Pain

I’ve been, like Jean, thinking about pain. In part because my mother and several other people around me have cancer and other conditions that are either always or occasionally sources of acute pain; another couple of people I know are pregnant and will at some inevitable point in the near future have to decide whether or not to try and lessen the pain of childbirth with medication; and a story I read about the end stages of a dog’s life in Japan. Working with vets who have the ability and power to prevent suffering, and to end an animal’s life when they can, I was curious about the cultural differences that would make this a different choice in Japan. From Butuki:

In general Japanese accept and suffer pain and suffering a lot more than westerners. Even for humans far fewer drugs are used for patients in pain and who are suffering; they believe that the natural things the body goes through is part of the healing process. People (and animals) are expected to accept pain as part of life. That’s why you rarely hear women screaming and cursing in a maternity ward, or men getting into fights on the baseball field when a pitcher hits a batter. It’s considered extremely childish and weak not to bear the pain.

As I was walking around the Fernando Botero show at the Berkeley Art Museum recently, seeing his Abu Ghraib series — the paintings staggering in their intensity, number, and stark visual exploration of human atrocity — I was struck by how closely human pain is probably linked to the fear of it. I’ve been bitten by a dog in the past, and it was a local pain, a reminder that it’s a good idea to keep your hands out of the way of dogs’ mouths, and I patched myself up and moved on. But if I had been afraid of dogs — deadly afraid of all dogs and what they were and could be, wolves and agents of demons — would the pain of the bite have been worse? I’m guessing, yes.

Torture is supposed to work as a method of obtaining information because the victim’s fear of pain is supposed to overwhelm his or her resolve to keep such information from getting into the hands of the torturer. Of course, such a strategy breaks down on even a cursory examination: in the main, the strong resist and the weak say anything. But it does, by soft rumor, spread fear through a population in much the same way “terrorism” does — it breaks with codes and rules that have been established as belonging to proper human interaction, even when that interaction involves killing “enemies.” Pain as weapon. Unpredictable pain as more terrible weapon. The result raises the stakes and makes sadism fair game in warfare, presumably not the intent of the Abu Ghraib perpetrators.

Although I’m impressed by the Japanese stoicism Butuki describes, I am grateful for the advances in medicine that make it possible for people (and animals) in agony to have some relief. Whether we’ve gone too far — chugging analgesics in order to be able to run marathons when in fact our body is telling us, quite sensibly, that we are inflicting serious damage to our skeletomuscular systems — is another blog post.