Dr. Donald DeMarco

In the movie version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, there is a scene in which the captain of the book-burning squad makes off-hand comments on some of the books that are about to be incinerated. In his view, philosophy books are the most pernicious. He pulls down a book from the shelf and cradles it in his hands for a moment while proclaiming: “Ah now this one must be very profound: The Ethics of Aristotle. Now anybody that reads that must believe he’s a cut above anybody who hadn’t. You see, it’s no good, Montag. We’ve all got to be alike. The only way to be happy is for everybody to be made equal.” Holding a copy of Hitler’s Mein Kampf in his hand, he added, “So we must burn the books, Montag, all the books.”

The author of Fahrenheit 451 was exposing the sheer folly of trying to make everyone equal. People are equal in humanity and in dignity. But their inevitable differences provide wonderful opportunities for sharing, helping, teaching, and building a community. Nonetheless, there is one book, perhaps the only one every written, that would be in perfect agreement with the policy of the book-burners: David Benatar’s 2006 opus, Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence is a prescription for absolute equality. Benatar argues that deliberate procreation is immoral, that abortion is morally mandatory, and that the optimal size of the human population is zero. “Those who never exist,” he writes, “cannot be deprived.” For the non-existent, there is absolute equality.

Applying the logic of Benatar’s position, the book-burning squad should have conflagrated each other and preserved his book. Benatar out-distances Arthur Schoenhauer, hitherto the most pessimistic of all philosophers, in his purely negative appraisal of life: “By bringing someone into existence, one harms her by causing all the bad aspects of her life. By bringing someone into existence, one does not benefit her at all by causing the good aspects of her life.” The bad outweighs the good; non-existence is better than existence.

“Given a choice between grief and nothing,” novelist William Faulkner once said, “I’d choose grief.” (Wild Palms, 1939). Nothingness has nothing to offer, neither hope, nor peace, nor consolation. In non-existence, everyone is equal. This statement is actually misleading because there is no one around to experience non-existence. Never to have been is the fate worse than death, for even in death there is hope.

The Nobel prize-winner also said, “given the choice between the experience of pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” The experience of pain, we should be quick to point out, is not entirely negative. It has a way of intensifying our appreciation of life. The poet Aeschylus knew something about the value of pain which “falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God.” For Dostoevsky, “the only thing I fear is that I will not be worthy of my own suffering.”

A more realistic book than Benatar’s is Painless Civilization, authored by a Japanese philosopher by the name of Masahiro Morioka. Professor Morioka contends that the elimination of pain and the seeking of pleasure seem to be the ultimate aims of our present civilization. Yet, this concerted attempt to eliminate pain and suffering makes it difficult for us to locate the meaning of life. Our “painless civilization” inevitably brings about the “living corpse” or a “fossilized life.” Our excessive preoccupation with eliminating pain and seeking pleasure, according to Morioka, robs us of the deep “joy of life” that we could experience when we are transformed for the better by pain and suffering.

Life becomes insipid when it is not transformed through pain and suffering. Malcolm Muggeridge, who did a great deal of reflecting on his long life, came to understood “that the only thing that’s taught one anything is suffering. Not success, not happiness, not anything like that. The only thing that really teaches one what life’s all about – the joy of understanding, the joy of coming in contact with what life really signifies – is suffering, affliction.”

It is both profound as well as supremely paradoxical that the symbol of Christianity, the sign of the Christian’s faith is the Cross. Life and death have meaning; non-existence does not.

Donald DeMarco, a regular contributor to The Interim, is a Senior Fellow with HLI America, professor emeritus at St. Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ont., and an adjunct professor at Holy Apostles College & Seminary in Cromwell, Conn.