By R J Snell, Public Discourse.
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.
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.