Pain and cruelty in socio-historical perspective

Abstract

This essay analyzes the relationship between an assumed increased sensitivity to physical pain and the emergence of liberal society, with its distinctive features of capitalism (the market) and democracy (civic equality and citizenship). Sociological research in the problem of pain has mainly been informed by Mark Zborowski's book People in Pain (1969), a study in the social and cultural aspects of the pain experience. He found that ethnic groups offered its members patterns of attitudes and reactions to pain that were peculiar to the respective group. However, his study was characterized by cultural stereotypes, which remained ahistorical and unchanging (Kleinman et al., 1992, p. 2). On the other side, Zborowski's study opened an opportunity to develop a sociology of pain through further research and theory con struction (Encandela 1993). The question to be asked is how and to what extent does society and culture modify and shape behavior of the person in pain as well as the perception of pain. Is there a limited set of historical and sociological categories that people draw on to describe pain and what are the available models of pain in a specific culture? The study of specific cases of dealing with pain has not sufficiently been informed by a historical sense of transformations in its meaning (see also Morris 1991). With the onset of civil society the nature and sentiment of people's relationship to pain changed. This involved a revolution in sensibility. It contained a new aversion to pain, to be avoided at all cost. Pain was con sidered evil and happiness the absence of pain. Humanitarian efforts in every field of reform during the last two centuries were mostly concerned with the abolition of pain. These efforts were composed initially of the fight against cruelty, understood as the unjustifiable affliction of pain. Mod ern humanitarianism protests against such suffering and pain. In its phil