Pain is Dead and Other Truisms

A Book Review of The Palliative Society: Pain Today by Byung-Chul Han

There’s something lovely about books of aphorisms. Wordsmiths seem to know what we do, but say it better in two or three pithy lines, like how Ibn Ata’illah writes, “Pain, even if manifest in many forms, is only through being veiled from Him, the cause for pain is the presence of the veil.”¹ Likewise, Byung Chul-Han ponders, “What is painful, after all, is the persisting meaninglessness of life itself.”

In contrast, truisms only work insofar as they let us linger briefly in the illusion of profundity without ever staying long enough to ruin it. Is the The Palliative Society a book of aphorisms, or a book of truisms? Both?

To start, Han doesn’t build a grand, novel-length argument so much as tap you on the shoulder every few paragraphs to remind you that everything is hollow. That the central conceit is that contemporary life has become pathologically allergic to pain. This “algophobia,” he tells us, animates everything from our penchant for Instagrammable sunsets to patholigization of ordinary sadness. Having lost its cultural and functional legitimacy, pain is now a kind of social faux pas. We do not think about death, and we certainly don’t prepare for it. In his telling, our civilization has become a depressive hypochondriac where we ache with nothing in particular and are terrified of everything.

From one angle, this is a healthy delivery of grim pop-ups about late modernity’s terminal decline. That none of this is especially new seems beside the point; if truth feels tired, it must be true indeed:

“Palliative politics is incapable of implementing radical reforms that might be painful. It prefers quick-acting analgesics, which only mask systemic dysfunctionality and distortion. Palliative politics lacks the courage to endure pain. So all we get is more of the same.”

And yet, for all its palliative repetition, The Palliative Society does offer more than a selection of highlightable quotes. Han’s best moments are those in which he manages to reframe the dull ache of modern life in such a way that one must wonder: where is civilization itself going? Diagnosis of the cultural pathologies that grow like lichen on our over-networked, over-medicated, over-exposed selves is the first step. The idea that we inhabit a “palliative society” is not a banal dig at the woes of this generation. It really is a society-wide retreat from confrontation, wherever it arises, be it politically, emotionally, even aesthetically. To him, the “culture of likability” is a symbolic annihilation of anything that cannot be consumed without discomfort. Smiling influencers and digestible art are surface-level manifestations of a positivity-obsessed neoliberal digital life. Without pain, we have no catharsis from this.

There’s a particularly potent section in which Han speaks of the “hell of the same.” In his view, our environments isolate from otherness until the familiar suffocates us. Think of how personalization and customization is imprisonment to immediate desires, and liken the dopamine loop to a spiritual Möbius strip in the theater of neoliberal selfhood. Indeed, Han’s assertion that “positive psychology subjects even pain to a logic of performance” encapsulates a distinctly (but not uniquely) American distortion: loneliness, burnout, a society that is so preoccupied with the psyche and fixing it than questioning their societal issues. Proper Islamic spirituality should be a remedy that anchors the individual in divine intentionality rather than this perpetual optimization. We know that the reward for sabr is not increased output, but closeness to the Eternal. Where the palliative society anesthetizes pain until it becomes incoherent, Islam preserves its meaning through submission (taslim) and remembrance (dhikr), reintegrating the soul into a cosmos where even anguish has a place, and moreover, a point.

In the last chapter, Han’s deliberation of the “last man” (referring to Nietzche’s “’We invented happiness’ say the last human beings, and they blink.’”²) and digital surveillance is perhaps his most incisive moment. He points to capitalism not in terms of class or labor as a diffuse regime of psychopolitical control. He is less concerned with who profits than with how digital surveillance capitalism mutates subjectivity itself. The crisis is interiority:

“Only digital biopolitics can inoculate capitalism against the pandemic. Digital biopolitics closes a systemic gap. But the biopolitical regime of surveillance spells the end of liberalism. Liberalism will prove to have been merely a historical episode…The illiberalism of digital psychopolitics does not disturb him. His mania for health is such that he is constantly monitoring himself. He erects an internal dictatorship, a regime of control inside himself.”

This is indicative of a society that has internalized domination so thoroughly that it no longer registers as domination at all. There’s less need for overt control when it is auto-generated from within. Freedom, as a moral and metaphysical ideal, remains, but has been hollowed out and replaced by convenience. Yet, he cautions that the last man “is not a partisan of liberal democracy. For the last man, comfort is a higher value than freedom.”

This inversion is down to how humans understand existence and the human condition. Han rejects Francis Fukuyama’s triumphalist thesis that the “end of history” would culminate in the global spread of liberal democracy. Instead, he asserts that the last man is equally at home in autocracy or technocratic soft-totalitarianism, as content in China as in America. What binds these systems is not political structure but affective anesthesia: “heroism gives way to hedonism.” He draws on Ernst Jünger’s warning that a narcotized, painless ease pervades contemporary life, what is a “dream-like” ambiance that sterilizes resistance and detaches existence from risk. Far from being a citizen of liberal utopia, the last man is comfortable drifting through biopolitical sedation. Pandemic-era responses and a surveillance regime that solidified permanent access to the body only accelerated this drift, he argues, as it confirmed that the palliative society can thrive under liberal and illiberal regimes alike, as long as it sustains the shared objective of survival without suffering.

It’s not the dystopia we imagined. Post-human banality makes boredom and total control indistinguishable: “an altogether different future awaits us, the post-humanist age in which the last man and his boredom will have been overcome.” The one who has forsaken amanah, the moral trust of agency, and surrendered not to Allah, but to a simulacrum of safety.

Overall, The Palliative Society can offer a compact, almost monastic dissection of a new age culture. But his analysis circles transcendence. Han writes from a German, post-Christian context, and is a self-described Catholic and recluse. While he speaks of alienation, his alienation is psychological, aesthetic, but almost-not-quite spiritual. “What has been forgotten is that pain purifies,” he writes, evoking a sense of spiritual impoverishment that, while unstated, opens the door for a far deeper critique; one that Islamic spirituality is uniquely equipped to complete. This is precisely where his critique ends and ours begins.

“Pain is attachment. Someone who rejects all pain is incapable of attachment. Today, intense, potentially painful relationships are avoided. Everything takes place in a comfortable palliative zone. In his book In Praise of Love, Alain Badiou quotes one dating site’s slogan: ‘Get perfect love without suffering!’ The other as pain disappears. Love as consumption, which reifies the other into a sex object, does not hurt. It is the opposite of Eros, of desiring the other.”

So we would be adrift to not name the underlying disease: ghaflah, heedlessness of God. Pain is a method of remembering our soul’s need for Him. Where Han worries we have lost the capacity for tragedy, the Muslim insists we have lost the capacity for remembrance. The practice of Tasawwuf interprets pain as divine mercy: a means of stripping the ego, awakening the heart, and drawing near to Allah. Pain is not pathology but it is pedagogy. It reveals the nafs in its rawest state, detaches dependence on the material, tests sabr and refines intention, and, ultimately, grants ma‘rifa (gnosis). It is a means for reward and elevation.

Han sees modernity’s emptiness, even if he cannot fill it. If we read him, we should for confirmation: the anesthesia is real, but there may yet be an awakening.

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Photo by Akshar Dave on Unsplash

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Works Cited:

1. Kitab Al-Hikam, 223 [↩]
2. Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Modern Library, 1995. [↩]