But fixating on the suffering of the world in the abstract can come at the cost of failing to honor the suffering that exists right in front of us, within us and all around us. I, for one, am grateful that such a compulsion exists it’s better than indifference or judgment toward people who are suffering.
It has become something of a compulsion in modern life to blot out the suffering of the world in one’s own mind by assuming the correct political stance before truly understanding or even really looking at it. So much of our culture and politics is given to providing a moral explanation for the suffering of the world in the hope of changing it, as though everything tragic in life has a political cause. It can seem fatalistic or “negative”-a way of explaining away or even justifying the suffering of others. This truth doesn’t go over well in modern culture and politics. But within that acceptance lies the possibility of transcendence. For Job and Sisyphus, suffering is a fate they have no choice but to accept.
It has been explored in the Book of Job in the Old Testament and in The Myth of Sisyphus by the philosopher Albert Camus. This is among the hardest things to accept in life, especially if that person is you. If happiness is cosmically deserved, then so is suffering-an increasingly difficult case to make when looking into the eyes of the sufferer.īut some people suffer more than others for no good reason and nothing will ever make that okay. But if everything happens for a reason, that must also include the other side of the ledger: illness, disability, poverty, trauma, violence, loss-those things over which we have limited control and which make life tragic. In modern life, fate is usually invoked to explain good events or to explain away bad ones: “Everything happens for a reason.” There’s something comforting about attributing one’s circumstances to the larger flow of an all-knowing and wise universe. “Fate,” says Viking Prince Amleth in Robert Eggers’s recent historical drama The Northman, “has no mercy.” We have lost touch with the brutality of this idea.
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