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Where in hell are we? Judging from our national politics, international tensions, and the suffering described in news reports and visible on sidewalks in my own neighborhood, we\u2019re in pretty deep. Like many people, I struggle to shape and reshape the way I take action in this post-2016 era without completely losing my balance in the maelstrom.<\/p>\n
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My vision of hell probably looks a lot like Dante\u2019s Inferno\u00a0<\/em>(1320), an image I encountered in college when Dante\u2019s long poem of his journey through the nine circles of hell was assigned as an essay topic in a philosophy class. I remember liking the premise I\u2019d come up with, and it has stayed with me since then. It pops up especially when I get to wondering just how bad a particular incident or situation is \u2013 could it be worse? what could I do to help make it better? Given the current political, economic, and social climate, I\u2019m not surprised that the premise of that 54-year-old essay is on my mind again.<\/p>\n A few weeks ago, a folder of college papers surfaced in one of the many boxes I\u2019ve stashed away over the years. This essay was among them and I was eager to see it again. As I started reading, I remembered the panic I felt when I turned the essay in. Not only had I, a generally rule-abiding student, not read the whole book, but my essay was only about a page and a half, double-spaced. The suggested length was ten pages. With no prefatory comment and no helpful title, my 19-year-old self just leaped straight into my basic contention:<\/span><\/p>\n The severity of punishment in Dante\u2019s Hell does not vary from one circle to the next. There only seems to be a difference to an observer, like Dante, passing through. But all souls in Hell are suffering and all are in agony no matter which circle they are in. Each soul has no other punishment with which to compare its own agony, and with this lack of comparison, that soul\u2019s punishment would feel just as severe as any other. Each soul receives the worst and most appropriate punishment for the sin that soul committed. The soul of a thief is punished by having nothing, not even a form, that is not stolen from it. A glutton\u2019s soul is punished by having to wallow in mud, an appropriate punishment for one who wallowed in material things on earth.<\/span><\/p>\n Dante says, \u201cThe more perfect, the more keen, whether for pleasure\u2019s or for pain\u2019s discerning.\u201d A person evil on earth will not be as affected by a punishment in hell as will a person less evil on earth. The souls in the Circles of Incontinence, because their sins were not thought to be as bad, would be \u201cmore perfect\u201d so the suffering they felt would be \u201cmore keen.\u201d The souls in deeper circles do not suffer any more than the ones in higher circles. It just takes a stiffer punishment to make a sinful soul suffer the same agony.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n After all my trepidation, the professor gave the paper an A with a hand-written comment, \u201cIn three brief, brilliant paragraphs you have touched the soul of the Inferno<\/em>.\u201d Only now do I appreciate her use of the word \u201csoul\u201d in the comment, which seems apt given that I used the word 13 times in the three brief paragraphs. I have no doubt, though, that her note played a part in how firmly the idea that my 19-year-old self took from a medieval text got planted in my mind.<\/p>\n The power of comparison burrowed into my thinking. If souls in the upper circles of hell had been able to compare their punishment with the punishments received in the lower circles as Dante had, might they have felt a little better about their plight, might they have suffered a little less? I suppose, though, that this wasn\u2019t the point. In fact the upper levels only seemed\u00a0<\/i>better if, like Dante, you were able to walk from one circle to the next and observe the comparison, but not if you imagined being caught in one of hell\u2019s circles suffering its specific punishment.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n About 15 years ago, an editor I admired used a quote that felt true to me. Purported to be from Danish philosopher S\u00f8ren Kierkegaard, though I can\u2019t find proof, it said, \u201cThe root of all unhappiness is comparison.\u201d Memory of the idea planted by Dante may have helped this quote feel right to me. I pinned it on the wall over my desk and it stayed there for years. I tried applying it to my life.<\/p>\n If I could let comparison go, I reasoned, my sense of worthiness or even happiness would not depend on comparing myself to others. It wouldn\u2019t matter how I or anyone else judged my life against the lives of others. The amount of stuff or money or fame I had, whether or not I had a partner or children, how I expressed my activism, or any other of the many measures I\u2019ve used, consciously or unconsciously, to judge myself \u2013 wouldn\u2019t have so much influence over me. I\u2019d use the quote over my desk to remind me that I\u2019d be happier, more at peace with myself, and more able to be active and useful, if I could quiet those comparisons.<\/p>\n This expands Dante\u2019s lesson to include pleasure along with pain. In hell, the pain experienced is appropriate partly because the souls in each circle aren\u2019t aware of the pain felt in other circles. In my lived experience, I\u2019m fuller, happier, more ready to be and act in the world, when I can stay in my own circle of pleasure and pain, keeping comparison away.<\/p>\n The impact of comparison takes a different but at least as powerful a turn when I step into the turmoil of the world around me. Much as Dante considered the circles of hell when he moved through them, I\u2019m acutely aware of the widely differing conditions of people\u2019s lives as I move through and act in the world today.<\/p>\n More than two decades ago, I discovered an exchange between Hannah Arendt, a German-born American political thinker, and Mary McCarthy, an American author and political activist, in a book of their letters from 1949 to 1975.1\u00a0<\/sup>The ideas they discussed have stayed with me over the years, but only now am I making a connection with the Inferno.<\/em><\/p>\n On June 9, 1964, McCarthy wrote to Arendt about an idea she longed to write about.<\/p>\n The present idea has to do with equality. I\u2019ve long thought that this is the spectre that has been haunting the world since the eighteenth century. Or at least it has been haunting me all my life. Once this notion was introduced into the human mind, existence became unbearable, and yet once there it can never be banished.<\/span><\/p>\n The only people who remain happy or content are those who haven\u2019t yet heard of it, for one reason or another \u2013 at either end of the social scale. The beknighted squires (and there still are a few) who don\u2019t have a guilty conscience, and the beknighted peasants (and there still are a few) who don\u2019t suffer from envy. Both these groups, as it were, don\u2019t question God\u2019s disposition of His favors, whether He smiles on them or frowns on them. But everyone else is only pretending if they claim to take inequality for granted. On both sides<\/em>. \u201cWhy should I have this and not he?\u201d or \u201cWhy should he have this and not I?\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u2026I have the sense, maybe subjective, that the worm of equality is not only eating away at the old social and economic foundations but at the very structure of consciousness, demolishing the \u201cclass distinctions\u201d between the sane and the insane, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n Arendt replied on June 23, 1964.<\/p>\n Let us talk about the equality business; most interesting. The chief vice of every egalitarian society is Envy \u2013 the great vice of free Greek society. And the great virtue of all aristocracies seems to me to be that people always know who they are and hence do not compare themselves with others. This constant comparing is really the quintessence of vulgarity. If you are not in this hideous habit you are immediately accused of arrogance \u2013 as though by not-comparing you have decided to be on top.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n McCarthy\u2019s words, like ideas sparked by Dante, are firmly planted in my mind. McCarthy\u2019s \u201cworm of equality\u201d digs through layers of class, health, beauty, and morality, just as Dante\u2019s downward path draws him through the circles of hell.<\/p>\n But what of Kierkegard\u2019s root of unhappiness or Arendt\u2019s vice of envy? What if we long for the satisfaction and joy that might come from living in a world that allows us to know who we are without the envy and arrogance that can come from the habit of comparison? Can we imagine such a world without assuming that it requires returning to a medieval realm inhabited by beknighted squires and peasants?<\/p>\n If we\u2019ve found such a place, why would we venture out to see and feel the inequalities in both suffering and joy in the world around us? Why venture into a world that demolishes the distinctions between classes and between \u201cthe sane and the insane, the beautiful and the ugly, the good and the bad\u201d\u2026 the truth and the lies?<\/p>\n Why? Because the suffering is just as unbearable today as it was in the past. The violence now may be less but the pain remains as keen. Perhaps our hell, the circle of suffering being experienced right now, is exactly matched to the conditions we\u2019ve created, just as the punishment in Dante\u2019s hell was perfectly matched to the sin. And if, in absolute terms, today\u2019s conditions are better \u2013 \u201cmore perfect\u201d \u2013 and the suffering less than in the past, as some research shows2<\/sup>, the reason the world has improved must be because many people have ventured out, seen the differences, and insisted that things get better. Digging through the layers of class, health, beauty, and morality and comparing what we find, one layer with another, can be a source of energy to act. Things would not be better now if so many people in the past had not been restless, dissatisfied with what they saw, and determined to be part of making things better.<\/p>\n Choosing to work to reduce suffering or strive for more equality doesn\u2019t have to mean living without joy or pleasure. We just have to engage in two apparently opposite ways of living a life, one that digs down through layers of inequality, taking action as we can, and one that allows for the pleasures that come from being ourselves, avoiding envy and comparison with others. In The Crack-Up\u00a0<\/em>(1936), F. Scott Fitzgerald said, \u201cThe test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to\u00a0hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and\u00a0still retain the ability to function. One should, for\u00a0example, be able to see that things are hopeless yet be\u00a0determined to make them otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n I see it as a matter of continually weaving back and forth between stepping outside the dynamic spiral of action and into a more constant awareness of our own groundedness, then getting up and leaping back into the fray\u2026then stepping out, then back in, and out, and in.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.annefocke.net\/wp-content\/uploads\/2018\/05\/Inferno-horrorfilmcentral-adj-1.jpg\")
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<\/p>\n<\/p>\nNotes<\/h4>\n
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