Harriet Beecher Stowe's loss and Ian Welsh's pain

"When the couple's son Charley died, in 1849, at eighteen months, [Harriet Beecher] Stowe began, as [author David S.] Reynolds writes, her 'fixation on Jesus Christ as the humble sufferer, the grand symbol of the burdens borne by the lowliest members of society.' She explored this theme in a number of short stories and, of course, in Uncle Tom's Cabin, when she portrayed the title character, an enslaved man, as a Christ figure. She said that losing Charley made her understand 'what a poor slave mother may feel when her child is torn away from her.'"

-- Annette Gordon-Reed, in "The Persuader: What Harriet Beecher Stowe wrought," in the June 13 & 20 New Yorker

"When I was a young man I spent a lot of time really sick, and in a pile of pain. It’s not an exaggeration to say I’ve spent days screaming. It’s one of the reasons I have so little tolerance for anyone who excuses torture, or for anyone who stands in the way of effective healthcare, including effective pain medication."

-- Ian Welsh, in a June 2 blogpost, "Pain"

by Ken

I've been meaning for a while now to write about, or more importantly to direct you to, a remarkable post of our friend Ian Welsh. The nice thing about writing that engages meaningfully with the world around us is that it tends to age ever so gracefully -- as opposed to the psychotic blitherings of, say, Charles Krauthammer, which already reek of primordial ooze by the time he punches "send" on his word processor. And I had a feeling this post of Ian's, in which he relates some surprising and obviously painful (in a variety of senses) personal history would hold up pretty well.

And then I was reading Annette Gordon-Reed's review-esssay "The Persuader: What Harriet Beecher Stowe wrought," in the June 13 & 20 The New Yorker (unfortunately, only an abstract is available free online), taking off from David S. Reynolds's book Mightier Than the Sword: "Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Battle for America.

Gordon-Reed begins with a provocative question:

What does it take to persuade -- to move people from one position to another, or to get them to care about an issue that has never stirred their interest? How do you get a critical mass of people to believe that a dispute affects their visions of themselves as individuals and the world in which they live?

She goes on to point out that however badly polarized American society is today, we've had it worse.

Between 1861 and 1865, Americans did more than hurl verbal brickbats across the political divide; they fired cannons and rifles, killing one another in astonishing numbers. And they did so, in part, because a large number of Americans had been persuaded that they could not live in a country that countenanced slavery.

Uncle Tom's Cabin, she writes, was "one of the most successful feats of persuasion in American history."

Stowe's novel shifted public opinion about slavery so dramatically that it has often been credited with fuelling the war that destroyed the peculiar institution. Nearly every consideration of Stowe mentions that Abraham Lincoln supposedly said when he met the diminutive New Englander: "Is this the little woman who made this great war?"

I'm not going to try to synopsize the tales Ian Welsh has to tell of his extended life of agony, which I hope you'll want to read for yourself. For the moment I'm interested mostly in the connection he makes in the part of the opening paragraph I've quoted up top between his own experience of extreme pain and his personal stake in opposing torture and supporting access to adequate health care.

"Pain is one of the reasons," Ian writes, "I believe there is no such thing as a personally interested omnipotent benevolent God,"

because what I know about pain is this: you can experience titanic levels of pain for far longer than you can experience the same level of pleasures. The idea that pain is entirely is adaptive is laughable, because pain very quickly gets to the point of incapacitation, and someone who’s incapacitated can’t help themselves.

He offers us four aphorisms about pain he wrote down when he was about 25:

No matter how much pain you are in it can always get worse.

Pain comes in infinite varieties: each type is different.

All other things being equal mental pain is worse than physical.

The human capacity for pain is infinitely greater than the human capacity for pleasure.

Ian has another large point to make, and that's about the management of pain, or rather the all too common failure to manage it. His surgeon during his hospitalization, for example, was convinced that he was "a malingering little shit" who was just trying to scam pain meds. And then one doctor sized up the situation correctly and took on the weighty burden of responsibility for providing medical relief.

’ve always known, since then, that some good people exist. There aren’t very many of them, most people are chickenshit, too weak to be good or even truly bad, but they do exist. And I know the price that good man paid, I heard him talk about his daughter, who he hardly ever saw, because he put his patients first, and I saw the regret he had. And that he understood that when someone was screaming in pain, crying brokenheartedly or puking up blood, you know what, they come first. And no, you can’t just assume someone else will do it if you won’t, because most people are weak, and most people won’t do it when push comes to shove.

But to come back to my original point, there's something unstated that caused Harriet Beecher Stowe in the agony of her loss and Ian Welsh in his just plain agony to relate their suffering to that of others. There are a lot of people, very likely most people, for whom, under such conditions, it would be all about them.

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