Kamal Ghorui
What is the point of pain?
Particularly of extreme pain?
That pain has a function is clear—it is a warning sign—to stop what one is doing, to take notice, to seek help. But extreme pain exceeds its function.
A person suffering from terminal cancer or a bad accident is not helped in any way by pain. Here, it is an overflow that lacks evolutionary logic. One would have thought that evolution through its random mutations would have taken care of this, but that hasn’t happened.
What is striking is that even science struggles to solve pain. Either solutions are not effective enough, or they unleash side effects and dependency that limit their utility.
Pain is so embedded in the dense network of systems that operate the body that eliminating it without affecting anything else looks virtually impossible.
What amplifies pain is the human ability to think. Pain is something we imagine, anticipate, amplify and revisit. Animals seem to suffer less, perhaps because pain for them is bounded. The extent of pain may not vary in some species, but animals don’t add layers of meaning to the pain they experience.
And then there is pain that has no physical origin at all. Grief, humiliation, heartbreak, existential dread— these hurt intensely yet no tissue is damaged, no alarm has been triggered.
This is suffering generated purely by thought, by the meaning we impose on experience. It is perhaps the clearest evidence that our cognitive architecture doesn’t just amplify pain— it creates it.
A metaphorical way of making sense of this is to think of pain as the price we pay for being human. As human beings, we have the unique capacity to conceptualise our experiences, to give words to them, to create a world that resides in that complex construction called themind.
The human scale of pain is, in part, a product of this special ability.
Nature is brutal, but not violent. Not in the sense we are. Human beings have the ability to inflict pain on others, not out of necessity but as a choice.
We torture, we hunt, we are cruel because we are able to detach ourselves from the violence we commit, and use it to make meaning that appeals to us.
We wage wars over fictions we have created, and kill to defend them.
We can harm over thousands of kilometres without being untouched by the consequencesof our actions. The same faculties that have allowed us to build civilisations have armed us with the ability to create unique forms of pain.
Not only do human beings have the ability to experience extreme pain, we have the desire to inflict it on others deliberately.
One way to think about this is to see pain through a moral frame. See it as a tax we pay to make up for our specialness. The same ability that lets us conceptualise pain for others does so for ourselves. At a deeper level, we can think of it as guilt monetised.
As the price we pay for what we do to others. As some form of moral compensation that we fork out as a way of balancing the cosmic ledger.
And it works at the species level. Those who commit genocide sleep well at night, the torturers go on to lead ordinary lives. To cope with this injustice, we invent the ideas of heaven and hell, of an afterlife and a past life, for otherwise there is neither justice nor explanation.
That is not to argue that human beings literally pay a price for our cruelty through the device of extreme pain. Biology does not care for our notions of moral symmetry. The nervous system acts as it has to, responding to stimuli as it has been designed to. But human beings need more.
We need to understand, interpret and make sense of what is happening. Unlike animals, human beings ask— why me? Why am I having to suffer like this?
And there is no answer that science can provide that feels adequate.
And all that the moral frame can tell us is that an innocent individual appears to be paying the price for what we, as a species, have done. If we are the kind of beings who cannot accept suffering as meaningless, then we do not just try to make sense of our own pain. We extend that impulse to the suffering we see around us.
Not because we believe it has a clear reason, but because it demands a response from us. Being empathetic and compassionate does not balance the books, but it does become a way for us to cope with the reality of pain.
Every act that relieves suffering— a hand held, a word spoken, a body eased— does not settle any cosmic account. But it acknowledges that pain, however it arises, cannot be left alone. That the same consciousness which turns suffering into a question can also turn it into a response.
Animals are shielded from such questions by the limitations of their capabilities. They don’t need to explain pain or justify it. When we suffer and suffer without reason, we strive to understand why. And answers, whether in the realm of science, faith or morality, are uniformly dissatisfying.
We suffer on account of our humanity; the only way to deal with it might be to display more of it.
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