A localised front . . .

It might seem that I wrote somewhat dismissively of Simone Weil in my last posting. But it would be wrong to see it this way. I was writing about psychoanalysis, and the secular view that underlies psychoanalysis, i.e. that there is only the material world and everything is assuageable and explicable solely in terms of that world. It is a subject not particularly associated with Weil in her role as a mystic, whatever about as a philosopher. And, as such, I was only writing about her in passing . . .

In a certain sense, too, Weil’s attitude was closer to that of Idries Shah’s (also discussed in the last posting) than I have previously indicated—to the extent that she could equally write that ‘Those who are unhappy have no need for anything in this world but people capable of giving them their attention.’

The difference between the two of them was that to Shah this matter of a compulsive seeking of attention represented a psychological absurdity, whereas for Weil it was the cry of the bruised soul, something to be taken seriously, and dealt with compassionately, something that one opened oneself up to at the cost of real personal pain.

The deepest level of human suffering, Weil described as affliction [that she had a special definition of what constituted affliction need not concern us here]. What it involved was an agony that paradoxically also represented the possibility of being approached by God. Thus, what was torment on the physical and/or mental plane might equally be interpreted as a mercy on the spiritual one.

What differentiates the Christian (and not just the specifically Christian) from the secular point of view is that Christianity offers to the convinced believer the possibility of a meaning to suffering. And not just to the sufferer but also to those who minister to suffering. In taking aboard the suffering of the afflicted, they also in some sense share in the possibility of the approach by God.

By contrast, to the secularist suffering is simply an evil with absolutely no redeeming qualities attached. Nor is there any consoling message in suffering for those heroic secularists who devote their lives to treating it. Which may explain why, in America, anyway, physicians have almost three times the suicide rate of the general population; while in terms of the medical profession itself psychiatrists seem to hold top spot.

Nor does this simply apply to those dealing with human misery, it applies also to the sufferers themselves. A study in hospitalized patients suffering from depression, published in the American Journal of Psychiatry (2004), has been described as finding that ‘religious affiliation is associated with significantly lower levels of suicide compared to religiously unaffiliated people, atheists and agnostics.'

For the secularist, the only method of dealing with suffering is to abolish it—something ultimately futile, in that the afflicted, like the poor, are, and always will be, with us. Suffering is not susceptible to eradication—it simply changes its form.

In a passage that may at first glance seem contradictory to the general thrust of this posting, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, in her seminal book, On Death and Dying, said, in relation to those who died best: ‘Religious patients seemed to differ little from those without a religion. The difference may be hard to determine, since we have not clearly defined what we mean by a religious person. We can say here, however, that we found very few truly religious people with an intrinsic faith. Those few have been helped by their faith and are at best comparable with those few patients who were true atheists. The majority of patients were in between, with some form of religious belief but not enough to relieve them of conflict and fear.’

What Kübler-Ross is saying here is not that religion was of no benefit in terms of facing up to death, but rather that it had to be a religious belief of, arguably, an almost transcendent quality. When I wrote above that ‘Christianity offers to the convinced believer the possibility of a meaning to suffering . . .’, I should really have also italicized the word ‘convinced’.

Thus, on the one hand, you have the convinced atheists, and, on the other, those of a convinced religious persuasion, with bookended in between the great morass of everyone else.

Interestingly enough, certain parallels can be drawn here with the experiences of Bruno Bettleheim, the psychologist, in Dachau and Buchenwald, where he found that the people who were least likely to be broken by the camp system were the Jehovah’s Witnesses, followed by, in second place, the communists.

Notice that the two ‘best’, or at least the most committed, groupings in both Kübler-Ross and Bettelheim form a very real dichotomy—and one that is not predicated on class or politics or race or whatever. This fundamental opposition is between those who, for want of a better term, accept that there is a spiritual substrate to existence, and those who don’t.

It is this primal dichotomy, I would suggest, that underlies all the lesser dichotomies of class and politics etc., which are really only subsets of it. It is the manifestation in human affairs of the cosmic struggle between light and darkness—which struggle alone supplies the possibility of understanding the meaning and purpose of universal existence.

What I am saying is that the fundamental conflict in the human world is between, to simplify things, those who believe in God and those who believe only in nature. Those seriously involved on both sides—in terms of the examples given: the atheists-cum-communists and the religiously committed—confront each other in a conflict with cosmic implications.

And then there are the rest of us . . .

Writing of the middle ground or morass, and in terms of what was clearly a worst case situation, Bettelheim went on to discuss those members of the ‘apolitical German middle class,’ who for whatever reason also found themselves in the camps—and he is writing here of Dachau and Buchenwald in the years 1938/39, when the purpose of the concentration camps wasn’t as yet primarily exterminative:

‘Non-political middle class prisoners (a minority group in the camps) were those least able to withstand the initial shock. They were utterly unable to understand what had happened to them and why. More than ever they clung to what had given them self respect up to that moment . . . No consistent philosophy, either moral, political, or social, protected their integrity, or gave them the strength for an inner stand against Nazism. They had little or no resources to fall back on when subject to the shock of imprisonment. Their self-esteem had rested on a status and respect that came with their positions, depended on their jobs, on being head of a family, or similar external factors . . . Nearly all of them had lost their desirable middle class characteristics, such as their sense of propriety and self respect. They became shiftless, and developed to an exaggerated extent the undesirable characteristics of their group: pettiness, quarrelsomeness, self pity. Many became chisellers and stole from other prisoners . . . They seemed incapable of following a life pattern of their own any more, but copied those developed by other groups of prisoners. Some followed the behaviour pattern set by the criminals. Only very few adopted the ways of political prisoners, usually the most desirable of all patterns, questionable as it was. Others tried to do in prison what they preferred to do outside of it, namely to submit without question to the ruling group. A few tried to attach themselves to the upper class prisoners and emulate their behaviour. Many more tried to submit slavishly to the SS, some even turning spy in their service (which apart from these few, only some criminals did). This was no help to them either, because the Gestapo liked the betrayal but despised the traitor’ (The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age: Bruno Bettelheim, Macmillan Free Press, New York, 1960).