Suffering Through Guilt

On New Year's Day, having engorged myself with fine food and drink, I settled down on the couch, TV remote in hand, ready for some football. I flipped on the tube in mid-commercial. There on the screen was Sally Struthers in the midst of hugging a child from my native India, her hands clasped around his bloated stomach, asking for a small donation to save his life. I suddenly felt very guilty.

Those commercials--pay $1 and you could save a life!--confound me. On the one hand, relative to kids starving to death in India and Africa (and even here in the United States), all of us have it pretty good. If anything, these ads drive home the fact that our comparative affluence is a quirk of fate, an accident in circumstance. Therein, I suppose, lies the point: by making us feel good about ourselves (or lucky), these organizations hope to get our dollars.

On the other hand, the commercials infuriate me. The last thing I want to see after eating a heavy brunch is an innocent, impoverished child. It makes me feel guilty. And it also gets me thinking. There are millions of starving children in the world, and while we all sympathize with them, is their welfare really our direct responsibility? Moreover, will $1 really save a child's life? And how do we know these organizations are reliable? Most important, is it immoral of us to ignore the commercial? By switching the channel, are we responsible for some poor child's death?

These are precisely the moral issues that the philosopher Peter Unger addresses in his recent book, Living High and Letting Die. Unger comes down firmly on the side of contributing. As he writes, "Is it really seriously wrong not to do anything to lessen distant suffering; or is it quite all right to do nothing?....I argue that the first of these thoughts is correct and that, far from being just barely false, the second conflicts strongly with the truth about morality."

Most of us, I suspect, would disagree with the latter half of Unger's proposition. It seems a bit extreme to assert that we are morally obligated to help remote, starving children. Few of us do (at least not by mailing in $1 to UNICEF), and even fewer of us feel bad about not doing so. Why? Because, intuitively, it just doesn't seem wrong to switch the channel when something like that comes on the screen.

Unger's deeper point in the book is to reject just that kind of a reaction. Behavior we intuitively consider to be moral, he argues, is often in fact immoral. "[E]ven as our responses to particular cases often are good indications of behavior's moral status," he writes, "so, also, they often aren't any such thing at all." He dedicates the rest of his text to explaining, through various puzzles and analogies, why "living high and letting die" is immoral behavior.

Unger, though, unfortunately does not address the most fundamental question in the living high and letting die scenario: Why do humans suffer in the first place?

In a sense, the fundamental question of suffering transcends the Sally Struthers puzzle because all human beings--rich or poor--suffer. We all go through emotional turmoil, and many of us endure physical pain. It all seems unnecessary.

Indeed, the idea of human suffering and the theory of a benevolent deity seem wholly incompatible. If a higher power exists, and He is "good" and "omnipotent," then how can He possibly allow His creations to suffer pain? Why do we have even the capability to suffer?

I can't answer this question, but many before me have tried. C.S. Lewis devoted an entire book, The Problem of Pain, to it. But one is convinced by Lewis only if one subscribes to his unique, Christian beliefs. Moreover, nearly every religion tries to answer the "problem of pain."

Hinduism and Buddhism, for example, insist that suffering is simply a manifestation of being human. According to these traditions, the goal of existence is to break away from the cycle of suffering by realizing that worldly possessions and desires are mere illusions. To be one with God, one must seek truth and essentially cease to be human. A noble and spiritual vision, perhaps, but one that many Americans--with our New Year's meals and our TV sets--find difficult to embrace.

The point is, each of us will suffer throughout our life. The trick is to recognize that others suffer too and attempt to make life more livable for us all. I'm not convinced ignoring Sally Struthers is immoral, but it is immoral to forget the pain of the people she helps.

It is easy to get absorbed in our own affairs, especially during reading period, exam week and the like. Whatever our individual sources of tension may be--seminar papers, ill loved ones, cold sores--every one of us is suffering in our own way. The goal is to maintain civility and empathy through it all. Good luck with exams.

Sujit Raman '00 is history concentrator in Mather House.