Standing Naked in the Storm

The Modern World and Third-Order Suffering

During my positive psychology class this last spring semester we spent some time talking about Bruce Rogers-Vaughn's book Caring for Souls in a Neoliberal Age. Specifically, we talked about Rogers-Vaughn's contrast between first-order, second-order, and third-order suffering.

First-order suffering is the suffering of the human condition. Universal and existential suffering. Illness, death, loss, grief, limitation, and finitude. First-order suffering is integral to human existence.

Second-order suffering is suffering caused by other human persons. This is the suffering caused by human evil. Trauma, abuse, harm, oppression, injustice, violence, and social marginalization.

Most of our pain is due to first-order and second-order suffering. However, the modern world has ushered in new form of suffering, what Rogers-Vaughn calls third-order suffering.

Third-order suffering occurs when we are deprived of the resources necessary to carry and cope with first-order and second-order suffering. Life is painful, but it is doubly painful if we lack what we need to face that pain, if we are abandoned and defenseless in our experience of suffering. Due to first-order and second-order suffering, life sometimes feels like stepping out into a cold, hard rain to face howling winds. Weathering that storm is hard enough with warm clothing and rainwear. Third-order suffering, by contrast, is stepping out into that storm naked and exposed.

Here is how Rogers-Vaughn describes the origins of third-order suffering in the modern world:

Without strong, vibrant collectives to support them, individuals are more-or-less left to their own devices to deal with distress. We might describe them as in a state of spiritual homelessness. These unfortunate souls are abandoned, left to interpret their sufferings as signs of personal failure...They do not have adequate narrative resources at hand to understand, to "make sense of," their sufferings. They are simply left with market-generated narratives of "personal recovery," which, like insulin for the diabetic, are perpetually fragile in the face of what they are up against. Such narratives are window-dressing, a veneer of order imposed over what once would have been a durable sense of self...Their options are either to look within, blaming their sufferings on themselves, or to stare into the fog...

Rogers-Vaughn mentions here two things that create third-order suffering.

First, the loss of thick community. In generations past, suffering was carried within rich, tight-knit families and communities. You didn't have to carry your pain all alone. Today the situation is very different. The Surgeon General has declared loneliness and social isolation to be an epidemic. The nuclear family has fractured. In fact, as David Brooks has suggested, the "nuclear family" was, in retrospect, a horrible idea, a "mistake." The fantasy that two married people, alone and isolated in a suburban cul-de-sac, could provide enough social support for each other and their kids was bound to fail. Should the mental health of either Mom or Dad falter, or the marriage itself fall apart, the domestic idyll could quickly descend into a hellscape. Generations of children were raised in these fragile ecosystems and we've paid a heavy price for it. And beyond the family, all around we've seen the evaporation of mediating institutions (e.g., churches, fraternal organizations, unions). In the words of Robert Putnam's book, we are increasingly bowling alone.

Beyond the social resources that once helped us carry first- and second-order suffering, Rogers-Vaughn also describe our loss of narrative resources, the meaning-making structures that once helped us make sense of suffering and carry our pain with dignity. In the past, these narrative structures were spiritual and religious in nature. But as the West becomes increasingly irreligious and secular, these narratives are evaporating. Consequently, in the face of suffering modern people face an existential void. We stare out into the fog. We lack a story that can carry us through the valley of the shadow of death. As I describe in The Shape of Joy, we see evidence of this narrative, existential collapse in our mental health crisis and in increasing of "deaths of despair" (suicide, drug overdose, liver disease due to chronic alcoholism).

In short, life has always been hard. The human condition is full of first- and second-order suffering. But we're also now experiencing third-order suffering. The modern world has abandoned us to our pain.

We're standing naked in the storm.