The Age of Pain
November 17, 2016 11:19 AM   Subscribe

In one respect, today’s emotional politics is the inverse of the 1960s. Back then, people were coming to define themselves by their pleasures: their sexual desires, consumer preferences, lifestyle choices. Today, many are coming to define themselves by their pains: past traumas, mental illnesses and chronic health conditions ... One culprit always stands out in public discussion of these trends: digital technology.
In The Age of Pain, New Statesman (15 November 2016), Will Davies (Goldsmith's, University of London) discusses the politics of pain and its intersection with digital technologies.
posted by Sonny Jim (32 comments total) 23 users marked this as a favorite
 
Yes. We had no pain back in the 60s. Life was all one big Woodstock.
posted by Postroad at 11:52 AM on November 17, 2016 [14 favorites]


How else to defend ordinary human passivity, in a culture organised around ideals of athleticism and entrepreneurship?
I was struck by the passages in The Discovery of France about human hibernation, peasants huddling together in bed through the long winter months, moving and eating and being awake as little as possible. It has been rolling around in my mind, how it sometimes seems like most of us are wired that way - wired to be passive, "depressed", in the winter, not wired for a modern world where food and fuel energy is limitless, where the only limit (it seems sometimes) is the internal energy you've got, how the anomalies among us who don't need to hibernate, who can go and go and go, are the only ones who can take full advantage of the modern world, though their endless energy would've likely killed them in the long months between harvest and planting.

It seems like our world is run by those without ordinary human passivity - or at least by those who can fake it for long enough - but it's populated by the rest of us.
posted by clawsoon at 11:52 AM on November 17, 2016 [29 favorites]


It seems like our world is run by those without ordinary human passivity raving maniacs

FTFY
posted by Strange Interlude at 11:56 AM on November 17, 2016 [16 favorites]


I'd love to read this, but on mobile chrome there's a big ol' pop up that simply will not close.

I also want to hear about this hibernating humans thing. It is relevant to my interests.
posted by schadenfrau at 12:05 PM on November 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


The author claims that people who block harassers on Twitter or set up safe spaces on university campuses are comparable to Breitbart-bubbled Trump voters. In other words, it equates those who seek protection from attack with people in a self-reinforcing cycle of racism and ignorance
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 12:08 PM on November 17, 2016 [25 favorites]


It seems like our world is run by those without ordinary human passivity

Worked with a guy. Forty-ish. Tall. Muscular from the gym and mountain biking. Aggressive. Needed to be in charge—but not to do what's right, but just to "do." He was completely bald. I called him "dick head."
posted by My Dad at 12:11 PM on November 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


The author claims that people who block harassers on Twitter or set up safe spaces on university campuses are comparable to Breitbart-bubbled Trump voters

That...might actually be all I need to know
posted by schadenfrau at 12:25 PM on November 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow (and anyone else willing to dismiss the article on that basis): he really doesn't. There are three sentences in the entire piece devoted to Trump voters. Three. And the point of those is to note the correlation between "rust belt" voting areas and painkiller use. It's a very small, almost incidental, detail in an argument which is largely about emotion and technology.
posted by Sonny Jim at 12:34 PM on November 17, 2016 [9 favorites]


I read this entire article and am not sure what I'm supposed to take away from it. It is about election PTSD or social media overload? Or maybe 80s/90/s consumerism bearing damaged fruit today?

It seemed intelligent and worthy of my attention when I read it, but then it ended and I was all, where's the rest?? There was no third act.
posted by I_Love_Bananas at 12:36 PM on November 17, 2016


That...might actually be all I need to know

so it ... bounced off your bubble?

I agree that it feels like 3/4 of a fairly good article.
posted by Sebmojo at 12:38 PM on November 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


how it sometimes seems like most of us are wired that way - wired to be passive, "depressed", in the winter

There are many parts of the world with no winter where food grows year round...
posted by airmail at 12:45 PM on November 17, 2016 [11 favorites]


Support for Trump was known to be most concentrated in areas suffering growing levels of chronic physical and mental pain, as well as rising mortality rates.

Growing levels of pain and rising mortality rates compared to what? Does this guy think that no-one had painful illnesses in the past?

This is partly a generational phenomenon. Those born in the 1980s and 1990s grew up in a society that was obsessed with health, activity and ambition. Offered no language with which to articulate vulnerabilities and anxieties, many have reached for the language of mental illness and victimhood. How else to defend ordinary human passivity, in a culture organised around ideals of athleticism and entrepreneurship?

What the ever lucking fuck is he talking about, "offered no language with which to articulate vulnerabilities and anxieties." Did he watch any movies or listen to any rock music or read any books in the 1980s and 1990s?
posted by desuetude at 1:07 PM on November 17, 2016 [10 favorites]


@I_Love_Bananas - I think the argument is that the cause of our increasingly private distress is political and civic alienation, and that we've been left feeling wounded and isolated as a result. Not only that, we have few avenues of discourse available for making sense of these private pains that haven't been constrained by the forms of the social media we use. (We feel free to "like" things on FB, but more involved engagement either comes with a price or is reduced, or shut down.)

The medicalisation of psychological distress cannot continue indefinitely: the NHS won’t be able to pick up the mounting bill for much longer, and medicalisation does not address the fundamental causes. The political question is how non-medical institutions (schools, workplaces) might be reformed or invented so as to treat people with greater care in the first place. Providing individuals with social and public routes out of their personal troubles will be critical, as the idea of “social prescribing” hints.

I mean I appreciate the impulse behind this. And I think it's correct, in many ways. Access to fairly paid and high quality work and truly equitable workplaces, healthy and engaged communities, a fair distribution of resources - all that absolutely makes a difference in terms of health and well-being, and is important in its own right. But those are distal determinants of health, that's a long-term game. When people are in acute distress - actual pain - it has already settled into a necessarily private and discrete body, and needs to be addressed as what it is.
posted by cotton dress sock at 1:17 PM on November 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


I think a better take is that the haves and have nots are losing common language. It's hard to relate to the working class with Broadway musicals, no matter how popular or how long the soundtrack streamed for free on NPR.

But it seems like base fear and xenophobia cuts across class, especially since it offers an alternative to class that threatens the status quo less.
posted by MuppetNavy at 1:23 PM on November 17, 2016 [10 favorites]


I think the safe space and social justice stuff is getting taken way out of context, too. The pundits infer it as our generation being weak, when really, it's more that we don't cut loose our peers with trauma. We're a generation that's less prone to hide mental illness or queerness, and we stand up for our friends.
posted by MuppetNavy at 1:26 PM on November 17, 2016 [23 favorites]


desuetude Growing levels of pain and rising mortality rates compared to what? Does this guy think that no-one had painful illnesses in the past?

How about just in the last fifteen years. Seriously, read that link. It's a great piece by The Atlantic about how shit things have gotten in middle America.
posted by SansPoint at 2:11 PM on November 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


>Support for Trump was known to be most concentrated in areas suffering growing levels of chronic physical and mental pain, as well as rising mortality rates.

Growing levels of pain and rising mortality rates compared to what? Does this guy think that no-one had painful illnesses in the past?


I read somewhere that support for Trump essentially mapped out according to counties and districts hardest hit by the opiode epidemic.
posted by My Dad at 2:14 PM on November 17, 2016


support for Trump essentially mapped out according to counties and districts hardest hit by the opiode epidemic

It's almost like there's some sort of larger underclass of people who have been kept sedated in lieu of meaningful experiences within the capitalist/neoliberal system, but that acknowledging that the underclass exists is difficult as it refutes one of the underpinning tenets of contemporary society. However, this is not a 'hot take', so we don't get that article. We get yet another hot take.
posted by The River Ivel at 2:38 PM on November 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


The "Hillbilly Elegy" stuff seems like a convenient smokescreen. What about voter suppression? And why did so many potentially Democratic voters stay home?
posted by My Dad at 2:53 PM on November 17, 2016 [5 favorites]


The article says, Now consider another matter that has provoked exasperation among liberals of a certain age: the phenomenon of campus “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings”, which might suggest that some students see their personal feelings as more important than free speech.

Um. No. Someone who thinks safe spaces and trigger warnings are about "feelings" rather than protection from harm has no business talking about the effects of pain or suffering in building communities.

Marginalized people trying to claim some of the security that straight-white-cis-men have always considered their birthright is not a matter of narcissistic self-interest.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 3:05 PM on November 17, 2016 [24 favorites]


I hope the conversation shifts to shared values, rather than jargon from the academy. The threat is real. People from different backgrounds and viewpoints have to find some commonality or we're going to be crushed. This doesn't mean giving up certain fights. It just means attempting to connect using a common language.
posted by My Dad at 3:10 PM on November 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


airmail: There are many parts of the world with no winter where food grows year round...

Aye, and none of my ancestors have lived in any of those places for probably a couple of thousand years, maybe more. There are times when hibernation seems like a really good idea... especially if I could get my kid to participate.
posted by clawsoon at 3:14 PM on November 17, 2016


The most interesting line in the article was this one:
...we can no longer cleanly distinguish between the spaces to which we turn in search of care and compassion (or emotional release) and those to which we turn in search of reasoned argument.
I think a whole article expanding on that one line would've been a better article. This is true of many online spaces, including Metafilter. Metafilter is sometimes good at care/compassion/emotional release, and sometimes good at reasoned argument. But sometimes both of those things happen at the same time in a thread, and the results tend to be... well... sometimes fantastic, more often horrific.
posted by clawsoon at 3:20 PM on November 17, 2016 [15 favorites]


My Dad: The "Hillbilly Elegy" stuff seems like a convenient smokescreen. What about voter suppression? And why did so many potentially Democratic voters stay home?

It can be all of these things. It can be racism, it can be a fucked up economy for rural whites, it can be political polarization, and it can be voter suppression. Nobody is saying that there is only one reason why Trump won certain populations.
posted by SansPoint at 3:27 PM on November 17, 2016 [7 favorites]


I don't think the actuality of people's economic realities and prospects necessarily has much to do with their perception of them. But it is true that these people's defining industries left them, and that more people than just them are worried. (Also true that there was obviously more than that going on.)
posted by cotton dress sock at 3:48 PM on November 17, 2016 [1 favorite]


desuetude: What the ever lucking fuck is he talking about, "offered no language with which to articulate vulnerabilities and anxieties." Did he watch any movies or listen to any rock music or read any books in the 1980s and 1990s?

As I understand, this group managed to build a house out of pain.
posted by dr_dank at 4:10 PM on November 17, 2016 [4 favorites]


Yes. We had no pain back in the 60s. Life was all one big Woodstock.

well, you had better drugs and better music.
posted by jonmc at 4:38 PM on November 17, 2016 [2 favorites]


While there are few valid observations buried in there, I am so so tired of the spate of think pieces that have come out after Brexit and now the Trumpocalyspe that scatter blame hither and yon all the while missing the main reason, even if they contain some truths: Both left and right are pandering to corporations and the wealthy while pretending to be for the average person, and people are now finally seeing through it more widely; and the media is doing a dismal job of reporting this, preferring distraction or often outright collusion in maintaining the official narrative.

These are not new revelations. Add social media, a concerted disinformation campaign especially from the alt right, identity politics, and a festering economy—well, there you have it. But let's not forget the primary culprit, neoliberalism.

In reality most of this handwringing and angsty pondering serves only as an attempt to further obfuscate the plain truth.
posted by blue shadows at 4:56 PM on November 17, 2016 [8 favorites]


Um. No. Someone who thinks safe spaces and trigger warnings are about "feelings" rather than protection from harm has no business talking about the effects of pain or suffering in building communities.

Marginalized people trying to claim some of the security that straight-white-cis-men have always considered their birthright is not a matter of narcissistic self-interest.


Pretty sure this article is neither arguing for the Jonathan Haidt response nor trying to delegitimize the significance of psychological pain.
posted by atoxyl at 5:54 PM on November 17, 2016


There are many parts of the world with no winter where food grows year round...

... and I live in exactly none of them.

*sigh*
posted by ZenMasterThis at 6:23 PM on November 17, 2016


better drugs and better music

that's for damn sure
posted by flabdablet at 3:41 AM on November 18, 2016


I agree that it feels like 3/4 of a fairly good article.

I felt more like it was the prospectus for a fairly good paper. I took very little away from this article except hypotheticals: what if trigger warnings and Trump voters both fit into the same model of private pain becoming public politics? What if the '68ers' public assertion of the right to pleasure actually robbed millennials of the vocabulary of human weakness? What if poverty and drugs weren't public enemies but a voter base?

Even for a prospectus, though, I thought this piece was disorganized, fragmented, and kind of incoherent. I was really disappointed, because I think there's a lot to say--positive and negative--about politicizing pain.
posted by BaffledWaffle at 5:14 AM on November 22, 2016


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