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4— Pain and Compensation
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Functional Adaptation

For Wharton specifically, as for tort law more generally, suffering thus carried with it a rationality of its own, a rationality that made it necessary, useful, and, in the end, happily self-regulating. This was the hope, I have argued, of the philanthropists, and it was also the hope, I would further argue, of an entire age fascinated by the phenomena of pleasure and pain and predisposed to see an instrumental reason behind their occurrence. Pleasure and pain were understood, that is, to be purposive phenomena: they came into the world for a certain reason, they functioned in a certain way, and they produced a certain result. For Herbert Spencer, for example, it was through the agency of pleasure and pain that human evolution could take place at all. If it were not for our sentience, our ability to register those hard lessons taught by the environment, we would not have been made to adapt functionally to that environment.

Since pleasure and pain were instruments of adaptation, since there were evolutionary reasons for them to be felt in a particular way, Spencer also argued that human sentience must vary—vary in degrees of acuity as well as thresholds of susceptibility—in different environments, which is to say, they must vary from one human population to another. "There is no kind of activity which will not become a source of pleasure if continued," he said, for, by the doctrine of evolution, "there will be evolved, in adaptation to any new sets of conditions that may be established, appropriate structures of which the functions will yield their respective gratifications." And so "the common assumption that equal bodily injuries excite equal pains" could not be more of "a mistake." Indeed, "after contemplating the wide divergences of sentiency accompanying the wide divergences of organization which evolution in general has brought about," one cannot doubt "the divergences of sentiency to be expected from the further evolution of humanity."[87]


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The medical profession, staking its faith on this "divergence of sentiency," was quick to develop a procedure rejecting "the common assumption that equal bodily injuries excite equal pains." Between 1840 and 1880, it became common for doctors to administer anesthetics to some patients and not to others, not only because they believed that "different types of people differed in their sensitivity to pain" but also because they believed there was a reason behind this difference, a reason medical science ought to respect. Doctors seemed to be guided by "a calculus of suffering," the historian Martin Pernick has observed, a calculus which, in making pain a measure of the functional disparities among human beings, and therefore a measure of the functional rationality of the world, obviously had "implications reach[ing] far beyond anesthesia."[88]

And indeed, Spencer was by no means the first to see in pain the differential effects of adaptation. Throughout much of the nineteenth century, medical doctors experimented with the idea that pain was a variable phenomenon, that those who were refined and civilized were also more susceptible. As early as 1806, Thomas Trotter, surgeon to the British fleet, began to worry that the march of civilization would result in a "general effeminacy," since it "never fail[s] to induce a delicacy of feeling, that disposes alike to more acute pain, as to more exquisite pleasure."[89] Other physicians, sharing his concern, lamented that "civilized life" had sharpened the sensitivity to pain, and that childbirth had become "exceedingly painful[,] . . . especially in the upper walks of life."[90] As late as 1892, Dr. S. Weir Mitchell, the founder of American neurology, would make the same argument, in an essay entitled "Civilization and Pain." "In our process of being civilized we have won an intensified capacity to suffer," he wrote. "The savage does not feel pain as we do."[91]

The "savage [who] does not feel pain" included Indians, who, according to Benjamin Rush (the most prominent physician of the late eighteenth century), could "inure themselves to burning part of their bodies with fire."[92] It also included blacks, who, having a "greater insensibility to pain," could "submit to and bear the infliction of the rod with a surprising degree of resignation, and even cheerfulness."[93] But cheerfulness in the face of bodily affliction was by no means limited to these two groups of savages, hardened by experience into insentience. "Savagery" was a remarkably elastic category in the nineteenth century—it was understood to exist, for instance, also in urban slums, whose population, according to Horace Mann,


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was rapidly "falling back into the conditions of half-barbarous or of savage life."[94] These born-again savages, adapting functionally to their new environment, were also now becoming immunized to pain, much in the manner of Indians and blacks—a fact attested to by John William De Forest, a wealthy Connecticut citizen and an occasional social commentator. "We waste unnecessary sympathy on poor people," he said. "A man is not necessarily wretched because he is cold & hungry and unsheltered; provided these circumstances usually attend him, he gets along very well with them."[95]

By a feat of adaptation, insensitivity to pain turned out to be proportional to the incidence of pain. Those who had the most to suffer were least hurt by it. The functional correlation between pain and insentience thus became for De Forest the ultimate proof of the rationality of the world, for here too injury was dispensed with minimal damage, dispensed, that is, literally as an economy, the frequency of pain being compensated by a corresponding immunity. Such faith in a compensatory structure might sound like the sentiment of some arch-antihumanitarian, but (and the point is worth emphasizing) that was precisely what De Forest was not . A Civil War veteran and an agent of the Freedmen's Bureau in Greenville, South Carolina, from 1866 to 1867, his credentials revealed quite a different profile, not at all what one would expect from his seemingly callous statement about the painlessness of pain.

The paradox deepens when we turn from John William De Forest to Lydia Maria Child. A staunch abolitionist, loyal friend of Harriet Jacobs, and the author not only of the popular Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) but also of the controversial 1824 Hobomok (with its daring depiction of an interracial marriage between an Indian man and a white woman), Child would seem to personify the very spirit of nineteenth-century humanitarianism. Yet she too believed in a differential scale in pain, seeing a functional correlation between the necessary hardships of blacks and their necessary insentience. For her, it was a "merciful arrangement of Divine Providence, by which the acuteness of sensibility is lessened when it becomes merely a source of suffering."[96] Like De Forest, then, Child also envisioned a principle of compensatory equilibrium in every living organism. Indeed, her abolitionism rested on just this point. For her, the slaves' insentience was evidence in itself, proving that slavery was atrocious and that abolition was imperative.

It might seem odd that those who made pain a political issue


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should also argue for its endurability among the habitually afflicted. But the oddity here is perhaps no more than a dramatic example of the adequating rationality we have been examining, a rationality that imaged forth the world as a commensurate order, so that problem and solution were not only reflexively generated but also instrumentally corresponding. Adaptation to pain turned out to be nature's solution to the problem of pain. It was Herbert Spencer, of course, who gave this functional rationality its grandest expression, making it the centerpiece of his "Doctrine of Evolution," which saw adaptation itself as a cosmic drive toward compensatory equilibrium, toward a "conciliation of individual natures with social requirements," so that at the end of the process "pleasure will eventually accompany every mode of action demanded by social conditions."[97] Spencer found such an adaptative equilibrium "in the balanced functions of organic bodies that have reached their adult forms, and in the acting and reacting processes of fully-developed societies," both of which were "characterized by compensating oscillations." Indeed, according to him, "the evolution of every aggregate must go on until" all imbalances are eliminated, for "an excess of force which the aggregate possesses in any direction, must eventually be expended in overcoming resistances to change in that direction: leaving behind only those movements which compensate each other, and so form a moving equilibrium."[98] It was this compensatory structure that made it possible for Spencer to speak of a "rational ethics" in which "men themselves are answerable" to themselves, justice here being simply a reflexive equilibrium, simply "a definite balance, achieved by measure."[99]

In making "compensation" and "equilibrium" the overarching terms under which pain is both instrumentalized and neutralized, Spencer dramatizes the functionalist logic of the nineteenth century, a logic at work, as we have seen, not only in tort law, perhaps its most salient expression, but also in the practice of selective anesthesia, and in the rational beneficence of the new-style philanthropists. It is against that logic, against its claim to being a universal form of reason, that I want to bring to the foreground a different cognitive style, a different way of thinking about pain. Here, over and against any proposed solution, any proposed equilibrium, there remains the untidy fact of residues: residues unutilized, uncompensated, unspoken for. The phenomenon I have in mind is something like "incomplete ratio-


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nalization,"[100] a phenomenon I associate most especially with the realist novel of the nineteenth century. Committed as it is to a dream of commensurate order, the novel is also haunted, fleetingly but also quite routinely, by the obverse of such a dream: by the failure of the world to conduct itself symmetrically, its failure to resolve itself into a perfect fit, a self-regulating circuit of pain and compensation.


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4— Pain and Compensation
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