The Problem of Painful Socks
The great abstractions of good and evil, pleasure and pain, are sometimes sliding down our shin.
Somewhat to my surprise, I have developed for the first time in my life an allergy to the elastic in my socks. I suppose it serves me right for having bought cheap pairs on the internet, which are probably manufactured in conditions of the utmost pollution and the cheapest labor.
At any rate, I wake up in the night with an intense itching just above my ankle, exactly where the tops of my socks reach. Of course, I then do exactly what any doctor would tell me not to do, namely scratch the itch vigorously. Such scratching is supposed to make itching worse in the long run, but I find that if I scratch for long enough, it subsides.
There is more to it than that, however. Although I don’t like being woken in the night (I won’t mention the other cause of my interrupted sleep), the fact is that I derive considerable pleasure from scratching the itch. I find it truly enjoyable and sometimes am even slightly disappointed that I feel the itch no more. Not all my socks cause the itch, and then I am disappointed to have none to scratch.
This causes me to reflect nocturnally on the relationship between pleasure and pain, or at least discomfort, and good and evil. Normally, of course, we assume that pleasure will eventually result in its opposite, if for no other reason than that any given pleasure has to cease. Some of my favorite lines in Keats are from the Ode to Melancholy:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine….”
This is surely true. When, for example, you have a plate of fresh asparagus before you, you are aware, from the very first spear, that the asparagus, ecstatically delicious at the first mouthful, will not last, that it will soon be finished, and that, moreover, the solution to the end of the pleasure it gives you is not simply to have more asparagus: for pleasure, with a growing quantity of whatever is its source, is a declining response. There is a kind of law of marginal utility that applies to the hedonistic calculus.
Moreover, pleasure, when carried to excess, is very like time, whose whirligig brings in his revenges. More of a good thing is, alas, not necessarily a good, much less a better, thing: The dose-response curve of pleasure is, like stock market prices, not ever upwards. Even the pleasure of scratching an itch has its limits: too vigorous, and it can excoriate the skin, excoriation being much slower to heal than to produce.
In fact, I find it hard to imagine unalloyed pleasure (or happiness) that lasts eternally, or even for a lifetime. The reverse is not true, alas: while it is difficult to imagine a single heaven, it is all too easy to imagine a thousand hells. Likewise, a world without suffering is inconceivable, to me at least, while a world only of suffering, at least for individuals, seems perfectly feasible.
If suffering in the abstract is an inevitable accompaniment of human existence, it does not follow that the sum total of suffering in the world must remain constant or that attempts at alleviation are futile. Moreover, it is a common observation that suffering is not awarded according to demerit. Every doctor has encountered patients or families whose suffering has been deep, repeated, and undeserved. While eventually suffering comes to those who deserve it, because it comes eventually to everyone irrespective of desert, it does not necessarily do so proportionately to that desert. Many a villain has died peacefully in his bed, while many a benefactor of humanity has suffered a lingering and horrible death.
Of course, it might be said that the relationship between suffering and pleasure in the case of my allergy to the elastic in my socks was inverted: first came the suffering, then the pleasure. It might also be said that the suffering was punishment for having bought the socks in the first place, in the implicit knowledge that they were the fruit of exploitation (though it is not certain that the exploited would be any better off if they were not exploited, and might even be worse off), but in my defense or extenuation let me say that, living in a small town in England, it is not easy to come by twelve pairs of identical, allegedly pure cotton socks for $7.50—and it is important to have identical socks because, I don’t know how or why, the washing machine has a built-in knack of mixing socks up so that, however carefully paired they entered, they always leave with some unpaired orphans, a problem obviated if all the socks are the same.
But in any case, I do not believe in suffering as educative, as the teacher’s rap over the knuckles with a wooden ruler was believed to be in my childhood, and therefore there is no reason why the order of pleasure and pain should always be the same, from pleasure to pain. When I look up at the stars on a clear night and in a clear atmosphere (in an area where such a thing exists), with my minimal astronomical knowledge of the vastness of the universe and the pullulation of its objects, I cannot help but feel that my suffering, such as it is, cannot in any case be of much significance. Theodicy, the attempt to explain the existence of evil and unmerited suffering in a world created by an all-wise, all-knowing, all-powerful and benevolent deity has always seemed to me a form of whistling in the wind. At least one of those attributes would have to go to explain what is to be observed daily.
On the other hand, significance is not a natural quality; something can have significance only if there is a thinking mind to attribute it. If there were no thinking beings in the universe, it—the universe—would be of no significance whatever. Similarly, nothing is good or bad but thinking makes it so: By which I mean not that there is no intrinsic difference between good and bad but that, again, if there were no thinking beings in the world, there would be no good or evil. The leopard is not evil because it eats the antelope.
I think it is a fact of our nature that there could be no pleasure without pain, no goodness without evil, and no beauty without ugliness, though their precise proportions are not fixed. A perfect world would be imperfect, deprived of meaning or significance: Therefore, there is no such possibility as a perfect world. That is why depictions or descriptions of heaven are so much less vivid than those of hell, which are always very lively, if horrifying.
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