The poverty of resilience: On memory,meaning,and well-being

Jean Amèry and the theory of trauma

Hanns Mayer was born in 1912 in Vienna to a Jewish father and Catholic mother. During his youth, he studied philosophy and literature, although because of financial issues he did so only intermittently. Although his family had intermarried and was largely assimilated, the 1935 Nuremberg Racial Laws returned Mayer to a stronger embrace of his Jewish identity. In 1938, Mayer fled to France and then Belgium with his Jewish wife and collaborated with the Resistance. Eventually, he was arrested and interned in a variety of concentration camps until his liberation from Auschwitz in 1945. Following the war, Mayer adopted the name Jean Amèry, an anagram of his birth name, symbolizing his alienation from German culture, and became a journalist and essayist. His most famous work is an autobiographical essay collection, At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplation by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities, first published in German in 1966.

In my view, the most important of the essays in this profound volume is “Resentments.” In that essay, Amèry (1980 [1966]) diagnosed himself with the disorder that Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and later Max Scheler called “ressentiment.” ³ For Nietzsche and Scheler, ressentiment represented the victim’s inability to move past his injury and is thus a laming of the autonomous will. The man of resentment, Nietzsche wrote, is “Powerless against what has been done … [an] angry spectator of all that is past.” In this way, for Amèry (p. 68), “resentment blocks the exit to the genuine human condition, the future.” This is because, for him, “anyone who has been tortured remains tortured” (quoted in Levi 1989, p. 25). Overcoming such a pathology, it would seem, would thus be paramount.

In an intentionally provocative turn of phrase, however, Amèry (p. 68) argued that resentment “nails every one onto the cross of his ruined past. Absurdly, it demands that the irreversible be turned around, that the event be undone.” In this way, Amèry’s characterization of resentment captures perhaps the central feature of trauma already mentioned, namely, its disordering of memory, whereby the past remains present and defies any “natural” temporality of healing:

I know that the time-sense of the person trapped in resentment is twisted around, dis-ordered, if you wish, for it desires two impossible things: regression into the past and nullification of what happened … For this reason the man of resentment cannot join the unisonous peace chorus all around him, which cheerfully proposes: Not backward let us look but forward, to a better, common future!

Indeed, one of the main problems for Amèry was the dissonance between his own need to keep the past alive—his sense that forgiveness and the future were not yet timely—and the eagerness of his German contemporariness not to be “nailed to the cross” of their own ruined pasts. In this regard, Amèry (p. 72) argued that resentment was in fact the only moral position for a survivor: “Man has the right and privilege to declare himself to be in disagreement with every natural occurrence, including the biological healing that time brings about … The moral person demands annulment of time.” In this light, resentment is a pathology, but the only acceptable stance in the face of certain experiences or at least in certain contexts.

The difficulty of Amèry’s condition, and its relevance to the discourse of resilience and well-being, is perhaps made clearest, however, in his debate with his fellow survivor, Primo Levi, who sharply disagreed with Amèry’s stance. In his reminiscence of Amèry in The Drowned and the Saved, Levi (1989, 136) argued that Amèry’s choice to fight against what he saw as premature forgetting “led him to positions of such severity and intransigence as to make him incapable of finding joy in life, indeed of living.” Levi was thus not at all surprised by Amèry’s suicide in 1978, having written, “Those who trade blows with the entire world achieve dignity but pay a very high price for it because they are sure to be defeated.” For his part, Amèry (p. 69) acknowledged his conundrum: “Self-confessed man of resentments that I am, I supposedly live in the bloody illusion that I can be compensated for my suffering through the freedom granted me by society to inflict injury.” Although the revenge he imagined was only metaphorical (or a matter of criminal justice rather than his own “whip-swinging hand”), this was, he believed, the only way for his trauma to heal: “Thereupon I would fancy that the contradiction of my madly twisted time-sense were resolved.”

In contrast to Amèry’s resentment, one might thus imagine Levi’s attitude of forgiveness, his desire to look forward, as a better model of memory and resilience: Levi appears in this light to be free of the psychological disorder that one might suppose caused Amèry to take his own life. So it is perhaps surprising that in 1987 Levi took his own life as well. Was his freedom from resentment disingenuous? Was it not enough to make him truly resilient? Or perhaps, in some contexts, resilience is not enough.

Theodicy and useless suffering

In this regard, it seems to me that a key to Amèry’s—and, by extension, Levi’s—condition is that it requires more than “resilience”—and resentment as a form of it— to produce “well-being.” While the fact of their suicides is proof, by definition, that they were not resilient, perhaps the problem was not in their own psychological inadequacies or their communities’ failure to help them. Perhaps, instead, it is an inadequacy of the therapeutic vocabulary with which we approach such unimaginable suffering, a vocabulary that aims more at alleviating pain than creating meaning, as if there can be the former without the latter.

Amèry’s comments on his need for compensation provide a hint of the problem, taken up in the work of yet another survivor, the Lithuanian-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Also following Nietzsche, Levinas (2001) argued that people want to believe evil has some intention and direction behind it, that injury is somehow connected to malice. But as Amèry (1980 [1966]) had pointed out, “The atrocity as atrocity has no objective character. Mass murder, torture, injury of every kind are objectively nothing but chains of physical events … They are facts within a physical system, not deeds within a moral system” (p. 70). In Levinas’ language, this means that our capacity to cope with suffering has been dramatically altered. According to Levinas (2001), theodicy—the desire to save morality in the name of faith or to make suffering bearable—still existed

in a watered down form at the core of atheist progressivism which was confident, nonetheless, in the efficacy of the Good which is immanent to being, called to visible triumph by the simple play of natural and historical laws of injustice, war misery, and illness. (p. 376)

Nevertheless, he argued,

Perhaps the most revolutionary fact of our twentieth-century consciousness … is that of the destruction of all balance between explicit and implicit theodicy in Western thought and the forms suffering and its evil take in the very unfolding of this century.

For Levinas, the peculiar condition of the modern era is that suffering appears “useless,” by which he means inexplicable by any justificatory scheme or causal explanation.

If Nietzsche preferred to say God is dead, Levinas pointed out that we tried but failed to save him:

This is the century that has known two world wars, the totalitarianisms of right and left, Hitlerism and Stalinism, Hiroshima, the Gulag, and the genocides of Auschwitz and Cambodia. This is the century which is drawing to a close in the haunting memory of the return of everything signified by these barbaric names: suffering and evil are deliberately imposed, yet no reason sets limits to the exasperation of a reason become political and detached from all ethics (Levinas 2001, pp. 376-77).

For Levinas, “the disproportion between suffering and every theodicy was shown at Auschwitz with a glaring, obvious clarity.” This is why, as already mentioned, Ricoeur charged that every theodicy is a form of bad faith, insofar as it claims that the inexplicable is explicable, that every injury has a cause. The inadequacy, even corruption, of this assumption is nowhere clearer than in the face of the kinds of suffering Levi, Amèry, and Levinas are trying to address.

Theodicy and suffering in social theory

Levinas’ philosophical discussion of theodicy may indeed seem rather far from the social science of well-being following disaster, of resilience as its prerequisite, or even from contemporary psychological research and theory on trauma. But it is precisely this distance that is my point. However inadequate any theodicy in the modern era, the discourse of theodicy seems to me to possess a philosophical heft more worthy of the existential issues contemporary suffering raises than the discourse of well-being and resilience; at very least, again, meaning seems more important to recovery than the vocabulary of resilience and therapy addresses.

As Levinas makes clear, theodicy is not an abstract philosophical issue or a question for policy in the present, but a human concern—perhaps the paramount human concern—with a deep history. Serious contemplation about the meaning of evil and suffering in the theodical frame, of course, traces at least as far back as the Book of Job. The term theodicy, however, was coined by the philosopher Leibniz in 1710 and posed a different dilemma in the age of Enlightenment, when the nature, even existence, of God was questionable in a way it had not been theretofore.

This new questionability came to a head in the aftermath of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, the meaning of which was taken up by the leading intellectuals of the day. Indeed, the sociology of disaster may be said, without too much exaggeration, to have been inaugurated with an exchange of letters between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire: Voltaire’s (1912 [1755]) Poem on the Lisbon Disaster powerfully criticized optimistic theodicy, including Leibniz’s that we live in “the best of all possible worlds” (a notion Voltaire also ridiculed in his most famous work, Candide). But while Voltaire was disgusted with any effort to justify Lisbon’s misery, Rousseau (1967 [1756]) pointed to the human and social dimensions of this ostensibly natural disaster: “the majority of our physical misfortunes are our own work,” he declared. “After all,” he continued, “it was hardly nature that … brought together twenty-thousand houses of six or seven stories” in Lisbon.

Two centuries after Leibniz, the sociologist Max Weber (1922) developed the term theodicy in a more general sense to describe cultural frameworks—religious or secular—with which people explain, rationalize, and justify evil and suffering. For Weber (1946), we develop explanations—whether religious or secular, professional or lay—of suffering and injustice because we are driven by an “inner compulsion to understand the world as a meaningful cosmos and to take a position toward it.” Indeed, this impulse toward meaning of one sort or another is, for Weber (1958), the driver of the very process of modernization: it is the urge that gives rise to rationalization (Tenbruck, 1980).

At a conceptual level, the effort to extend Weber’s insights to the contemporary period has given way to a more differentiated terminology. Some subsequent scholars, for instance, have argued for categorizing secular interpretations of suffering as anthropodicy. For instance, in modernity, Ernest Becker (1976) argues,

Man needed a new theodicy, but this time he could not put the burden on God. Something entirely different had to be done to explain evil in the world, a theodicy without Divine intervention. The new theodicy had to be a natural one, a “secular” one. (p. 18)

For Becker,

The challenge was all the greater because the human mind was not prepared for such ingenuity: the idea of a “secular” theodicy was a contradiction in words and in emotions. Yet it describes exactly what was needed: an “anthropodicy.” Evil had to be explained as existing in the world apart from God’s intention or justification.

In a similar manner, the contemporary German philosopher Odo Marquard (1989, p. 31) has argued that the form of theodicy has changed dramatically through the ages: “First, in the age of religion,” Marquard writes, “God sat in judgment over humankind; then, in the age of theodicy, humankind sat in judgment over God; finally, in the age of critique, humankind sat in judgment over itself.” (This third stage is what Becker meant by anthropodicy.) For Marquard, in this third period, in which we are all on trial, such efforts are attempts “to escape into unindictablity.” Alas, the flight is futile.

In a somewhat different framework, according to Jon Elster, the Darwinian account of evolution provided an initial alternative to traditional religious theodicies, a biodicy whose central explanatory mechanism was natural selection. This biodicy, according to Elster, laid the groundwork for subsequent sociodicies, including most prominently that of Marx. For his part, Elster (1985) critiques such sociodicies for participating in the same “misguided search for meaning” that animates traditional religious theodicies (p. 106). For his part, Elster (1985) suggests that no sociodicy has identified a mechanism analogous to natural selection that “could ensure social adaptation and social stability” (p. 103). In contrast, Arthur Vidich and Stanford Lyman (1985) take a less overtly critical view of sociodicy. In their view, American sociology originated as a response to the problem of theodicy and an attempt to fill the void left by the declining influence of religious vocabularies. From its inception, American sociology “searched for explanations of good and bad fortune—that is, what appears in worldly terms to be the irrational condition that the good suffer while the evil often prosper.” These sociodicies “justifi[ed] the ways of society to its members”—for instance, by interpreting social problems as “instrumentalities for the creation of a more perfect society” (Vidich and Lyman, 1985: 218, 282). “Praxis,” then, became a substitute for prayer, and sociologists engaged in “an attack on specific problems and the development of specific methods for problem solving,” guided by the assumption “that all problems are solvable by the application of reason and science” (p. 282).

Is it possible that the contemporary discourse of resilience and well-being expresses a similar urge? The sociologist Eva Illouz (2003) suggests something like this when she interprets popular culture as a kind of surrogate theodicy. “Popular culture, she argues “is not only about entertainment” but also “about moral dilemmas: how to cope with a world that consistently fails us and how to make sense of the minor and major forms of suffering that plague ordinary lives” (Illouz, 2003: 4). Following Philip Rieff’s (1966) argument about the “triumph of the therapeutic,” Illouz argues that the late modern, secular, and therapeutic vocabulary—like traditional theodicies—seeks to render suffering, struggle, and hardship comprehensible, congruent with a rational view of the world. In this way, the therapeutic vocabularies Illouz (2003) describes might be categorized as psychodicy, explaining and interpreting present suffering through the lens of earlier traumas that continue to haunt the survivor (see also Illouz, 2003). In her analysis, however, Illouz takes meaning seriously without implying that any meaning is preferable to none at all.

The literature on social suffering, emerging primarily out of anthropology (see, for example, Kleinman et al., 1997), aims in a similar direction, identifying social sources of suffering and underscoring how technical-rational modern systems elide or even suppress questions of meaning (see the discussion in Wilkinson (2005; 2013)). From another direction, the sociologist Colin Campbell (2007) argues that—as traditional Judeo-Christian theodicies have become less compelling frames for questions of meaning—Westerners have increasingly turned to Eastern spirituality for existential guidance, drawing upon Eastern frameworks to formulate “new age” theodicies. Despite “the great hope of the Enlightenment project” that “science itself would be the new Providence,” technical-rational scientific discourses cannot adequately address the profound moral and emotional dimensions of theodicy (Campbell, 2007: 368). No matter how hard we try to avoid its call or accept that we will never be satisfied, theodicy craves even spurious solutions; its demands cannot be bypassed.

Conclusion

In her recent book, Bright-Sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermining America, the pop sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich (2009, p. 33) recounts how, following a diagnosis of breast cancer, she was confronted with the demand for positive thinking. “A positive attitude,” she writes, “is supposedly essential to recovery … It remains almost axiomatic, within the breast cancer culture, that survival hinges on ‘attitude’.” Indeed, “In the seamless world of breast cancer culture … cheerfulness is required, dissent a kind of treason.” However, in Ehrenreich’s experience, and in her trenchant analysis, “Rather than providing emotional sustenance, the sugar-coating of cancer can exact a dreadful cost.” This is because of what happens when the disease persists, returns, or gets worse: “Then the patient can only blame herself: she is not being positive enough; possibly it was her negative attitude that brought on the disease in the first place.”

In an interesting sociological interpretation, even making explicit reference to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Ehrenreich attributes the rise of positive thinking to capitalism, the American version in particular. “Positive thinking,” she argues (p. 7), has “entered into a kind of symbiotic relationship with American capitalism,” telling people “they deserve more and can have it if they really want it and are willing to make the effort to get it.” In the process, however,

Positive thinking has made itself useful as an apology for the crueler aspects of the market economy. If optimism is the key to material success, and if you can achieve an optimistic outlook through the discipline of positive thinking, then there is no excuse for failure. The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails and your job is eliminated, it must [be] because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.

Whether in matters of material success or health, then, positive thinking is part of an ideological constellation that blames the individual. Doing so is necessary for making sense of suffering in a neo-liberal context.

There seems to be two kinds of alternatives to such a framework: Either we substitute a different theodical frame for the neo-liberal one—which includes both positive thinking and resilience as key components of well-being—or we return to Job’s conclusion (or God’s imposition on Job) that no ultimate answer is possible. While the framework of resilience and well-being is of clear practical value and can contribute to policy debates both small and large, it does not, in my view, address the kinds of existential issues highlighted by the tradition of social thought on theodicy, to say nothing of the difficulties of Amèry’s moral and psychological situation. And insofar, it bears the hallmarks of the modern forms of theodicy—biodicy, anthropodicy, psychodicy, and sociodicy (and perhaps even ecodicy)—it may also produce the kind of second injury that affected Amèry and Ehrenreich in their own ways. Not every problem is solvable. Not every injury has meaning. And, as Amèry implies, sometimes healing is not the best outcome, although one prefers Job’s forbearance to Amèry’s death.