EARTHQUAKES ON THE OTHER side of the planet. Burnt wreckage on the other side of the highway. We slow down to gawk, via windscreens or computer monitors, at tragedy visited on others. Why? Do we all have a touch of the sociopath in us?
These experiences are so familiar, they seem not to require explanation. Just say “schadenfreude” and people know exactly what you mean. Though the term is borrowed from German, the experience of pleasure at the suffering of others seems to be near-universal. Yet that ubiquity masks something truly puzzling. Suffering is still suffering, whoever is doing it. By definition it is repellent. So why aren’t we repelled?
The standard answer is that it is comforting to see the world’s portion of suffering distributed to someone other than us. Misfortune skitters about like the narrowed eyes of a flinty schoolmaster: so long as the focus falls on some squirming classmate, we are safe. This is nonsense, of course, but it would hardly be a novelty for our implicit conception of fate mindlessly to retrace deep lines of childhood anxiety.
This explanation has never quite convinced me, because I can’t watch film characters being cut apart. I have no desire to see another blade-swinging horror flick ever again. Depictions of clinical surgery are even worse, perhaps because what they show happens to real people much more often than does a gore-flecked rampage. But according to the “I’m happy the suffering is elsewhere” theory it ought to be easy for me to consume these images. They keep the scalpel safely within the world of the screen, not out here with me. Yet I think I’d rather undergo surgery myself than spend a day watching it on screen; at least then I’d be offered anaesthetic. So I am not convinced.
Besides, this theory doesn’t reduce the suspicion that we are all nasty little psychos at heart. Gawking at misery is no less vicious for being a palliative rather than a main attraction. So I was intrigued recently to came across a different theory of the magnetism of others’ suffering. It was not the first place you’d look: an essay of 1757 by the philosopher Edmund Burke.
Today Burke is remembered as the godfather of political conservatism. But for most of his life he was mainly known as the author of A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, a treatise on aesthetics and moral psychology. He wanted to explain the experience of the sublime – that overawed hushing of the mind occasioned by a sudden encounter with something unfathomably vast, like the stellar panorama of a deep space telescope. He diagnosed the subtle pleasure of recognizing danger at a remove: “terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too closely”. (Immanuel Kant would later develop a more sophisticated version of Burke’s theory that may be familiar to modern r
