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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
In the West today, suffering has become a new sacred cow. Once a common feature of the human condition, it is now a special trait you can use to impress your contemporaries. It provides you with a borrowed identity, transforming you into an exceptional being who can show off on the public stage at little cost. Everyone flaunts their certificate of affliction, positioning themselves above their peers. Even those who are well-off and powerful seek to find a place in the aristocracy of the margins, creating new castes of the dispossessed at the expense of the truly unfortunate. Infused with bitterness, this cult of the victim glorifies the martyr figure and feeds into the passions of revenge and resentment. This is the message of our age: we are all victims and entitled to feel sorry for ourselves.
The submissive humanity of Christianity and the arrogant humanity of modernity have now been replaced by a victimized humanity allergic to distress. Pampered, coddled, raised in fear and sensitivity, how will younger generations be able to confront the chaotic world that awaits them, marked by war, violence, terrorism and climate chaos? Who will teach them the courage to endure, to face setbacks head-on, without faltering in the face of misfortune?
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Seitenzahl: 368
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue: An inverted Pantheon
Introduction: Thucydides and Jesus Christ
A common homeland
Respect my suffering
Promotion of the damned
Notes
Part One: Facing Misfortune
1. ‘One day all will be well, so runs our hope’
The wages of sin
Vale of tears, valley of roses
The pea syndrome
Eradicating evil?
Is well-being a cause of anxiety?
Did people suffer less in the past?
Notes
2. All kinds of awful
Effort is not pain
Allergies to constraints
Self-pity
Notes
3. Suffering produces laws
The market for afflictions
A compassionate Republic?
Notes
4. The one-upmanship of martyrdom
The new ‘offensology’
Taking it to the limit
Nazi, my sweet Nazi
Indulgence credits!
Privilege in reverse
Notes
Part Two: Victimist Competition
Notes
5. The thieves of suffering
The Shoah, it’s me, it’s us, it’s not you
Hitler as the truth of the West
The demonization of Israel
Is there a lesson to be learned from mass crime?
Notes
6. Putin, or the petty civil servant of crime
The Yugoslav precedent
The Great Patriotic War
Respect your enemy
‘Europe is condemned to death’
Nihilism and Russian degeneration
A geostrategic challenge
Notes
7. Towards a generalized ‘gynocide’?
Comparison is folly
Violence against women
A new grammar of love?
A new name for passion?
Fairy tales and rape culture?
Justice on trial
Shared savagery
Towards creative discord?
Notes
8. Decolonize the decolonizers?
Ah, the good old days in the colony!
Europe, the eternal whipping boy
French neurosis about Algeria
Is the Muslim the new Jew?
Notes
Part Three: How Can We Live with Our Wounds?
9. Barbarism as a cover-up?
Hide this genocide so I cannot see it
State lies and scandalous disclosures
The camera revolution?
The torturer’s pleasure
A declaration of love to gangsters
Notes
10. Healing the past?
Can money alleviate grief?
Duty to remember or duty to history?
Reconciliation, with whom and how?
Notes
11. The hero, an ambiguous antithesis
The demolition of the hero under the Ancien Régime
Heroes by chance
Notes
12. Is this how men live?
Going through hell and back?
To recover or to resign?
A way out of victimization?
Revenge or forgiveness?
The cancer of hatred
Notes
Conclusion
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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I Suffer Therefore I Am
Portrait of the Victim as Hero
PASCAL BRUCKNER
Translated by Stephen Muecke
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in French as Je souffre donc je suis. Portrait de la victime en héros © Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle, 2024
This English translation © Polity Press, 2025
Polity Press
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All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-6716-4 – hardback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2024951689
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
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Dedication
For Caroline Thompson, of course
For Patrice Champion, in memory of Belgrade and Krakow
For Olivier Nora, who stood firm
Epigraph
One does not ask of one who suffers: What is your country and what is your religion? One merely says: You suffer, that is enough for me.
Louis Pasteur
Man is a pupil, pain is his teacher and no one knows himself until he has suffered.
Alfred de Musset, Lorenzaccio
Prologue: An inverted Pantheon
On 8 December 2015, the Élysée Palace announced that President François Hollande planned to award the Légion d’honneur to the 130 victims of the 13 November attacks in Paris at the Bataclan theatre and in the surrounding streets. The Chancellor of France disagreed. Since its creation on 19 May 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte, the Légion d’honneur has rewarded military personnel and civilians who have rendered outstanding services to the nation. The 130 innocent people who had the misfortune to be in the wrong place at the wrong time and were mown down by jihadist barbarity, deserved the nation’s esteem, but in a thousand other ways.
In 1999, Spain created a special decoration for those killed in terrorist attacks. The United States built a monument to the 9/11 dead. But the Légion d’honneur is awarded neither for being involved in a tragedy, nor for mourning. It is supposed to be an acknowledgement of merit. It is one thing for the country to pay homage to the victims, but quite another to give them a medal reserved for heroic deeds. It’s as if we wanted to exorcize the tragedy by pinning republicanist baubles on the murdered men and women. To be decorated, you have to have fought, and with valour; being randomly shot down does not suffice.
In the end, the Élysée gave up on the idea and on 12 July 2016 created the National Medal of Recognition for Victims of Terrorism, the fifth most important decoration in the order of protocol, ahead of the Resistance Medal and the Croix de Guerre. But the creation of this medal got a frosty reception in some sectors of the public and the army. Was just suffering some outrage or being murdered by fanatical individuals more important than paying tribute to armed combatants? Everyone was a child of the nation, it seems, but some more than others. Since 1990, medallists for terrorism have been considered ‘civilian victims of war’ and their children are eligible to be wards of the state. These are all significant symptoms of an ongoing confusion that had already given rise to a debate in the aftermath of the Second World War between resistance fighters and deportees: does the torture inflicted on someone deserve more consideration than actual accomplishments? Is an unfortunate person more heroic than a valiant one?
Introduction: Thucydides and Jesus Christ
In The History of the Peloponnesian War, an account of the conflicts between Athens, Sparta and the other Greek cities, the Athenian historian Thucydides (460–395 bce) states the following law: ‘Justice does not enter into the reasoning of men unless the forces on both sides are equal; otherwise, the strong exercise their power and the weak must yield to them.’ This is a law of the ages: the powerful rule, the wretched bow down. It was a Christian revelation, heralded by Judaism, that reversed this paradigm, much to the dismay of the pagans, who were appalled by this exaltation of a God who allowed himself to be crucified like a slave in order to save humankind. ‘Was it fitting for God to allow himself to be tied up and dragged away like a criminal? Much less was it fitting that he should be abandoned and betrayed by those closest to him, who followed him like a messiah, the Son and messenger of God himself’, exclaimed the Roman philosopher Celsus in the first century.1 For a man of antiquity, it made no sense for Jesus to pronounce the commandment to love one’s enemies and to enjoin believers to give precedence to the sick, the poor and the dispossessed. It’s an anthropological upheaval that puts the low above the high, the ignoble above the noble, and against which Friedrich Nietzsche, the great worshipper of strength and aristocracy, never tired of railing.
A common homeland
In the Passion narrative, Jesus offers his suffering as a common homeland to all the downtrodden and brings them the cross as an aid. This is Christianity’s stroke of genius and its absolute singularity, the new agreement proposed to the human race: the invention of a man-god who has the weaknesses of the former and the transcendence of the latter. Contemporaries were astonished that this obscure sect should have succeeded among the cohort of fanatics, zealots and healers who populated Galilee at that time. The Son of Man did not preach for the rich or the righteous, but for sinners, loose women, thieves and the fallen. He made himself humble among the humble. His intransigence was not of this world and it put a bomb under every institution, even the Churches. With the mixture of gentleness and aggression that characterizes the Gospels, his call for an insurrection against the powerful would shape the whole of the Western world, including the great secular doctrines of modernity. What is the working class in Marxism if not the body of Christ constituted as a revolutionary bloc to overturn History and establish the perfect society? What are minorities in ‘wokeism’ if not so many Christ-like effigies to be revered, no matter what? Is it not their misfortune that legitimizes them, especially when that misfortune is written in the plural through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s ‘intersectionality’, the crossroads of various oppressions?2 Christianity inverts hierarchies and gives pre-eminence to the vanquished over the brutes. The language of the victor consists of saying: I am right because I am the strongest. The language of the victim, on the other hand, says that my weakness is my weapon and my right. There is a transcendence and almost a sanctity to it; I share their pain; their destitution makes it incumbent on me to come to their aid.
We know that this quasi-divinity of the vulnerable is the prerogative of civilization. For better or worse, we are the heirs to this Christian revolution. Over the last two millennia, and often against the advice of the Churches, it has given consistency to the rights of women, of children, of the exploited, of slaves and the colonized. But a derivative strategy has been grafted onto this invention: the attitude of victimhood, which can be found at both the State and the individual level. It seems to be stronger in rich countries, devoted to material pleasures and structurally dissatisfied with their lot. Our pantheon is made up only of the downtrodden and the crushed. They are the only ones eligible for our sympathy, and we find new ones every day. This is our great democratic passion; even the privileged want to play the victim. Freedom, the ability of each individual to lead their life as they see fit, is above all permission to lament their own fate.
Respect my suffering
The word victim has many meanings even though being subjected to robbery, rape, accident or torture are not the same thing. But in this area there is an escalation to extremism and confusion reigns. Everyone aligns their condition with that of the person most affected. ‘Respect my suffering’, individuals demand. ‘Prove to me that you are suffering’, demands the State, insurance companies, public opinion and the media. But what can be done about those who suffer neither enough nor too little – in other words, the majority? Traditionally, the status of victim was obtained from historians or the courts. The historian described the reality of a massacre, and the courts recognized this reality and drew out the consequences. This process of recognition took a long time, and was often enshrined by the State or governments in official ceremonies. But these days, in an age of impatience amplified by social media, people want to speed up the process of crowning themselves martyrs. For instance via ‘grievance studies’3 in the USA, where university departments specialize in grievances affecting all sorts of categories: fat people, women, minorities, queers, lesbians, trans people, etc., and who grant themselves this title from the outset, so to speak. Armenians, deportees, slaves, colonized people, Harkis and homosexuals all had to wait a long time for recognition. We no longer have the courage to wait; we want the title of oppressed immediately.
What is victimization? It’s a narrative identity that we ascribe to ourselves and expect others to confirm. It is a pathology of recognition, a desire to be identified without having to come forward.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ dominant dreams of heroism have been replaced, in the twenty-first, by intense dreams of victimhood. This is the result of three reversals: the frenzied quest for happiness is flipped into a frenzied obsession with misfortune. Suffering is annexing ever-expanding territories to its empire, including areas that were previously outside its jurisdiction. Lastly, the promise of democracy, always a disappointment, exacerbates dissatisfaction and puts complaint at the centre of the contemporary psyche. In a word, the ideology of victimhood sins three times over: it discredits the spontaneous stoicism of each individual in the face of evil. It distorts priorities: under the guise of protecting the vulnerable, it smuggles in false victims who obscure from view those genuinely in trouble. Finally, it becomes the alibi for the killers who use this false flag to commit their crimes.
Promotion of the damned
In the past, the victims, whether male or female, were sacrificed by fire, hanging or lynching in order to repair a fractured community. They were sacrificed and sometimes sanctified. Nowadays, it’s the other way around: first we sanctify, then we sacrifice. After 1945 and the Holocaust, the figure of the Jew was put on a pedestal, then pulled down when it became that of the Israeli, accused of all the evils of colonialism, racism and imperialism. The prime position has become damned: from being a model, the figure of the Jew has become a rival to be eliminated in order to take its place.
On a global scale, there is a complaint competition, with each trying to howl the other down. The fraternity of the fallen is matched by the cacophony of complainers, who hoist the figure of the martyr on high, while feeding the two great passions of revenge and resentment. White or black supremacists, radical Islamists, bitter masculinists, angry neo-feminists, furious ecologists, revanchist Slavophiles, vindictive neo-Ottomans, each cashes in on a past glory or disaster to blame their enemies. How many defeated empires – Russia, Turkey, Iran, China – dress themselves up in the trappings of the doomed to then dive headlong into the hubris of reconquest? How many independent states invoke the former colonial metropolis to continue exploiting their peoples? The natural inclination of any persecuted person, once in power, is to metamorphose into a persecutor. Victimism is warmongering: the more people feel sorry for themselves, the more they feel justified in punishing those they see as their enemies. Their tears are heavy with rage and enmity.
Concern for the humiliated is humanism’s strong point. But blackmailing with victimhood is the flip side of this progress. Its final stage is the erasure of the truly unfortunate in favour of carnival pariahs whose only distinguishing feature is that they possess the networks and notoriety that allow them to promote themselves. They seize the language of the oppressed to usurp a position. They enter into a war of words, taking them hostage, kidnapping them. From one end of the social ladder to the other, each brandishes their hard-luck certificate that raises them above their fellows. This character, this strange kind of professional sufferer, is on the march through every country, cutting across all social classes. So how do we distinguish the counterfeiters and cheats from the others?
This book has three parts: the first examines how the message of the Enlightenment and the Revolution, of a better world free of fatalism and fanaticism, leads to a society of fragility and tears – in other words, of resignation. In the second part, we look at how the status of pariah potentially gives people every right, especially the right to accuse and oppress in the name of their injury. The final section looks at the figures of the executioner and the hero. Both the hero and the victim create unity, each in their own way: the first reassures societies subject to doubt, while the second reshapes the torn fabric of the social contract. Both need an audience to endorse them. We gorge ourselves on the unfortunate, just as we exalt the brave, who bolster our image. But horrified as much as fascinated, we also gorge ourselves on the monsters who kill out of sadism or disguise themselves as martyrs to perpetrate their abominations.
Why are the breeding grounds of victimhood so fertile? Paradoxically, in the hedonistic West, suffering has become a new, meditative sacred. Once a common feature of the human condition, it is now a passport that you flaunt to impress your contemporaries. It provides you with a borrowed identity, transforming you into an exceptional being who can show off on the public stage at little cost. This is the message of our age: you are all disinherited and entitled to feel sorry for yourselves. The ultimate dream would be to become a martyr without ever having suffered anything other than the misfortune of having been born.
Notes
1
Cited in Jean-François Braunstein,
La Religion woke
, Paris: Grasset, 2022, p. 25.
2
Kimberlé Crenshaw (born in 1959), a lawyer and activist, invented the concept of intersectionality in 1989.
3
Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose coined the term in 2017–18 to criticize what they saw as an impoverishment of academic work around race, gender, sexuality and fat people.
PART ONEFacing Misfortune
CHAPTER 1‘One day all will be well, so runs our hope’1
No one suffers needlessly.
Saint Augustine
The classical age was hard going, at least if we are to believe its leading lights. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there was plenty of misery to go around; people had to put up with it and would even flaunt it. The whole point of life, which was short at the time – thirty-five years for princes and the nobility of the robe, twenty-seven for the rest of the population, with remarkable exceptions depending on the individual (Louis XIV lived to be nearly seventy-seven) – was to prepare for death. In other words, to face the Supreme Judge and wash away one’s sins. When Europe was predominantly Christian, the fear of damnation had to take precedence over the fear of dying: death had to be a path to divine bliss or the flames of hell. The seventeenth century abounded in admirable texts on the need for believers to welcome misfortune as a trial of internal purification, and to prepare for the Great Departure. Whereas for the Greeks and Latins suffering was an inevitable fate, for the early Christians it was the price of the Fall, the wages of original sin. Fate is unjust, evil strikes the innocent and children at random but, as in the Book of Job, God will provide for the happiness of the deserving.2 Death is not an end, but a bridge to the unknown of the Last Judgement.
The wages of sin
Fortunately, God gave his only Son to deliver humanity from evil and death. The passion of Christ becomes the founding narrative of faith: each believer, in their own sorrow, can play a part in this story and find in Jesus a guide and a friend to help them. On his cross, strung up like a thief, the Son of God looks death in the face and overcomes it with the hope of Resurrection. On this condition, suffering becomes an ally; it is the failure that leads to victory, says Martin Luther; it is the sign of our downfall and our possible elevation.
Christianity rejects both aristocratic heroism, which is contemptuous of the poor, and Stoic morality, which recommends enduring grief and misfortune without complaint. The latter goes so far as to invite the wise man to undergo torture and dismemberment with a smile: even in the Phalaris bull in Agrigento, Sicily, a hollow, red-hot bronze sculpture in which the tortured were locked up, the wise man was supposed to remain happy and overcome the atrocious pain. Blaise Pascal castigated the insolence of Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius and saw in them a major crime: the affirmation of a human freedom unaware of its penury. In his view, we must confess our ordeal and, from the depths of this degradation, go back to the Creator. ‘In Thy sight none is pure of sin, not even the infant whose life is but a day on earth’, wrote Saint Augustine in his Confessions. The Churches developed a very real concern for the unfortunate, along with their appetite for misfortune. This is evidenced by the aesthetics of torture and blood in a certain form of Catholicism, particularly in Spain, the love of the dismembered body and the ability of this monotheism to be one of the greatest manufacturers of martyrs (it has now been surpassed by Islam, which churns out a whole string of them, the Shahids,3 also known as terrorists).
But in the Gospels, misfortune loses its worst feature: gratuitousness. It has a meaning, and all religions are saturated with meaning; they exist only to make grief, mourning and death bearable by giving them a higher purpose. Buddhism itself, through the notion of karma, makes present misfortune the result of faults committed in previous lives. As the saying goes, the arrows we fired in the past come back at us as a just retribution for our past sins. A cruel concept (we all deserve our fate, especially the poorest), but eminently consoling. Immanent justice sanctions the division, from birth, between the disadvantaged and the advantaged. In Hinduism and Buddhism, which are very different (the latter does not recognize castes), there are two kinds of salvation: an intramundane salvation that we earn as we reincarnate and that allows us to improve from generation to generation, and an extramundane salvation where we escape the cursed cycle of rebirths. With Christianity, suffering became a mystery brought to light and deciphered in the course of one’s own suffering. And theologians competed in casuistry to legitimize the existence of pain, illness and the death of children without undermining the goodness of God.
Vale of tears, valley of roses
It would appear that this justification for our misfortune was not all that convincing, since over time it has become a breviary of resignation. Advances in agriculture, the diversification of diets, even among the poorest, and the discovery of alkaloids and opiates to soothe physical torments, which gave rise to the first controversies on opium among doctors,4 swept away the priest’s fabulations about pain as a necessary divine punishment. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, a fierce desire to live and escape the inevitability of torment began to emerge in Europe. If a few drops of laudanum could banish an intolerable ache or induce a beneficial torpor, then sermons on just punishment would resound in the void. Christian algophilia was rejected via action. The greatest benefactor of humanity remains John Collins Warren, who invented ether anaesthesia in the United States in 1846.
At the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Enlightenment set itself a simple ambition: to replace the obsession with salvation with a concern for happiness, to tear itself away from the inexhaustible leprosy of misfortune and arbitrariness that characterized the Ancien Régime. Life is not just a vale of tears; it is possible to transform this world into a fertile, cheerful garden. Evil may persist, but we can abolish many of the pointless evils that have crushed mankind for centuries. The idea of progress replaces that of eternity, the future becomes the refuge of hope, the place where man is reconciled with himself. ‘One day all will be well, so runs our hope; all is well today, that is the illusion’, says Voltaire. This shift in sensibilities was also extended to animal suffering in public debate with the theory of the ‘chain of being’, which postulated a kinship between all living beings. Condillac’s sensualist philosophy gave beasts a common destiny with man: ‘Let us conclude that if beasts feel, they feel as we do.’5 The torments caused by animal fighting, the castration of horses, the brutality of slaughterhouses and hunting, and the wild beasts caged in menageries would gradually awaken a genuine religion of compassion towards our inferior brothers and sisters, especially as humans became attached to some domestic species and devoted genuine affection to them, as they did with other members of the family.
The concept of progress brings together individual and collective happiness, as exemplified by Anglo-Saxon utilitarianism, which claims to place happiness at the service of humankind. The calamities that befall us will disappear tomorrow if we put some work into them. The forward march of the human spirit can be slow or fast, but it is always infallible. But the promised land of the future remains, for the long term, a land compromised by the old world, which it strangely resembles. Progress is an equivocal ambition; it nurtures the hope of succeeding where previous generations have failed, but it postpones Eden. Misfortune doesn’t disappear, it shifts its location. Tomorrow, once again, becomes hope’s eternal category. There are countless secular doctrines that recommend patience before the advent of the perfect society. There can be no triumph of the spirit for Hegel, no proletarian revolution for Marx, without a long period of bloody tribulations and wars of all kinds. The chaos of History gives rise to the Better, and violence is the great midwife of the future. Nietzsche was not to be outdone, extolling cruelty and savage hordes to improve the human race by selecting the strongest. These are all doctrines for which evil is a necessary moment of good; in every calamity there is a secret reason at work. The worst horrors that humans inflict on each other are supposed to end up in a collective flourishing. The secular heirs of Catholicism are staging their noisy revival on the altar of pain. Our societies believe themselves to be de-Christianized, but our passions remain those of Christianity. Religion is not coming back; it has never disappeared. It smoulders like an ember beneath our secular assertions.
The beginning of the twenty-first century in Europe has seen a proliferation of bloated promises. Each era boasts of its ability to resolve the crises of the previous one. The digital age, with its billionaire prophets and its high priests of immortality and artificial intelligence, is no exception. It was a regenerated and purified humanity that was to enter the third millennium, certain that it had hunted down the last germs of hell. Death, disease and old age were to be swept away as archaisms. But the intoxication of transhumanism was followed by the hangover of Covid and the excessive morbidity of this period, highlighting the limits of medicine. The end of History, combined with the progress of democracy and the benefits of the market, was to propel the human adventure to new heights. Europe would be the only place where tragedy would no longer take place, in the profound words of Susan Sontag, uttered at the time of the war in ex-Yugoslavia. Every decade, the same drunken oaths and the same hopes return, mirrored since the beginning of the twenty-first century by the apocalyptic announcements of millenarian groups about the end of the world. The drunkenness of the utopians is matched only by the panic of the catastrophists.
The pea syndrome
The optimism of the great philosophies of History has been swept away, at least in the West, by a growing number of conflicts, genocides and mass exterminations, which have made people more hesitant about the ultimate end of History. Humanity has become disenchanted because of all the abominable crimes and no longer has confidence in its own resources. It seems to be moving simultaneously towards the worst and the best. Faith in the future is wavering, at least in the West. All the more so since democracy is the ultimate regime of legal insatiability: it intensifies a thirst it cannot quench, spikes fevers and exacerbates rivalries. It feeds indignation and revolt, but also envy and jealousy. It makes each of us a citizen more tormented by what we don’t have than by what we already have. The prosperity of some feeds a permanent jealousy based on comparison, including among the advantaged. Marx wrote: ‘A house may be large or small; as long as the surrounding houses are equally small it satisfies all social demands for a dwelling. But if a palace arises beside the little house, the little house shrinks into a hut.’6 Frustration is heightened by the fact that a certain level of comfort is already assured in wealthy nations, an advantage that people fear losing at any moment. What we thought had been eliminated continues to taunt us: new epidemics decimate us, wars reappear, extreme climatic phenomena ravage the countryside, and the impoverishment of citizens resurfaces in societies that we thought had settled down.
We Europeans and Americans of the twenty-first century have become hypersensitive to the slightest annoyance. We have all been struck by the princess and the pea syndrome, the Hans Christian Andersen heroine who spends a sleepless night because of a tiny hard pea slipped under her mattress.7 Our emotions are heightened as medicine softens the conditions of our existence. Victim mythology is usually explained by the gap between the promises of modernity and its results. But what if the opposite were true? What if it were the undeniable successes of science and industry that have exasperated our impatience? So many evils have been vanquished, so many injustices abolished, that we are surprised that they cannot all be done away with immediately. In spite of itself, the state of civilization creates as much suffering as it relieves. It produces a telescoping between aspirations and realities that can generate disenchantment. By establishing well-being and health as minimum standards, it makes their lack more intolerable. Anything that thwarts our appetites becomes a source of discomfort; we aspire to better things all the time, at the risk of raising our petty miseries to the level of intolerable deprivation. Our allergy to worries grows as the prospect of overcoming them increases.
Unlike Christianity, which never set out to eradicate evil on earth – ‘it is in vain, O men, that you seek in yourselves the remedy for your miseries’, said Pascal – the American and French Revolutions, guided by human rights, aimed to regenerate the human race through the combined efforts of knowledge, industry and emancipation. It was supposed to be possible to overcome almost all ills – hunger, poverty, superstition – with time. Alas, there is no one progress, but rather localized progresses, themselves equivocal, producing regression and considerable damage. How can we still take communion at the high mass of productivism and scientism, whose ravages are obvious, without mentioning the ‘accidents’ that were the crises of mad cow disease, asbestos, contaminated blood, levothyroxine and fentanyl? Our undeniable progress over the last three centuries has come at the price of terrifying setbacks. Every conquest is also a defeat, every show of strength an admission of weakness.
But it would be a mistake to believe that our faith in progress is dead and buried. Even the most ardent opponents of this idea swallow a painkiller as soon as they feel pain, or submit to the surgeon’s scalpel if their life is in danger. The best remedy for the pains of progress is yet another advance that will correct the effects of the previous one. Both the submissive Christian and the arrogant modernist have been replaced by contemporary perplexity. We have become moderate believers who aspire to a progress that is controlled or localized.
Eradicating evil?
The Moderns have sometimes toyed with the mad desire to abolish disorders of all kinds, to treat suffering as null and void, or to sweep it under the carpet. The philosopher Alain, in his 1925 book on happiness, saw hygiene and gymnastics as the best remedies for pain.8 He mocked Pascal for being frightened by the silence of infinite space, saying that he had probably caught a cold at his window.9 In his view, fatal illnesses, and even wars, stem from a failure in education: we must learn to be happy, it’s a polite duty. Serenity is an obligation that is sometimes disrupted by evil geniuses; thus the hostility between Germany and France, ‘robust children, pestered and finally exasperated beyond endurance by a mere handful of spiteful boys’.10 As for the man on his way to the guillotine, all he has to do is count the bumps in the road to distract himself from the fatal deadline! The historian Philippe Ariès has remarked that, in the post-war West, mourning and grief have become solitary activities like masturbation.11 While the disappearance of our loved ones continues to devastate us, the funerary customs that provided a framework for survivors have disappeared. Death is no longer a life event, except when it strikes a great person like Queen Elizabeth II in September 2022. The whole world was moved, including France; for three weeks, we literally borrowed Great Britain’s queen to rediscover the splendour of the monarchy. The obituaries in the magazines are devoured all the more avidly because they are a quasi-taboo. We no longer go into mourning or wear dark clothes; we can follow funerals on the Net. Grief remains private, the death of a close friend or relative must not disrupt the triumphant march of life. The aim now is to introduce a ‘positive death’, to make it more attractive, to banish glum funereal faces,12 to shuffle off with a smile. Even palliative care, if the ads are to be believed, should be nice and friendly.13 And why not compost yourself to reduce your ecological footprint, as suggested by the Humo Sapiens association?14
Our prevailing hedonism, in its attempt to avoid the negative, reinforces what it was trying to conceal: the omnipresent terror of pain, both physical and moral. The society of compulsory happiness is also one that constantly speaks the language of distress. In a perverse twist, it encourages the growth of unhappiness, spreading like weeds. While it may not be true that everyone seeks happiness, it is true that they all want to escape misfortune. The Epicurean and Stoic schools of antiquity sought to limit suffering by understanding its mechanism; Christianity exalted it with a view to redeeming the creature; we live on its denegation with the mad hope that it will dissipate if we deprive it of any public expression. The result: groups of the afflicted are multiplying exponentially, and public and private recriminations have never been so numerous. Young people in rich Western countries have been described as the ‘snowflake generation’ to reflect their extreme fragility.15 Cohorts of the ‘vulnerable’ are gathering online to share their despondency and their fears.
Is well-being a cause of anxiety?
Have we all become softies? That’s what many people nostalgic for bygone days thought. Nietzsche, horrified by the humanitarianism of his century, really pushed the hope of a human being shaped by the hammer, as clay is by hardness:
The discipline of suffering, of great suffering – know ye not that it is only this discipline that has produced all the elevations of humanity hitherto? The tension of soul in misfortune which communicates to it its energy, its shuddering in view of rack and ruin, its inventiveness and bravery in undergoing, enduring, interpreting, and exploiting misfortune, and whatever depth, mystery, disguise, spirit, artifice, or greatness has been bestowed upon the soul – has it not been bestowed through suffering, through the discipline of great suffering?16
It’s like reading the rules of a reform school for wayward boys. In the same vein, the Hungarian-born British sociologist Frank Furedi mocks the setting up of medical and psychological emergency units for the slightest accident or difficult event, and points out that the people of South-East Asia, who fell victim to the 2004 tsunami, had no need of the experts rushed in by international bodies.17 It also calls into question the new nosological entity of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) developed by American psychiatry when Vietnam veterans returned home, and which is now applied to the descendants of the Shoah as well as to those of the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda.18 As long ago as the 1930s, a pain manifesto was published protesting against ‘the tyranny of the healthy’ and the softening of medical care. Yet for a long time, in France, the medical world was reluctant to prescribe morphine, even in cases of serious illness. It was not until 2001 that this treatment became compulsory. This debate is absurd: we can both detest unnecessary pain and celebrate the fortitude of individuals in the face of adversity. Between the up-in-arms and the cowardly, there are other less extreme forms of behaviour.
But these days, many people see toughness, silence and solidity as a retrograde attitude: you have to sympathize and feel sorry for yourself. The slightest accident, especially one involving children, and we summon cohorts of psychologists for fear of irreversible after-effects. Every time, emotion takes precedence over analysis, and identification with the bereft prevails. What has changed compared with previous centuries is not the sum total of the scourges we suffer from, but our disposition towards them. The classical age in Europe could be pessimistic, but it was content to confirm the dogma of original sin: crimes, horrors and atrocities followed as proof of our darkness redeemed by God. The tragedy began in the Renaissance, with the hope of a better world, the sole responsibility of man, who became accountable for his failures. This promise to build a reasonable Eden with the weapons of the welfare state, education and the law remains, by its very nature, unfulfilled and therefore disappointing. Whatever is done to support us, it is never enough; there are always obstacles, impediments. The more we try to make our lives easier, the more the residual difficulties seem like insurmountable walls. Particularly in France, where the welfare state is as obese as it is ineffective, we live with expectations that are constantly raised and then disappointed. We are never sufficiently fulfilled, loved, gratified. As Jean-François Laé writes, ‘We suffer more and more from the effects of generalised protection.’19
Did people suffer less in the past?
Our societies face a permanent dilemma. In the effort to eliminate injustice, they begin by naming it, thereby risking giving it undue weight. Our major issues, the promotion of disadvantaged groups and concern for well-being, must constantly be based on a state of imperfection that we recall the better to overcome it. We mentally contrast yesterday’s deplorable state with today’s preferable possibilities. And we look at poor or underdeveloped countries as embodying these archaisms that we no longer want. Bad things generally had to be put up with, because the remedies were cruder and the medicine rudimentary. The remedies we now enjoy did not exist, and the threshold of tolerance has shifted. All the wisdom in the world ceases when faced with a toothache or a terrible pain. If we are writhing in agony, we insist on immediate relief. Knowing that the medicine exists but that we won’t benefit from it is an indignity. A child dying for lack of care is an absolute scandal. People have always hated pain and, as the historian Roselyne Rey tells us, in the sixteenth century many people preferred to wait for death rather than undergo amputation or ablation (anaesthesia did not yet exist).20 With any pain, it is the fine-tuned scale of what is inadmissible that must be taken into account. One person faints over a blood test, another allows herself to be butchered without batting an eyelid. Physical courage varies from one person to another and in each of us, depending on our stage of life. Despite the atrocities of war and epidemics, there is no evidence to suggest that societies of the past were hardier; they were more resigned and people died very young.
There have always been examples of superhuman endurance that have captured the imagination in every age. One such was a boy in Sparta, quoted by Montaigne, who preferred to have his liver eaten by a fox rather than confess to his theft (the education of young men implied mastery of theft), or the American mountaineer, Aron Ralston, who in 2003, trapped by a rock in Utah, amputated his forearm to free himself and was saved in extremis (he returned to the site six months later to scatter the ashes of his cremated stump). We have to distinguish between hardships we impose on ourselves and those we endure in spite of ourselves. Napoleon’s soldiers on the run from Moscow, the deportees in Nazi Germany and the Zeks in the Gulag were subjected to abominations that leave us speechless, and rightly so.
