The Greater Good

Over a drink with some friends yesterday, we started talking about the very controversial protests by the animal rights organization SPEAK against the Oxford animal labs. The Oxford animal lab has become a very emotive debate in part due to the graphic photos of experiments on animals leaked by some of the students and evidence which suggested that the vast majority of experiments conducted were used entirely to get grant money. The opposition insists that these experiments save human lives, while the animal rights group bring in their own scientists to claim that drug companies use animals to keep low overhead, ultimately harming the human population when the pharmaceuticals are released. Of course, speaking of low overhead, the same principle is at work when we buy clothes and products made in far away places like Bangledash, Indonesia...but won't get into that now.

Anyway, one of my friends was talking about being forced to kill a hamster when she was a first year biochemistry student at Oxford, a test designed to illicit that she was able to emotionally cope with the effects of experimenting on animals. In anger over this event, and bear in the mind that she is German and has a very emphatic German accent, she begin to heatedly explain that medicine and science has increased the human life span and brought rapid technology to the world, but has not done anything to make the world happier. The horrible infant morality rate has now ended in the West (although almost 16,000 children die per day in non western countries, mainly Africa). Disease is by and large controlled, our standard of living is quite high, and by all accounts and purposes we have far fewer concerns than our ancestors. Yet, people are miserable, and now obesity and depression (resulting in a population severely medicated) are labeled the great diseases afflicting North American, and, increasingly, Europe. Not to mention, our lifestyles are bringing about global warming and increasing carbon in the atmosphere.

But of course, in many ways, it is difficult to blame science. Happiness quotients are very hard to measure in society, and perhaps even the idea that happiness is a plausible goal, or a desirable goal, is mistaken. After all, I suppose the implicit idea is that extending humans' lives, increasing the quality of living, will make them happier. That equally unmeasurable concept—suffering—is believed to be the barrier to happiness.

Yet, does happiness, by default, result when suffering ends or vice versa? Many seek to find some sort of happiness in suffering, in the feeling of expiation that results from their abjection and degradation. Saying the world just needs Jesus is not a very sufficient answer either, although many will object on this point. A system of beliefs motivated by guilt and expiation operates on the same principles and falls into the same trap. Thus, there is traditionally the belief that there will be no remembrance in heaven of all those who didn't make it, and are, um, damned to hell, since that might rain on the parade a bit, and present the idea of suffering creeping back into the celestial realms. If this is the case, then how can a believer ever be happy here on earth?

But this is not a bash on any religion, but a bridge into my final idea, which is that we have mistakenly assumed that individuals are happy as individuals. Elie Wiesel once wrote a book on Job, and in the book, he made the point that while a society and a person may believe that suffering is individual, it is in fact always already collective. Unlike eastern religions, in Judaism, entering into the collective "cosmic anguish" of the universe does not bring relief to individual misery, but actually intensifies it. In other words, the catch 22 is that, for example, if we have to see some other creature suffer, even an animal, it does have an impact on human happiness, no matter how impervious, completely immune, or even sadistic many people may seem when someone else dies, suffers etc. Hence, in Wiesel's reading, Job's friends actually try to "justify" why Job's suffering is deserved, trying to distance themselves from it a much as possible and rationalize it away.

The great moral failure of Job's friends was that they were unable to realize that his suffering was their suffering. Yeah, it is a moralizing reading of Job perhaps, but the point stands, which is that I am personally just not sure that whether in the name of science, or religion, or whatever else, sacrificing for the greater good can ever do anything but scar our brains. We have brought many greater goods in the name of progress, but cannot bring happiness if happiness is indeed tied to suffering, and suffering is collective. If this is true, I don't know how it can be remedied. I cannot even hypothetically think of a way in which, at some point in time, any group of people, society, or religion can function without making sacrifices for the "greater good."