Note on Adversity

By the way, in posting the lines from Shakespeare I was suggesting that, in my case, I can see that there is a silver lining to every cloud, but I was not suggesting that suffering is good because people learn from it. First of all, they often don't; secondly, that idea is a convenient excuse for people to behave meanly; thirdly, there are other ways to learn, and perhaps not much need to learn to begin with. And, if other people suffer too while one is learning a lesson, it would be heartless to feel glad about that learning opportunity.

I'm not speaking strongly out of any particular provocation, but sometimes I am very irritated when I think how callously everyone (myself clearly included) can see the miseries of others -- whether in the First or Third World -- and entertain the idea that this has a net beneficial effect. As an example, I need only take my History text, which calmly stated that the wiping out of a third of Europe's population by the Black Plague was actually a positive thing because the continent was becoming overcrowded. ! The superiority that each generation assumes over the preceding ones is little different from the superiority that one part of the world assumes over another today, and I think that this cruel mentality in dealing with the past is identical to the cruel mentality that informs foreign policy now (vide 650,000 Iraqi deaths).

It's the same thing with World Wars I and II. Up to a certain age I thought it was a glorious thing, where Allied soldiers killed the evil Nazis (the two wars were conflated in my mind), and that was that. And the general idea is that "all's well that ends well." But the more I read, the more I found out that the Axis soldiers were not always evil (certainly not all Nazis) and that the Allied soldiers were not always good, and that, to put the soldiers aside completely, it was mostly civilians who died. Tens of millions of people were killed, and many more wounded. But people play computer games based on this in their living rooms today. It would, of course, be unhealthy and unreasonable not to put the past behind us, but this should not be done before ensuring that the past will not be repeated, and understanding that the past should not be banalized.

Anyway, I'm sure that Shakespeare was not thinking of adversity of this general scope, but I did need to rant a little.