Final session of my four-week summer school course. Here are my students, hard at work in a final group assignment. It asked them to connect our discussions of the problem of suffering with their fields of study - social science, business, journalism, law, statistics, etc. - and variously fascinating things resulted.Journalists might help society focus on groups suffering particular hardships, directing government attention to address them, while also preventing unruly group-mind protest by communicating the right way to think about problems and solutions.
A healthy and whole legal system would prevent abuses of the weak by the powerful. Education could help people appreciate probable risks and accept the results without becoming mad or upset; risk should be transferred to the more powerful who can better afford it.
A welfare state wouldn't leave people like Job without resources.
Statistics might help us understand people better too, as a digital humanities-like study conducted by some students had found fascinating trends in word usage in the work of a famous Tang dynasty poet.
A lone literature student cited Paradise Lost to suggest that household division was the cause of much suffering, while a student of Marxist philosophy quoted Sartre's claim that in accepting responsibility for one's suffering one accepted responsibility for all humanity.
A group of sociologists finally said they'd tried to imagine a society without suffering and hadn't been able, and quoted from the novel-turned-TV series "Ordinary World" that "great pain is the breath of song," so only suffering will lead people to change the world.
