1998 Siu Lecture

The message I will focus on is not the Taoist or Confucian strand of the immensely rich Chinese culture, but the Buddhist component. The focus is on dukkha, suffering, and the message of the Lord Buddha, that life is filled with suffering, but that suffering can be reduced, minimized, even eliminated. Keep this in focus, and you have a good guide in life. You shall live your life so that you do not cause suffering in others, in any form of sentient life--"sentient" referring precisely to the capacity to experience suffering, and not only by humans, but also all other forms of life. One form of life is yourself: your duty is to alleviate, not to deepen your own suffering.

And the Buddhist guide adds greed and craving, excessive attachment, as the cause of suffering, pointing to a way out. To this excellent guide a Western message is added: we can measure dukkha on a 9-point dukkha scale from "1", the "barely noticeable", to "9", the "unbearable, wanting to die"; the unit, one dukkha, being defined as one person suffering level "1" for one day ("0" means no suffering). This permits us to make comparisons across time and space for any set of humans from the individual via the couple/family and the country to the globe, for any length of time, measuring the level of suffering as: Average level of dukkha x No. of persons involved x No. of days.

Let us deconstruct, to understand the underlying message.

First, the measure is in the homo mensura tradition of Protagoras, "Man is the measure of all things". In a community, a country, you may have the most glittering buildings or other material achievements, you may be politically/ideologically correct, being based on the purest implementation of the single true teaching of whatever kind. This measure makes us focus on the reality of the human experience. If people, persons, humans, in fact suffer, then what is so great about it?

Second, the measure is subjective. The single person is the only judge of his/her situation. My suffering is mine. Nobody is going to tell me I am not suffering when in fact I am; nor that the suffering is good for me, I have already considered that. Nor is anybody going to tell me I am suffering when in fact I am not; because according to them the objective circumstances should make me suffer. I decide that. I alone.

Third, the measure is profoundly egalitarian. Each person's suffering is given the same weight in the terse, mathematical, "No. of persons involved". Sounds trivial, and yet filled with dramatic implications. We humans suffer from serious fault-lines in our social constructions, between us and other forms of life, between genders, generations and races, between classes, nations and states. Genocide is massive violence across such fault-lines, direct or structural. Yet we protect ourselves against taking in the suffering on the other side, drawing clear lines between worthy and unworthy sufferers, like we do these days in Yugoslavia. The suffering of dehumanized, even demonized persons does not count. This measure makes us all equal before the suffering, like before the law. My enemy counts like myself.

Fourth, the measure does not include sukha, bliss, happiness. We might argue that there could be a separate sukha scale, and I would probably argue that. But the danger would be that some people's sukha is used to compensate, in an average way, for a lot of other people's dukkha the way economists construct their flawed measure of growth as per capita growth.

This is both humanly, intellectually and politically impermissible, and panetics, the study of (inflicting) suffering, does not commit that elementary mistake. The dukkha is there, revealed by figures staring us in the eyes. Our task is to reflect it and reflect on it, not to reduce it through some averaging. Averages bring no comfort to the sufferer; reducing the infliction, alleviating the suffering does. Quite another matter is the dispersion, the distribution of suffering. Some groups, some persons, suffer more than others. There is a policy in that: give priority to those who suffer most.

Fifth, the measure is non-theoretical. All that is said is that concrete human beings report suffering, some more than others. The measure does not tell us why. Maybe this is an improvement on Lord Buddha's reductionist insistence on greed and craving as the prime cause. Maybe better trying to identify the causes for each concrete case? But there is also a deeper reason hidden behind this formula: the theory we have may itself cause immense suffering. A formula to obtain the good society is usually also a formula to reduce suffering, and that formula may close out the suffering that is not supposed to be. Fault-lines dehumanize the unworthy sufferers; theories make us see the suffering as transitory, as means hallowed by the ends -- you cannot make omelets without crushing some eggs.

Sticking to that example in the Leninist tradition: I am reminded of the story, supposedly true, about a machine-tractor station somewhere in the Soviet Union, sometime in the 1930s. Private lands had been deprivatized, the kulaks expelled or exterminated, the sovkhoz-kolkhoz was the new mode of agricultural production, permitting maximum use of the new means, machines in general, tractors in particular. According to the theory, not only production, but also productivity should increase, the workers no longer being exploited and alienated.

In fact, both decreased. Immense suffering all over: the loss of the dear ones, the loss of land, the loss of freedom probably being deplored more than some gains like stable employment, however inefficient, some satisfaction of basic material needs. Of course the local party secretary could not give up the theory. He had to introduce another, counter-productive, factor that could explain the miserable effects, yet not detract from the theory. The catch-all formula was the bolshevik homologue to the workings of Satan in Christian epistemology: sabotage, by the Class Enemy. The problem was that no proof of sabotage could be found, possibly because the class enemy was too sneaky. So one night he produced the "proof" himself, adding more misery to miserable tractors by pouring sand into their ball bearings.

Another method is to plead for more time for the blessings to show up. "Give me five minutes more", or five centuries, and there will be a trickle-down effect from growth. And yet 2 billion people, one third of humankind, have less than $2 per day. 800,000 go to bed hungry. 100,000 die every day for lack of satisfaction of basic needs (food, clothes, shelter, medicine). See the United Nations Human Development Yearbook for more.

Let me now take this reasoning one step further by applying it to the practice of peace and development. But before that let us make a brief stop at another practice, that of law.

P, the perpetrator, has made V, the victim, suffer through an act of crime: theft, violence, sexual violence. One way of handling this is through revenge: V inflicts suffering on P, or

V's family on P's family, in a vendetta that lasts generations. But the (modern) state intervenes, deprivatizing the counter-violence, telling V "I'll do the infliction of violence on P for you, on the condition that you remain quiet". There is even a new terminology: violence from the state, from above, is not referred to as violence but as "justice", as when the head is severed from the body by the French guillotine and the henchman pronounces: ìau nom du peuple francais justice est faite.î

The panetics approach will now inform us of the following: we started with V's family suffering, now there are two families suffering. The point here is not that they can be compared, all sufferings can be, using the measure. The point is that in the Judeo-Christian legal tradition a mathematical theorem is invoked in such cases: the sum of two sufferings is zero. One suffering washes away the other: the victim feels fulfilled, reconciled to his/her fate, knowing that justice has been done.

In the USA today V may even watch P being executed, presumably to speed up the process whereby one violence cancels the other.

The panetics approach harbors no such theorem. The sum of two sufferings is two, not zero, sufferings. No stand is taken on crime and justice except one: try to minimize the infliction of suffering by preventing crime in the first run; do not believe that you reduce human suffering through punishment.

Moving into the practice of peace I am struck by the implication of the panetics approach to the current massive infliction of suffering in the NATO/Serbia/Kosovo complex. That the Serbs are inflicting suffering on the Kosovars, as they did before on Croats and Bosniaks, is very clear; nor is there any doubt that NATO is inflicting suffering on the Serbs through massive bombing of military and civilian infra-structure which, added to economic sanctions, will produce Iraqi suffering levels.

The Kosovar suffering, regardless of what proportion is caused by the guerrilla war between Serbian forces and the KLA, by the Serbian violence, by the NATO bombing, will also last for a long time. In 1995, the same order of magnitude, 650,000 Serbs were expelled by Croats/US from Krajina/Slavonia; being seen in the West as "unworthy sufferers" their suffering was made invisible.

The logic of war increases suffering through escalation. There is no way in which this adds up to zero. But there could be a way in which the suffering might serve as a stop signal: this is more than enough, as Tito proclaimed after the Croat-Bosniak-Serbian carnage during the Second world war, stop it. He had the power to say so and to enact it; the world has no similar figure of authority now that the UN has been bypassed. More particularly, the Croats could permit the Serbs back on the condition that the Serbs permit the Kosovars back (on the condition that the Albanian Muslims extend harbor facilities and mining privileges to the Slavic Muslims on Bosnia on the condition that they let Bosnian Croats become parts of Croatia). But the condition for this kind of deal is that we recognize suffering as equal, friend or enemy, worthy, unworthy. Better still: a deal of that kind might have prevented the whole war.

How do I, as a peace researcher, try to come to grips with the effects of a war, and how is that similar to, and different from, the panetics approach? Table 1 gives an idea, based on a distinction between the material, visible effects so often quoted in HQ type commentaries in the media (casualties divided into killed and wounded; material damage) and another distinction between the space of damage: nature, humans etc.:

The other categories in Table 1 expand that vision. Thus, there is an opening for the Buddhist approach to life in general by including the damage done to Nature space. Moreover, there is a glimpse into peace theory through the inclusion of the structural and cultural damage done to the social and world spaces, and the inclusion of time as a "space" opens for us the dynamics of violence through time, how violence breeds violence.

I have praised panetics for being theory-free, I have not said that we should all be theory-free. The task of panetics is

[1] to identify the suffering and its magnitude, and then

[2] to identify appropriate theory for the minimization of suffering.

My own studies lead me to believe in violent cultures and structures rather than violent people as the major causes for violence in general and war in particular. We may punish the bad actors and derive some gratification from that; unless we change some aspects of our culture and structure those very same aspects will reproduce the bad actors and those actors will reproduce the violence. Some of those aspects are very deeply rooted; moreover, there is the Pogo principle ("I have met the enemy and he is us"): our own culture is not very peaceful.

Panetics focuses on the infliction of suffering. If we now assume that the dead suffer no more and that the wounded can be healed, this leaves us with the bereaved and the traumatized.

Multiply the military figures about casualties at least by a factor of 10 for the primary bereaved (near family and friends) and by a factor of 100 for the secondary bereaved (extended family, neighbors, colleagues). Panetics will show the madness of war much more clearly; our usual statistics conceal the suffering. I have mentioned before that we humans have the unfortunate habit of creating fault-lines in the human condition. We create categories, the Self/Other divide, and massive violence. Genocide may fly across the divide, one example being the holocaust on European Jews, and not only by German Nazis. Here is a more complete image of the told and untold massive suffering humans are capable of inflicting, according to the fault-line (adding the fault-line between normal and deviant) and according to the type of violence: direct (intended) and structural (unintended).

Table 2. Comprehending Genocide: Massive Category Killing

No.

FAULT-LINES

DIRECT VIOLENCE

STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE

[1]

NATURE

slaughter

depletion

pollution

[2]

GENDER

killing women:

abortion,

infanticide,

witch-burning

patriarchy as

prison of women

[3]

GENERATION

abortion

euthanasia

exclusion of young

exclusion of old

[4]

DEVIANCE

-criminal

-mental

-somatic

death penalty

euthanasia

euthanasia

exclusion

exclusion

exclusion

[5]

RACE

eradication

slavery

colonialism

imperialism

slavery

[6]

CLASS

-military

-economic

-political

-cultural

elimination (all)

exploitation (body)

repression (mind)

alienation (spirit)

[7]

NATION/CULTURE

IDEOLOGY

ìgenocideî

narrowly defined

the state as

prison of nations

[8]

STATE/COUNTRY

TERRITORY

war (for food,

sacrifice, winning)

imperialism

Combine this with the image of the bereaved and traumatized and we sense the enormous suffering through the millennia. But we only sense this if we open our hearts and minds to the suffering of everybody, not privileging some suffering at the expense of others. As a matter of fact, probably one of the worst forms of dehumanization is to deny some categories their suffering, invoking theories like "they suffer less because they are so used to it". Deprive a human being of suffering and you deprive him/her of subjectivity, deprive him/her of subjectivity and you have constructed a non-human. The genius of Ralph Siu consists exactly in presenting us, in the double meaning of present, with an image so compelling that we can act upon it.

In his article in the Journal of Humanistic Psychology (Summer 1988, pp. 6-22), "Panetics - The Study of Human Suffering", Ralph Siu asks the question, "what are the types of suffering being inflicted by Americans upon fellow Americans?" And he presents two tables, one for the categories of suffering, and one for the agents on the causal side of that suffering. By far, most suffering, in his estimate, is linked to unemployment and poverty; much is found less under such headings as the justice system, crime and smoking (alcohol somewhat more). The

agents he finds most responsible are the business leaders, the president (presumably standing for the government) and the public media persons; much, much less responsible, the criminals.

In short, his image, expressed in megadukkhas, is of a society where crime may be an irritant but of very little significance relative to the suffering caused by Capital and State as expressed in unemployment and poverty. Even lawyers and church leaders get off the hook; their role is very minor.

At this point I will come to the rescue of the business leaders and the president, getting them off Ralph's hook, shaped by the word "agent". Agency is too close to action which is intended, and I doubt that these people sincerely wish to inflict the suffering of human degradation known as unemployment and poverty on anybody. I think what they do is more like unreflected behavior, fulfilling some of the commands of the structure within which they operate, an economic system where growth and profit are higher on the priorities than full employment and the elimination of poverty for all. The category of structural violence is intended to make this distinction lest we fall into the trap of blaming some particular people rather than looking at how we can reconstruct our economic structure. True, there may be some who justify unemployment because employers can be more choosey, picking from among the unemployed and recommend a relatively high level. But such people are usually economists rather than business leaders.

In their remarkable study of the plight of the Russian people under the economic reforms of the 1990s, Ralph Siu and Carl Stover point out that the suffering has increased, not decreased. What makes so many people unaware of this are the ideological blinkers: Russians should be happy, exiting from totalitarian communism, entering liberal democracy and the free market system. The problem is that these are gross ideological descriptions, not the experience of everyday life. Hence there is much need to save the theory, for instance by invoking the idea of leaders with communist habits, or invoking corruption.

Both may carry some truth, but also be uncomfortably similar to our friend above, the Party Secretary, out to save his theory. My concept of peace is to minimize suffering due to direct violence, and my concept of development to minimize suffering due to structural violence.

If the latter can be done with an economy of growth, fine; it probably cannot be done without some. But personally I am inclined to think that there is something still more important: an economy of subsistence guaranteeing everybody the basic needs satisfaction that is the basis for a life in human dignity. If the former can be done with balance of power strategies, fine; it probably cannot be done without a minimum of defensive defense. But personally I am inclined to think that there is something still more important: a population highly skilled in peaceful conflict transformation, in solving conflicts rather than having them fester till in the end violence erupts. But these are only some indications of where a better practice may be located. Much more basic is what Ralph has taught us: to take human suffering as the point of departure.

War and unfettered growth become like slavery and colonialism: labels for untold suffering. Due to Ralph's work the untold can now be told, if we sit down and to the job, trying to get some numerical estimates. As he says, they may be 100% off, yet the measure will tell us something of immense value. We may differ as to the good society, the good world and human happiness. But we might agree on something very basic: to reduce suffering, to stop inflicting suffering. So let us all do our best to translate these brilliant insights into tools of policy theory and practice, breaking the pattern of selecting some suffering and neglecting the other, and of aiming for the stars, oblivious of the suffering in our backyard.

Ralph G. H. Siu Memorial Lecture, Washington DC, April 26, 1999

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