Karen Armstrong starts with an observation about the popularity of children’s literature dealing with misery and sorrow (she mentions Jacqueline Wilson, with whom I am not familiar, but that darned Lemony Snicket series comes to mind) and ends up extolling the value of an unflinching look at the misery and sorrow that surrounds us in the real world.

“Increasingly it is becoming unacceptable to voice legitimate distress. If you lose your job, become chronically ill, or fall prey to loneliness or depression, you are likely to be told – often abrasively – to look on the bright side. With unseemly haste, people rush to put an optimistic gloss on a disaster or to suggest a patently unworkable solution. We seem to be cultivating an intolerance of pain – even our own. An acquaintance once told me that quite the most difficult aspect of her cancer was her friends’ strident insistence that she develop a positive attitude, and her guilt at being unable to do so.” —Guardian.UK

One of Armstrong’s corollaries is the danger of fundamentalist religion, with its ‘anaesthetic approach’ both in personal and political life. Although it is a sweeping generalization, this arguably predisposes fundamentalism against an all-embracing compassionate approach to others’ suffering. [I have previously aroused the ire of at least one FmH reader by endorsing another weblogger’s observation about the impaired capacity for empathy that underlies neo-conservatism.] Armstrong ends with where she must have begun, with the Buddhist outlook which is integral to her message; the centrality of suffering (rooted in impermanence) is embodied in the first of its Four Noble Truths. In a modern psychiatric context too, I have long been intrigued by the adaptive advantages that probably underlie the persistence of the depressive outlook in the modern psyche.