Allow me to pass over where we agree and focus on where we may differ. Each of us must come to terms with the pain and grief in our own lives. Often the anguish is very personal. Uniquely, humans have the ability to rationalise their own suffering and mortality. Rationalisation is normally only partially successful, but it’s a vital psychological crutch. Around 850,000 people each year fail to "rationalise" the unrationalisable and take their own lives. Millions more try to commit suicide and fail. Factory-farmed nonhuman animals lack the cognitive capacity and means to do so.
However, rationalisation can have an insidious effect. If (some) suffering has allegedly been good for us, won’t suffering sometimes have redeeming features for our children and grandchildren – and indeed for all future life? So let’s preserve the biological-genetic status quo. I don't buy this argument; it’s ethically catastrophic. For the first time in history, it's possible to map out the technical blueprint for a living world without suffering. Political genius is now needed to accelerate a post-Darwinian transition. Recall that young children can't rationalise. Nor can nonhuman animals. We should safeguard their interests too. If we are prepared to rewrite our genomes, then happiness can be as "finely-tuned" and information-sensitive as we wish, but on an exalted plane of well-being. Transhuman life will be underpinned by a default hedonic tone beyond today’s “peak experiences”.
One strand of thought that opposes the rationalising impulse is represented by David Benatar's Better Never To Have Been, efilism and “strong” antinatalism:
https://www.hedweb.com/quora/2015.html#main
Alas, the astute depressive realism of their diagnosis isn't matched by any clear-headedness of their prescriptions. I hesitate to say this for fear of sounding messianic, but only transhumanism can solve the problem of suffering. Darwinian malware contains the seeds of its own destruction. A world based on gradients of bliss won’t need today's spurious rationalisations of evil. Let’s genetically eliminate hedonic sub-zero experience altogether. — David Pearce
While I do have some eccentric sprititual/metaphysical beliefs, I'm going to do my best to bracket them here. They help me in my own life, but when talking ideas I don't want to use them as dei ex machina. If those eccentric beliefs are legit, they should be able to deal with whatever happens in rational argument.
So:
I think you make a good point: if I look at my life and my suffering, and spin a narrative where I had to suffer what I did in order to get where I am now (i.e. a state I find better than where I was before) then doesn't that lead to me suggesting that
others go through similar suffering?
I agree, right away, that such a line of thought is abhorrent.
I shift it this way:
Instead of saying, e.g. 'you too have to suffer corporal punishment, as I did,' I would, if I had kids, understand they're entering into a dicey space, and convey to them (through all the means parents have) 'you are loved, but shit's going to be hard. You're going to need to learn to feel and make sense of suffering/hurt/pain/heartbreak'
The meaning isn't in the
particular suffering. Meaning is produced through a
stance, or
mode-of-being - what will come will come; what I have to do, over time, is learn how to make sense of it. I have to
cultivate a
meta-capacity for undergoing and recovering from suffering.
I think this scales from -100 to n-1 (where n is a state where there is no suffering at all.)
in raising my kids I simulatenously
(1) aim to reduce their suffering
&
(2) cultivate their capacity to work through suffering.
But, as you correctly point out, some shit is so fucked up, this doesn't work:
There are overwhelming sufferings - traumas - that so flood the victims, knocking over all their sense-making categories, that there's no nice, neat way to wrap it up. I don't see suicide as a weakness of will, or failure to make sense as one should - I see, usually, justified desperation in the face of irremediable suffering, psychological or social double binds, etc. I had a nervous breakdown in my twenties, spent some time in a psych ward - and the chaotic pain you see there blasts away moral and religious categories of suffering in an instant. You don't forget it.
So I'm not fetishizing suffering either. I was once an antinatalist - and while I only am familiar with Benatar through osmosis, I once went
deep into Schopenhauer, Beckett & (to a lesser extent) Cioran. I'm coming at this from the lens of : Ok, we're in it; and, being in it, how to proceed?
My concern is in some ways about (dialectical) tempo. I have reservations about too readily positing a suffering-free state
from a suffering-saturated state. One way to look at this is from a Bayesian lens. As a student of history, one of my (strong) priors is that utopian projects tend to be inverted mirrors of present-suffering, and so create new forms of suffering in doing away with the old (they can see how to reverse present suffering, but, understandably, can't anticipate the conditions and flavor of future suffering.)
To me, this seems like a historical hard-limit: you only know what you know now. Now my position isn't that we should
never knock down
Chesterton's Fence( Besides, I think its inevitable - beyond good and evil, as a matter of history - that all fences eventually come down) but I also doubt strongly that we can know now what we're knocking down, and the ramifications of that breaking-down, when the state of scientific knowledge and historical reality is accelerating at breakneck pace. It's not that I don't think not-suffering wouldn't be better - it's that thinking we know what that would mean now seems unlikely. again, back to Bayes - our understanding shifts dramatically, again and again. The historical evidence is overwhelming: what we think we understand now is likely only a scaffolding to another paradigm shift. The people in the (recent!) past couldn't know then the frame-shattering things we know about neuroscience now. But we can't know now what the people in (not-too-distant!) future will know. And that future-knowing will likely not be simply a filling-in-the-gaps in our current paradigm, but an overturning of our paradigms altogether. (its possible not - but we would need realllllly strong philosophical reasons to overturn the priors we get studying how these things tend to unfold historically.)
I agree that reducing suffering (and increasing flourishing) is the best
orienting, regulative idea, for our ethics, but implementation will have to unfold gradually (or at least in tandem with our understanding) - and because of that, I think our best bet is to cultivate a focus -
really cultivate a focus -on the here-and-now, and only then tentatively venture out toward widening time horizons (and how far out can we really see?)