On Suffering and the Human Condition

(This week’s article is by guest writer Dwayne Schulz. For a brief bio, see below.)

Evolutionary biology tells us that we are just one amongst many of nature’s creatures; liverworts and bacteria, apes and apple trees, cicadas and seagulls. We, like all such creatures, are born, live for a time, then die. Every creature struggles to keep itself in the game facing challenges like disease, competition, predation, accident, famine and environmental stress. The world is ranged against us.

Of course there are also times of good health and plenty when populations boom and individuals live long. As a matter of brute fact however, life by its very nature, at least part of the time, involves struggling to survive and thrive against hostile forces both intentional and unintentional. And nothing guarantees the success of any one individual or species. No matter how fit or specialized, random events, like changes in climate, meteors and volcanoes, occasionally wipe out whole species. Chance, both good and bad, plays a central role in the story of life. As the famous evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould once put it  – if you could re-play the tape of life from the beginning, there is virtually no chance that today’s species and ecosystems would be lucky enough to make it through a second time.   

I would suggest that the ‘naturalism’ part of spiritual naturalism means, at least to some degree,  seeing the peculiar woes and concerns of humanity within the context of this universal struggle for survival. One of the main concerns of traditional religion has been the question of why evil and suffering exist, especially for Abrahamic religions with an all-powerful and loving God who could theoretically banish it from the world. Traditional religion’s answers are varied and creative but in the absence of a scientific understanding of natural and anthropological history could amount really to no more than self-justifying tales and myths. These are usually mixed in with the promise of salvation of some sort — absolute enlightenment, bliss, at one-ness with the cosmos — albeit usually not until the afterlife.

For spiritual naturalism, however, evil and suffering cannot be magically superseded, completely overcome, or even explained away. They are just part of life faced by every living thing in nature; a primitive, even ‘absurd’ fact of existence; a fact as stubbornly real as bad weather or the atomic weight of carbon. The question then is how we deal with them in the here-and-now. It certainly does not mean falling in a heap and resigning ourselves to whatever oppressive circumstances we happen to find ourselves in.

Yes humans continue to suffer illness, trauma, bereavement, setbacks, stress, pettiness, sarcasm, self-doubt, anxiety, hostility, injury, violence and injustice, and may very well do so till the end of time. But we can improve our external behavior and internal responses to these things and in some instances significantly ameliorate or even eradicate their source. As a species we are defined by our capacity to change both as individuals and collectively. Whether it was our invention of complex culture and improved hunting tools during the Upper Paleolithic, our learning how to domesticate cereals in the Neolithic or the worldwide campaign that eradicated smallpox in the late 20th Century, humans have demonstrated an amazing capacity for improving their life circumstances in one way or another.

I do not use these examples to assert that history is a story of onward and upward progress but simply to illustrate that the circumstances of our suffering can, at least to a degree, be overcome by changing our behaviors, thinking patterns and social practices. Lest you think that such improvements are restricted to the sphere of material goods, remember how much law and social values have changed in the last 300 years concerning things like democracy, women’s rights, gay rights, corporal punishment, freedom of religion, the admissibility of testimony under torture, the environment and animal welfare. To the extent such changes signify an expanded sense of compassion, tolerance and respect for human dignity, they also signify steps in humanity’s spiritual improvement. It is easy to forget this progress. I’m not saying it is perfect or complete, invulnerable to corruption or irreversible, just that it is real. I think we need to remind ourselves of this fact much more often because it is easy to become cynical or disinterested in such ‘worldly’ affairs, to believe the pursuit of external change is fruitless and somehow disconnected from the project of internal spiritual development.

When the world seems to be sliding into ever greater madness, violence and untruth by the day why shouldn’t I turn my back on it all? Yes, a core component of spirituality has to be about how we think about and relate to ourselves. Yes, we ought to strive towards inner tranquility, equanimity and mastery over our worst emotions and thoughts. But what is the point of becoming strong like the Stoic sage if we allow the world around us to fall to pieces? What kind of a sage is it that turns away from the suffering of other sentient creatures, who turns a blind eye to the desecration of nature or the erosion of human rights in their community? In a word, the struggle for inner harmony is intertwined with the struggle for outer harmony in our personal and social affairs, in our relations to other races and to nature as a whole. This fact puts the words of Epictetus (the famous Stoic of Ancient Rome), “Dedicate the rest of your life to the making of progress”, in a new light. I also see this struggle for progress as no different in principle from the struggle of all living beings to survive and thrive in the face of adversity and chaos and is similarly undertaken with no guarantee of success.  

Humans have one key advantage though – we don’t have to go it alone. We struggle together, defending and achieving our successes in solidarity with others. There is something profoundly spiritual, i.e. elevating, about compassion for and acting in solidarity with the suffering of the oppressed. Simone Weil, the French thinker and mystic famous for her opposition to fascism during the Spanish Civil War and French Resistance captured this idea when she wrote that “Putting ourselves in the place of a being whose soul is mutilated by affliction or is in imminent danger of becoming such a being” is to undertake a “passage into the impersonal”, i.e. to transcend the ego, to become a better, more selfless human being.

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