Anticipating Suffering: Problemata

What is knowledge of future suffering for? Is it possible to prepare?

The ambiguous gift of awareness

A friend of mine was recently reflecting on her experience of the loss of independence that comes with having children — an experience she was amply warned about, and yet is still coming to terms with a couple of years into being a mother. The warnings she (and many young women of our generation) received seemed to have done little to help her bear it when her time came, and indeed have cast a strange sort of colouring over her attempts to embrace her new season of life. Having been forewarned, she now directs questions to herself like, ‘what did I fail to understand?’ and ‘did I think I would be exempt?’.

The anticipation of suffering affects both the time before the event and the event of suffering itself. But it doesn’t seem to affect it in the ways we might expect: it doesn’t, for instance, seem to lessen the force of the suffering by taking away some supposed element of surprise. As my friend found, it can open you up to other unpleasant surprises, like realising you’d downplayed the warnings all along, or realising that where you thought you were inwardly steeling yourself up for it you were actually doing nothing of the kind.

Prior to the arrival of the suffering, the knowledge of it can also extend its own shadow back into the present. While we don’t ‘pre-suffer’ in the sense of experiencing the thing itself in advance of its arrival, we are vulnerable to fear and dread.

The worst case scenario of those warnings about losing one’s freedoms is that some people will take it as a reason to steer clear of child-rearing altogether. It’s like a traffic-hazard warning that invites you to reroute your life trajectory. This is not a mythical concern: I know at least one woman in her thirties with this story, and another who had to work her way out of it after years of being married and intentionally childless. But even for those it doesn’t dissuade altogether, a prospective future with children may still be a cause for fruitless anxiety. The thing itself may indeed turn out to be not as bad as expected, and the anticipatory dread the greater evil than the reality. ‘Awareness’ thus turns out to be an ambiguous sort of good.

We could think of many other instances of this ambiguous good of anticipation. Perhaps one of the most acute is receiving a diagnosis of a terminal or degenerative disease. The whole schtick of the film ‘The Farewell’ (in which a grandmother’s terminal cancer diagnosis is hidden from her by her family) is to question the presumption in favour of knowledge in such cases, and to suggest that fear ought not be underestimated as a contributory cause of death.

C. S. Lewis has also reflected on the fear-response to capital-C Cancer in A Grief Observed, his notes on the occasion of his wife’s death:

Yet H. herself, dying of it, and well knowing the fact, said that she had lost a great deal of her old horror at it. When the reality came, the name and the idea were in some degree disarmed. And up to a point I very nearly understood. This is important. One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness). One only meets each hour of moment that comes. All manner of ups and downs. Many bad spots in our best times, many good ones in our worst. One never gets the total impact of what we call ‘the thing itself’. But we call it wrongly. The thing itself is simply all these ups and downs: the rest is a name or an idea.

Anticipation of suffering gives us ‘the name and the idea’ abstracted from the whole context of life in which it is experienced. It can tend to fix our attention on the mythical ‘thing itself’ and cause us to forget that a life can never be reduced to one Thing.

Forewarned is forearmed?

The promise of foreknowledge of suffering is that we can prepare. Yet, awareness of a future circumstance of suffering does not immediately translate into being prepared for that circumstance. To heed a warning for the sake of preparing actually takes a fair amount of thought into the nature of the future circumstance, and sometimes the kind of knowledge needed for useful preparation actually exceeds what is possible to attain beforehand.

The relevant knowledge comes to the anticipator by means of the descriptions of others who have already experienced it. How we describe our suffering to others matters a great deal, because others do not have subjective access to the thing itself, and therefore have no sure way to test the description.

When we hear another person describe her suffering, we have no choice but to embrace her self-report as reliable — including her self-report of when the suffering originated, and in response to what. Insofar as we take this report as predictive of our own futures, we map our lives onto the other person’s and trust her as a reliable discerner of a reality which we cannot yet access by personal experience.

This is of course why it is also relatively easy to dismiss the other person’s experience as something from which we ourselves will be exempt. The tendency is very natural and not entirely without basis. Why suppose that my future can be mapped onto another person’s life?

Furthermore, very often these sorts of warnings, while dressed as invitations to prepare, are not well-suited to preparation. A story about how child-rearing is by the nature of the thing a restriction on your ability to pursue other matters that are important to you does not invite reflection on what circumstances or other contingencies may constitute that experience and account for its ubiquitousness — and therefore, might themselves be addressed.

When someone says ‘having children caused my lack of independence’, what is being said? Probably something more than just ‘my loss of independence coincided with having children.’ Mere coincidence can’t be extrapolated as significant beyond the single instance; it certainly isn’t a basis for warning others. No, a causal explanation of reality is being offered here. Most likely something like this: new demands were placed upon the new parents by these highly-dependent creatures which consume a vast amount of the time and energy of the two main people they are dependent upon (and most acutely, on the mother), thereby limiting their capacity for other freely-chosen pursuits.

Unfortunately, outside of acute instances of suffering such as physical pain, for which material causes can be directly identified, the distal cause of an experience of suffering can be hard to identify. And even physical suffering, it must be said, is more experientially complex than an explanation by way of this or that nervous system activity would suggest.

Beyond avoiding children altogether, what then does the warning suggest for us to do? To what extent does it lay open certain forms of preparation, while veiling others?

For instance, what if the problem is not actually the children, but the absence of proximate and available family members ready and willing to assist with care? What if it’s due to the post-industrial settlement that meaningful work is wage-earning work, to be done outside the home, creating inevitable trade-offs between work and family life? What if we have centred our leisure, as a culture, around activities largely inaccessible to families with small children?

I don’t mean to suggest that any of those circumstances can necessarily be altered, or that changing them would entirely mitigate the costliness to personal freedom of child rearing. What I do mean to suggest is that the cause(s) of suffering are likely complex, and we are not always the best narrators of our own stories.

The above qualification—that the problems won’t be resolved simply by distinguishing the relevant causes—is important, as the other aspect often obscured by warnings that ‘situation x will be hard’ is the internal vector. Emotional responses are natural, but they are not fixed, and may be themselves evaluated as good or bad, fitting or unfitting. Circumstances aside, would any of us be quite as troubled in such suffering if we were more patient and enduring, and better shared the mind of Christ in counting others as more significant than ourselves? Forewarnings must not omit this part of the narrative, as preparation should be as much concerned with the virtues that allow us to bear suffering well as with practical strategies for mitigating the circumstances that occasion the suffering.

The idea that to be aware of future suffering is to be prepared for it — or at least enabled to be prepared for it — has now been sufficiently complicated. I’ll leave it for another occasion to consider what may still be beneficial about anticipation.