When Bad Things Happen to Other People (34 page)

The vehemence with which thinkers, both religious and atheistic, have attacked
Schadenfreude
has exacerbated and clouded the moral question of appropriate suffering. And though moral censure of the emotion, or the expression of it, often takes forms sufficiently crude to be ignored, it is important to remember that the roots of
Schadenfreude
-fear are deep. Too deep, it seems, for exploration by those who, after their own fashion, equate hostility with the very idea of such pleasure. The vestiges of Jewish and Christian morality are especially apparent in secular reflection on compassion and human suffering.

Philosophically, the assumption that benevolence must aim at the 
full
 good of another works to collapse any distinction between
Schadenfreude
and malice. Religiously, the particular visions of appropriate suffering that various creeds generate blur the boundary between human satisfaction and divine 
Schadenfreude
. What is most surprising is that our most conspicuous producers of codes of appropriate suffering should purport to be dead set against the idea that persons might take pleasure in the suffering of others.

Contrary to the view that
Schadenfreude
is diabolical, I advanced the notion that
Schadenfreude
is an ordinary object of rational assessment, not a knee-jerk reaction motivated by malice. Here is the pivotal question about the object of our pleasure: is it the actual suffering of another person or simply the fact that another person suffers? Kant, Aquinas, Bernard Häring, and many others have relied upon a distinction the legitimacy of which I question. I allow that pleasure in the injury of another person might not involve any benefit to ourselves whatsoever; however, I suspect that this purely non-selfish desire is quite rare. More often than not, pleasure surrounding the suffering of others probably involves both objects, namely 
that
 another suffers and his or her actual suffering. Beyond this, I have expressed skepticism about the ideas of hating the sin but not the sinner and laughing 
with
 someone, as opposed to laughing
at
someone. Mental gymnastics of this sort require such dedicated training that few ever master the routines expected of us.

The persistent theme running through this study is that emotional responses to suffering involve reason. The moral appropriateness of our emotional responses partly depends on their making sense within their respective contexts. There is more to know about
Schadenfreude
than this. It is a complex concept that feeds on conventional standards of morality—especially those of compassion, punishment, and equality—as well as personal ideals which may conflict with such standards. The morality we choose will color the world we inhabit. Our version of who the bad guys are and what people deserve will shape both our actions and our emotions.

Ultimately, we decide for ourselves what constitutes appropriate or trivial suffering. The possibility for self-deceit lurks here, as well as in the shame triggered by a realization that one cannot or does not feel compassion. Though
Schadenfreude
arises from the suffering of others, it may, when coupled with bad conscience, generate a new, internal pain of its own—what Nietzsche termed 
ressentiment
. Nietzsche knew that suffering tends to bring out the worst in people and realized that we are most likely to relish the consolation others’ suffering can provide when we are most vulnerable ourselves. We are least likely to give in to this pleasure when we feel ourselves to be least vulnerable. I have presented
Schadenfreude
not so much as a function of psychological extremes, though, as of a feeling that justice has been served or, following Nietzsche, as a revolt against the “spirit of gravity.” To the extent that
Schadenfreude
centers on appropriate suffering, I have suggested that a theory of
Schadenfreude
might grow into a social or religious theory of misfortune.

It would be naive simply to say that Christians profess mercy and forgiveness toward all and that any
Schadenfreude
Christians feel would be The Moral Problem of
Schadenfreude
hypocritical. Mercy and forgiveness can be ways of evading justice, and justice can hardly be separated from compassion in Jewish and Christian theology. Once we understand that mercy and forgiveness can be thought of as ways of tolerating or even encouraging wrongdoing, we see how important it is for Jews and Christians to expect punishment for wrongdoers. Forgiveness is consistent with punishment, for to ignore or dismiss the trespass against rules or beliefs which makes punishment appropriate may be taken to disrespect those rules or beliefs.

With so many different believers invoking God to justify their joy at others’ suffering, it seems appropriate to present the invocation of God as among the most vexing of all those values which generate 
Schadenfreude
.

Despite Kafka’s careful use of the term in his 
Brief an den Vater
 and Peter Gay’s purposeful choice in 
My German Question
, I have resisted hanging too much on the German provenance of the word 
Schadenfreude
.
Schadenfreude
did not enter the German language through the pen of Kant or Schopenhauer, nor exculpation of it from the works of Nietzsche. These influential thinkers were articulating a social phenomenon already a part of German culture just as much as they were contributing to moral assessment of that reaction. To view these Germans as serving both these ends is useful for two reasons: one, we refrain from thinking of them as utterly different from us; and two, we realize that the evaluation—and, by extension, the definition—of
Schadenfreude
is itself open to question.

I have agreed with Schopenhauer that
Schadenfreude
is a function of distance, that is, of the separateness between the 
schadenfroh
 person and the other whose suffering occasions pleasure. The greater the degree to which someone else resembles us, the greater the degree to which we will likely feel compassion for him or her. In everyday life some people adopt the perspective of a surgeon, a jailor, or a fanatical sports fan, habitually distancing themselves from others in order to finish a day’s work. I have discussed the problem that separateness (as opposed to solidarity) poses and pointed out the difficulty of simply insisting that we empathize with others in order to overcome the manifest separateness of persons. It is the awareness of whether and how the sufferer agonizes that makes the cruel person cruel. Empathy may lead to cruelty as well as compassion.

Schadenfreude
 tells us something important about how a person views the world—what constitutes suffering and what counts as an appropriate response to it. Through examining
Schadenfreude
, we can better see genetic, psychological, and social assumptions which mold our characters. Understanding the evaluative premises inherent in
Schadenfreude
can increase our sensitivity to the particular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar sorts of people. These evaluative assumptions enter into the vast majority of our common-sense judgments and opinions—we live by them. They evolve and we may hardly notice the change. Investigation of these assumptions and presuppositions can reveal what is unique in the outlook of a person or an age.

Because it does not fit received ideas, my normative defense of
Schadenfreude
can help us to see ourselves and others in new ways. Others may consider us to be acting cruelly though we ourselves do not. An increased sensitivity to pain and humiliation should strengthen our imaginative ability to think of strangers as fellow-sufferers and should prompt us to examine how we ourselves may perpetuate or exacerbate the suffering of others. As an explanatory category,
Schadenfreude
can inform ethical analysis in a way that studies of malice and hatred have not. And as an event that focuses our moral attention on another person,
Schadenfreude
can alert us to power structures and social forces through which our characters both take shape and shape the lives of those around us.

Although we stand alone, we live in communities. Our suffering involves other people. They are a part of many of the bad things that happen to us, just as we are a part of many of the bad things that happen to them. Distressing as it may initially sound, we naturally take pleasure in many of the misfortunes of others. Our moral beliefs and principles often lead us to conclude that others deserve their misfortunes. There is no point in torturing ourselves over the social inevitability of moral disagreement. We would do better to embrace moral conflict as a compelling reason to search our beliefs for evidence of oppression, abuse, or self-aggrandizement. More practically, we would do better to worry about how our communities can foster self-esteem in everyone. It would be foolish to conclude that people who like themselves harm others less, but it stands to reason that people who dislike themselves will find it hard to sympathize with others. Treating ourselves and others well animates and guides moral philosophy.

The introduction to this study took shape around a remark Kant makes in the 
Critique of Practical Reason
, a remark which relies on an implicit notion of moral appropriateness. This appropriateness justifies our approving of the suffering of the guilty. How plausible is it psychologically to approve of the suffering of another without celebrating that suffering? This is a restatement, in the form of a question, of Augustine’s exhortation to love the sinner but hate the sin. We may on occasion find it extremely difficult to hold our view of who someone is apart from our view of what he or she does.

Justice, like comedy, presupposes respect for the boundaries of personal dignity. In justice and comedy we stand united with others in common humanness. Revenge and malice separate us from them. The challenge we face is to distinguish justice from revenge on the one hand and comedy from malice on the other. This can be extremely difficult. It seems unlikely that someone will be cheered by the news that we are laughing with him (in comedy), not at him. It also seems unlikely that someone will be cheered by the idea that we approve of his prison sentence because of our love of justice, not because he will suffer terribly. Ultimately, pleasure in others’ misfortunes is as difficult to defend as it is to condemn. Both the identification and the appraisal of this outlaw emotion lead to moral and religious conflict.

The compassionate and long-suffering slave Baby Suggs, from Morrison’s novel 
Beloved
, came to believe shortly before her death that there was “no such thing as bad luck in the world, only white people.” White people somehow caused all the bad things that happened to black people.

Was Baby Suggs right? I have argued on the one hand that we ought not to view suffering as an effect of some hidden cause (and that Baby Suggs must be wrong) and on the other hand that the very principles by which we lead our lives harm others (and that Baby Suggs might be right). Few among us would now dispute that Baby Suggs was right in some way. The white people who enslaved and humiliated her no doubt acted kindly toward other (white) people. Baby Suggs grasped the dual roles most of us play in the world: we are ourselves the good things that happen to some people, and the bad things that happen to other people.

NOTES

Introduction

1. Immanuel Kant, 
Critique of Practical Reason
, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1956), p. 63.

2. C.D. Broad, “Emotion and Sentiment,” in 
Critical Essays in Moral Philosophy
 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1971), p. 293.

3. Arlie Russell Hochschild, “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure,” in 
American Journal of Sociology
 85 (1979): 572–573.

4. Richard Rorty, 
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 192.

Chapter One

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, 
On the Genealogy of Morals
, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), p. 57. Hereafter, 
GM
.

2. Arthur Danto, 
Nietzsche as Philosopher
 (New York: Macmillan, 1965).

3. Arthur Schopenhauer, 
The World as Will and Representation
, 2 vols., trans. E.F.J. Payne (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), vol. 2, pp. 171–172. Hereafter, 
WWR
.

4. Franz Kafka, 
Brief an den Vater
 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1992), p. 24. The translation is my own.

5. David Lodge, 
Paradise News
 (New York: Viking, 1992), p. 148.

6. H. Richard Niebuhr, 
The Purpose of the Church and Its Ministry
 (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 35.

7. Camille Paglia, “Junk Bonds and Corporate Raiders,” in 
Sex, Art, and
 
American Culture
 (New York: Vintage, 1992), p. 247.

8. C. Fred Alford, 
What Evil Means to Us
 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), pp. 70–71.

9. Colin McGinn, 
Ethics, Evil, and Fiction
 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 66.

10. Jon Elster, 
The Cement of Society: A Study of Social Order
 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 256.

11. 
Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary
 defines “gloat” as “to observe or think about something with great and often greedy or malicious satisfaction, gratification, or delight.” The lack of surprise is not explicit in this definition, and neither is the notion of misfortune.

12. Michel de Montaigne, “On Vanity,” in 
The Complete Essays of Montaigne
, trans. Donald Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1948), p. 729.

13. Robert Nozick, 
Anarchy, State and Utopia
 (New York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 239.

14. John Rawls, 
A Theory of Justice
 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 532.

15. Melanie Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” in 
“Envy and Gratitude” and
 
Other Works
, vol. 3 of 
The Writings of Melanie Klein
, ed. R.E. Money-Kyrle (New York: Free Press, 1975), p. 189.