Page 39 - Ruminations

37. Affliction and infliction

The Pandora’s box of ills to which the flesh is heir may be usefully
divided into afflictions and inflictions. When we are afflicted by
calamity and catastrophe, the discernible cause, if any, is beyond our
reach. If that non-human agency is thought to be a deity, relief can be
sought through expiation and propitiation; in the case of the other
possibility, implacable fate, acceptance is the equally effective or
ineffective response to apparently undeserved suffering.
Infliction, however, has a perceptible cause. Thus practical means
can be brought to bear to neutralize or oppose misery at its presumed
source. This may be the sine qua non of magic (progenitor of science),
a time-honored recourse for every sort of interpersonal conflict.
In human history, ignorance of the physics, chemistry and biology
of natural phenomena have permitted ruling elites, secular and
religious, to maintain power by turning inflictions into afflictions in
the minds of their followers and preventing supposed afflictions from
being demystified into inflictions. That era of agony for the many and
ecstasy for the few came to an end in the West with the arrival of
humanism, free inquiry and empirical research during the Renaissance
and Enlightenment.
That apparently unstoppable tide of rationalism dispelled the Dark
Ages and brought science to the fore as the primary means of
discovering and treating the real causes of real events: afflictions were
on the run, and inflictions became ever more comprehensible as the
correct explanation for disease and oppression. The old authorities
lost their grip on the human mind through successive scientific and
political revolutions.
But real power is not yielded easily.
The malleable intelligence of mankind remains enthralled to
primitive fears and desires. The gains against superstition made in the
West may have peaked in the late twentieth century. Religious
authority is gathering strength, joined by secular elites intent on re-
establishing a vision of reality in which afflictions are mediated by the
church and inflictions meted out by the state to maintain entrenched
hierarchies of power and control. Both are doing so in a world
desperately in need of rational remedies for man-made inflictions too
often denied, downplayed or defined as intractable affliction.