Suffering and the 'Polarity Argument'

Can suffering be 'justified'? This is one question that has troubled religious thinkers down the ages in various philosophical-religious traditions, such as Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. The basic issues in this context can be summarised in these terms : If there is an omnibenevolent God, why did such a God create a world with so much suffering?

Various kinds of strategies have been developed to deal with such issues, and it is not my intention to sift through all of them, one by one. I shall merely point to one argument, often repeated in various religious circles, and curiously enough in non-religious ones too, which I believe to be, to put it mildly, inhuman. This is the one that I shall call the 'Polarity Argument', and this goes as follows :

You would not be able to appreciate the meaning of X unless you were in a position to know what anti-X is. You would not enjoy the beauty of the dawn unless you experienced the gloom of the dusk, the importance of light unless you knew what darkness is, the value of heroism unless you faced some danger, and so on and on.

Suffering, that is, has an educative value. If that were the end of the matter, I would have, of course, no cause for complaint. It is undoubtedly a truth that the burnt child, as we say, dreads the fire; unless we experienced some form of suffering when jumping into a fire we would not know that this activity, to put it bluntly, reduces our survival fitness. Trouble starts brewing, however, when this mundane observation is put forward as a justification for the existence of suffering.

To take a simple example, what could be the justification for the blindness of a woman who is walking down the street? One reply could be : by seeing her plight, we could be induced to help her, and to develop feelings of 'altruism' (whether 'altruism' is possible is a debate for another day). In other words, the suffering of other people has an instrumental benefit for us, and this is what I referred to above as an inhuman argument. To justify suffering in this manner is to imply that without the existence of this suffering of other people we could not develop certain qualities ourselves, whatever these may be, mercy, compassion, kindness and so on. And all of this even without mentioning the suffering on a much larger-scale that human beings have had to live with, such as the distress caused by natural calamities, political upheavals, outbreak of epidemics, and so on. To take the example of the (Nazi) Holocaust, for example, it may indeed be the case that by reading about it we learn a 'lesson from history' (though even that seems highly doubtful), and that by going through the journals and diaries of Jews of that time we experience feelings of empathy with them. But does any of this 'justify', in any way, the Holocaust? Would we not say that we would rather not experience such empathy and compassion if it is necessary that the Holocaust should have happened for us to experience these emotions?

Perhaps it is true that had there been no form of illness, disease, misery, agony, and distress, we human beings would not have been able to develop feelings of compassion and kindness towards others. Perhaps, the development of such other-directed emotions requires, in some way or the other, the existence of suffering. But, granted that these assumptions are valid ones, do they justify the suffering in the world?

Let us return to the 'light-dark' example. It may be true that when we stand in the light of the day after a dark night, we are better able to enjoy its brilliance. But it would be a very strange thing for someone to use this example as a 'justification' for the night. The night is simply a period of time without the sun's light and needs no justification or, for that matter, any condemnation (with due apologies, of course, to poets and novelists). Notions of 'justification' and 'condemnation' apply only to those dimensions of human existence that we call the 'moral'. For example, a glass of water in itself requires neither justification nor condemnation, though the act of drinking this glass might, depending on the circumstances or the intentions of the drinker, require either of the two. Similarly, 'suffering-happiness/mercy/heroism' may be, in some respects, a pair analogous to 'light-dark', but just as in the latter this polarity does not justify (or condemn) either pole, so too in the former. All that this 'suffering-happiness' polarity does is to summarise the common observation that after experiences of suffering, we sometimes (though not always) feel happy; and that our moments of happiness are often followed by experiences of misery. It does not, in the least, either justify or condemn our suffering or our happiness.

Religious traditions, therefore, that try to justify suffering with the claim that without suffering we could not learn virtues such as those of kindness, mercy and so on, are guilty not only of making unwarranted extrapolations from the 'natural' to the 'moral' but also of bordering on the inhuman by implying that we learn something through the suffering of others. However, what about 'us atheists'? Have we atheists, who claim to have rejected God, truly come to grips with the consequences of living in a world where suffering is pervasive?

A proper engagement with this question will require a detailed reply, tabulating the various forms of atheism. For the moment, however, I shall conclude with a few questions. Supposing that an atheist couple agrees that suffering is an 'evil', and that a world without this 'evil' would be a good thing. (The case of the manic/clinical depressive is an interesting challenge to much of what I have written above, and I shall return to this in another place.) Is it ethical for this atheist couple to have a baby, knowing that in the act of producing this baby they shall be casting a new form of life into a world filled with this 'evil'? If we cannot do anything to make the world a 'better place' (or, belonging as we do to a post-colonial, post-modern world, even have doubts that this can be accomplished), should not the very least that we are capable of doing be to take a conscious decision not to actually increase the amount of suffering in it? And even if we argue that when the baby grows up, s/he will then realise the truth that there can be no happiness without suffering, who are we, the deniers of God, to 'play God' and predict that this is exactly what will actually happen in the future? What if the grown-up baby instead fails to realise this truth, if truth it be, and steadily descends along a spiral of depression, misery, and self-destruction? Shall we not then be morally responsible for adding to the pool of suffering in the world? Are we atheists, who have burnt all the bridges of faith, ready to take such a 'massive leap of faith' and declare, without being able to justify this claim, that it is a good thing that there are human beings in this world even if their existence is associated with suffering? How do we know that it is indeed a good thing that human beings must exist in this world, no matter what the costs?