigned themselves to the inability of Enlightenment’s illumination to push its way into the dark miasma of the dreary suburbs. And there is perhaps reasonable grounds for that resignation. However much we might take comfort in the idea of universal equality—whilst taking pleasure in observing our own humble virtue—it is a simple and rather mundane fact that there are some who know much, and some who know very little indeed, and those who know little are not well placed to judge usefully on matters of importance. This is no mark against them; it is not a question of gauging who is the better human being. It is merely a statement of the way the world is, and however much querulous, hysterical tub-thumbing some might undertake in protest, it would be as futile as protesting the despicable tyranny of gravity.

Diderot lamenting the stupid, the miserable, and the busy.

But getting bogged down in ructions of that kind is, in any event, entirely pointless, for there is another simple fact which renders Diderot’s observation redundant: the matters of real importance in this world are too far beyond our ken to be susceptible to rational solutions. It is only foolhardiness underwritten by hubris—against which the old-school conservatives such as Burke, Hayek and Oakeshott warned—that convinces us otherwise. Even if we were ourselves, in some meaningful way, rational creatures (which we are so far from being, it’s odd anyone could think it were true), we can quite rationally want a diversity of ends which would make any attempt at unity impossible. To this can be added the rationally possible diversity of means to the diversity of ends which we might rationally make use of. With but a few short, rational steps we see the multiplicity of variables already beginning to spin wildly out of control, a sort of whirling dervish of rationalism.

The true rationalist would counter that we are much mistaken if we believe there to be a multiplicity of ends. Reasons is one; to any given question, the same answer must apply, to everyone, at all times, at all places. That is the essence of rationalism. And it’s the very reason why apostles of rationalism ought never be allowed to have unfettered authority over our lives, for in its essential form, rationalism becomes authoritarianism, and it in no way eases the weight of the chains to know that they have been placed about us in a rational manner.

So what does this leave us with? It leaves us with muddling along, getting by as best we can, choosing to care or not to care, as is our wont, making our way gamely through life’s trials until those trials are done. There are no grand plans, no masterful strokes by which all is made right. There is just the inordinately complex fact of billions of lives being pursued—vigorously, timidly, fretfully, ignorantly—and each one of those lives of necessity sure of its own infinitude because the mind cannot encompass something so vast as nothingness. It may not be a vision to inspire, but the universe remains obstinately indifferent to our desires, and the steamroller of reality will flatten us all, however much we might stand in its path, frantically waving our arms in our madness and delusion.