Striving Suffering and the Meaning of Greatness

There are many things that are bad about socialism, and frankly it would take volumes to lay out all of its failures.

But in a discussion with my younger brother recently, he put his finger on its most corrosive error: the belief that suffering is a design flaw rather than a permanent feature of the human condition. From that single lie flows much of the moral confusion of modern life.

The Boomers raised an entire generation with the idea that pain is abnormal, that difficulty signals injustice, and that hardship is something that can—and should—be eliminated. We are now living in the wreckage of that psychological experiment. We raised children not merely to avoid suffering, but to resent reality itself.

The ancients would have found this incomprehensible—if not insane.

Consider the Spartans, admired for their courage but rarely understood. Through the Krypteia, young men were sent into the countryside alone with nothing but a knife. They were forced to survive by endurance, stealth, and intelligence. Many did not return. Those who did were considered men. The Spartans knew—without apology—that manhood, dignity, and competence are forged under pressure, or not forged at all.

Boomers, raised on the fantasies of Marcuse and Erica Jong, attempted to remove pain entirely from their children’s lives. Parents became friends. Teachers became therapists. Failure became trauma rather than instruction. Competition became suspect instead of formative. Discomfort became something to be litigated, medicated, or explained away. The result was not compassion, but infantilization.

I remember how we were raised. My father’s approach to parenting was telling us to be quiet during the ten‑o’clock news. My mother reminded us—regularly—that the kids down the block were always better than us. And yet my brothers and I loved our parents dearly. Their criticism and distance forced us to solve our own problems. It prepared us for life.

We were weaker than our parents. We could not tolerate the disappointment of our children. And a culture that cannot tolerate disappointment cannot produce adults. It produces grievance specialists, moral exhibitionists, and people who experience ordinary life as an assault. It produces people who require “safe spaces,” cannot tolerate dissent, and confuse speech with violence.

The full craziness of the boomers is now starting to be unveiled. Take the national debt. Because we cannot say no, we are nearly forty trillion dollars in debt—money we cannot repay. And that means that they will ultimately be forced to face the pain we tried to eliminate from their lives, probably in greater measure than we could have imagined. Our weakness has resulted in moral theft.

The most comfortable ten percent of the population in human history has responded not with gratitude, but with grievance. Global capitalism has lifted the vast majority of the world out of poverty, yet entire professions now exist to diagnose invented psychic trauma that earlier generations would have shrugged off. True hardship has been replaced by vocabulary.

Life one-hundred and fifty years ago bore no resemblance to this. Fourteen‑hour workdays were common, even for children. Work was dangerous, in factories, in mines and on farms with little or no safety controls. Infant mortality was prevalent and death was often present in the home, not sanitized hospitals and hospices. Five hundred years ago famine was common and plague was a recurring event. Parents helplessly watched their children die. There were no antibiotics. If you caught a fever, you died. War was constant and everywhere and it invaded your city, your town and village with regularity. You worked where you were born if you were lucky in the job that your father had. If your father had no job you starved to death. The question was never, “Who am I?” but, “Will we survive the winter?” People expected suffering and because death was near, they understood the meaning of the sacred.

STRIVING IS WHAT GIVES US MEANING

My brother Paul’s statement made me remember an assumption of our Greek ancestry. Greeks like suffering. In fact, it is striving in the face of hardship and chaos that provides life with meaning. Every Greek grandmother understands this. Our ancient ancestors believed that life was an arena, the Agon, and the point of life was to contend. Virtue is not moral intention. Intention is useless if not acted on. Virtue is excellence under pressure. Growth and nobility only come through effort and pain, or Ponos. And happiness is not a state of being, but a life well-lived through sustained effort toward virtue.

The idea behind original American feminism — before it went off the rails — was that women also wanted to strive. They didn’t want to be left out. They wanted admission into the full arena of life.

Our literature, pagan and Christian is loaded with the recognition that life’s purpose comes from striving. Achilles chose a short life striving for greatness over a long, comfortable one. Odysseus left the beautiful Circe and paradise to begin the perilous journey home to Penelope. Aeneas left the inconsolable Dido to fulfill his fate.

For Aristotle, it was understood that virtue is habit formed through repeated difficult action. For Catholic and Orthodox Christianity, the idea of suffering is paramount. For the Catholics, suffering is necessary and expected, for the Orthodox it brings salvation. Anyone who has spent time in Greece or Italy knows that suffering and complaining is the national sport. Striving and continuous improvement is what gives life meaning and purpose.

American culture has stood this on its head. American religion and American life is fundamentally transactional. We demand immediate results. If I do this, then I expect that. This fully explains Americans edging God out of public life. American secular Protestantism demands an immediate result from God. Why should I believe in God when he doesn’t take care of all our problems? God promised to heal me. God promised to make me rich. And if God doesn’t deliver, He has to go. He’s not performing. There’s no use for Him. In America’s twisted culture, not only is it that people are expendable, but even God is expendable.

And so, the Boomers came to the rescue. They tried to step in and replace God for their children. Helicopter parenting was designed to remove every obstacle. Tiger moms planned every second of their child’s day and tried to control every aspect of their lives. Mothers tracked their children on their phones, teachers were blamed when their students didn’t study, and the government is blamed when people don’t bother to work and take care of their families. Pregnancy is now a divine mystery, and people seem surprised that coitus may actually cause pregnancy. All obstacles must be removed and everyone deserves to live in perfect bliss regardless of how irresponsible their actions, or how unrealistic their expectations.

If this is the kind of God that Americans want then it misses the point. A God who acts as a domestic servant is not a God at all. There are no reputable theologians, Christian, Pagan, Stoic, or Epicurean that ever lowered themselves to accept the absurd proposition that the Divine Order of the Universe is answerable to us. The Greeks believed in a world where the gods could be arbitrary, and need to be appeased, but courage and humanity were required in the face of this. The Stoics believed in heroic action with a stiff upper lip. Christianity transformed this even more and held that we should not only practice bravery, but kindness in the face of the fragility and mystery of life. Even the Epicureans believed that we should act with some degree of dignity in the face of the absurdity of life. There is literally no reputable civilization on earth that denied the Divine Order of things because it did not bow to our every whim. Until now.

The Boomers, not satisfied with bad parenting, bad economics, bad foreign policy, and bad urban planning have grounded it all in bad theology. We have turned music to “musack”, art into undisciplined scribbling on a page, and made virtue superfluous because “it’s just too hard.” Boomer theology can be summarized as “there is no God, so let’s all be idiots.” The universe is chaotic, so let’s create more chaos. Everyone else is stealing, so why shouldn’t I steal? Math is difficult, so why do it? It’s the government’s responsibility to take care of me, because taking care of myself is too difficult. In academics, in sports, in virtually every theater of life the instinct of the boomer has been to remove every difficulty and turn our world into a sanitized shopping mall with padded walls.

Because the Greeks were ahead of us in so many ways, we can now admit what the Greeks have known all along. That life is a test. It was Christianity in its best form that put this into even sharper relief. For a culture or a country, how can we best support one another and care for each other—even in instances where we may not even have enough for ourselves? If someone asks you to walk a mile with them, walk with them two. Life is not fair—but even in the face of that unfairness, can we reach out to those even less fortunate? If you don’t like the preacher or the priest, is that a license to be evil? No ancient or medieval person would have believed something so ridiculous. If there is a bully in school, do we capitulate, or do we stand strong and show kindness? As our parents used to say, “you do the right thing, even if someone else is wrong.” Or as the saying goes, “Virtue is doing the right thing when no one is looking.”

The true heroes of our civilization through the ages are representative of this understanding. Heroism is not the absence of fear it is courage in the face of it. The kids who stormed the beach at Normandy into certain death. Lincoln who freed the slaves at the expense of his life. The Wright Brothers who invented the airplane. Jesus who preached love in the face of hate. Martin Luther King. Thomas More. Albert Einstein the patent clerk. Beethoven, the greatest classical composer of all time who fought deafness and isolation. Dietrich Bonhoeffer who defied Hitler.

When I hear evangelicals praise God in the midst of suffering that gives me a glimmer of hope. They are firmly in the tradition of western civilization - from Socrates forward. The opportunity to be great, either as a person or a nation only comes in the midst of hardship. We do not know why some are born with nothing, and others are born on third base. That is an answer to a question we will never know. But we know what we can do and what we should do. And for those of us who can, we are called to take on this challenge and restore the real meaning of greatness.