A celebration of suffering

It could be our most human trait         

Words & images © Paul Ransom

Our paths may never cross. We may live on different continents, speak different tongues, and configure the world using different filters. At times, we may feel alien; yet I know about you what you know about me. We suffer.

Suffering is profound. It sits at the core of our humanity, right alongside desire. The anticipation, experience, and memory of physical and mental pain catalyses our survival instinct. Moreover, it impels us to imagine, to conjure realities beyond the here and now. Ones that hurt less. Our pains, and the various adversities we confront, fuel invention, enhance interpersonal bonds, and drive cooperative action. Suffering also underpins the instinctive emotional foundations of morality and justice. Likewise, the age old ruminations of spirituality and philosophy, and the newer speculations of psychology are nourished by our shared propensity for fits of angst. And then there is art, which is suffused with all manner of heartache.

Without suffering, we simply would not care. About anything or anyone. There would be no pleasure. No joy. No sense of achievement. Like it or not, suffering adds value and helps us to make meaning.

Yet, we should also acknowledge the role of fear. Whether it acts as a first cause for suffering and desire, and is our bedrock motivation, may be a moot point, a merely pedantic quibble. Either way, fear, suffering, and desire form a kind of existential trinity. We would not be human without them. Indeed, we would likely not even be alive; certainly not in the vivid and highly charged way we are now.

However, much as we extol the character building virtues of suffering, we remain dedicated to minimising, if not banishing it. This is not an inherently perverse or irrational inclination. No one wants a life of ceaseless affliction. The valorisation of stoic forbearance, and our love of exemplary ‘triumph over adversity’ yarns, neither fully anaesthetises us to our own pain, nor blinds us to the suffering of others.

Thus, our relationship with suffering is vexed. It’s like medicine or exercise – great in theory and hindsight but a pain in practise. Clearly, the challenge is not so much to avoid it but to manage the dose. Obvious though this seems, we routinely persist in personal and social beliefs (and subsequently engage in behaviours) mired in denial, fantasy, and fetishisation.     

• I say this as a guilty party. For decades I danced a bewitching tango of addiction and inspiration with suffering. That it subsequently prompted a process that led me to a much happier place – and still moves me to the core with its beauty and deep feeling sense of aliveness – does not obscure the fact that for most of my life it was toxic.

Culturally, we have addressed suffering in many ways. The Buddha argued it was inherent, entangled with desire. Pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer suggested something similar. Throughout history we have equated bravery and heroism with an ability to endure such inevitability. Elsewhere, we have lauded those who work to soothe our travails. (What is the quality of mercy without the spectre of suffering? Are not some of our gods dispensers of opium?) Via the mechanisms of governance and jurisprudence we have sought to redress and redistribute the share of suffering. With drugs and technology we have tried to smother it, head it off at the pass. With pop-psych memes and New Age hubris we pretend to be cured of it, to have evolved beyond it. Meanwhile, many continue to engage in the arrogant and nasty minimisation of others’ struggles. And – predictably – too many of us still believe that suffering is the due of others. Or can be plausibly denied in the interests of shareholder value.   

The other thing about suffering is that we are not the only animal affected. Indeed, it seems common across the biosphere. Even if we believe that humans are alone in having a truly conscious, self-aware psycho-emotional experience, it appears that both physical and mental pain are key drivers for the behaviours of many species.

Zooming out from ourselves we observe the foundational survivalist function of suffering in a range of lifeforms. The more complex, the more they appear to have an inner life, and along with that a greater capacity for suffering. Point being, selfhood and suffering are entangled; perhaps co-entailed. Maybe, (with a nod to Buddha and Schopenhauer), self is suffering. The I is where suffering happens. Consciousness is a cosmic pain receptor.  

All of which brings us to the point; because, no matter how we explain it, sentience seems to come bundled with suffering, at least on this planet. Machines, including AI, do not (yet) hurt. Even our best digital mimics lack the convincing analogue grit of pain and desire. However well they may describe, dissect and/or acknowledge its various impacts, they do not know trauma.  

Even though we can be moved to high emotion and feel a profound sense of recognition and connection with fictional characters and worlds, we only do so because we know the author is one of us. As in, a fellow sufferer. Only pain knows pain. Anything else is hollow. Condescending. A lie. 

• For more musings on the robot roll-out: AI vs Humanity: The mechanics of imperfection.

As social and interpersonal spaces increasingly clutter with performative approximation – be it AI slop or human duplicity – we may be tempted to decry everything as fakery. As a sign of decline. But this would be to forget that we have always embraced appearance over substance. Always been posers, approval seekers, deceivers par excellence. The machine did not invent bullshit. Rather, we invented the machine, like we once did gods, to help reify and deify our lies.   

Nevertheless, lurking beneath the distracting glare of civilised dishonesty is a hard-coded truth, the immanent dread we reflexively desire to overcome – and when this wish starts to feel like a need unmet…voila, suffering. Pain is the reality we cannot fully obscure. It is the bridge between us.

Suffering is how I know you.

There is much that divides us. We continue to berate and slaughter one another across the many aisles that demarcate our (real and imagined) differences. Variety may well be spicy, yet so many of us insist that ours is the divinely/historically anointed flavour of choice.

To this folly we can add a liberal salting of destructive pride. Cue the numerous reductive and punishing narratives of putative strength and virtue we so often hide behind, and the delusional exceptionalism that places us outside nature and legitimises a myopic comfort funded by an unsustainable taxing of finite resources.        

But for all our posturing, how readily we bleed. We are ever vulnerable. Scared. Alone. Sometimes ashamed. Though I may take issue with your behaviour, your politics, your brand of god, I know you cry in the dark, as I do. I know you are losing your shine. I know that your light, like mine, will go out. In the end, we will arrive at the line together, equally helpless. And perhaps then we will understand that we spent our lives squabbling over dirt and decor.

Our differences are relatively trivial but our shared humanity – that which marks us out from machines – runs deeper than blood and bone. We are united in pain. The absurdity, the futility, of our condition is where all borders melt. 

In this way you are not alone. Because I have watched you suffer and seen that your suffering is mine.

*

Nothing I have said here is new, simply timely. The possibility of artificial general (super) intelligence already begs serious questions. Significantly, will AIs become sentient, and will that mean they have the capacity for suffering? And if so, should they have rights and be considered moral agents?

This may seem wonkish – premature, irrelevant – yet it is only a step away from more immediate, human considerations. Is the other sentient? Yes. Does the other suffer? Yes. Should they therefore be afforded the same rights and assume commensurate responsibility? Yes.

As such, suffering is an opportunity; not merely for personal growth or artistic inspiration but to shift the gaze from narrow self to wider us, and thence to wonder whether that flag, gospel or profit margin is worth the agony of the family trapped in the rubble of what was once their home.

Maybe you think it is. Ends justify means, right? Until it’s you.

Now you remember what it means to be human. To be alive. To love someone. To hope and care and forge meaning from nothing. To know beauty and horror. Thus, to suffer.

Of all our reputedly noble traits, our angel wings and higher purposes, it is our sizeable and detailed suffering that defines us. Indeed, it is no great stretch to suggest that everything we have achieved together is a response to suffering.

Look around you. This is how we dealt with our pain. Make of that what you will.