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Multiheaded comments on Overcoming suffering: Emotional acceptance - Less Wrong
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This dialogue follows the most compelling (to me) scene in C. S. Lewis's "The Great Divorce". A saved woman is trying to coax a man she knew in life to join her in heaven while the narrator and his guide look on. She clearly acts in such a way as to reveal a preference that the man join her. But nothing he does, not even remaining in Hell for all eternity, makes a bit of difference to her emotional state.
Do I want her miserable? No. Do I think she cares, really cares about the man she's trying to help? Well... no. I don't think that's what "care" means; she lacks empathy for him. I recently acted in such a way as to get myself a baked potato. I don't really care, in the deep and meaningful way I care about other people, about having gotten a baked potato - and I'm not even devoid of potato-related emotional feelings, I would have been disappointed if it had caught fire and I was pleased when it turned out nicely.
Do I like being sad when my friends are sad? Well, no, not really, I don't have sadness-asymbolia. Would I rather not be sad when my friends are sad; do I want to deny them that power, as C. S. Lewis suggests would be only just? No! I don't want to go around helping people just because this is written somewhere on my abstract list of preferences, acting in numb glee and feeling nothing that responds to my environment.
I don't know what I want, Sir.
Frankly, I've always found this story one of Lewis' most sick, disgusting and unethical ones - and that's for an author who had many moments that come across as sick, disgusting and unethical to many.
When you share a bond of emotional contingency with someone, it sometimes happens that features of their style of living are so incompatible with yours as to destroy more of your own personal utility than the bond can generate. It's a nasty situation, which we often adapt to by laboriously self-modifying the bond away. Colloquially, this is called "getting over someone".
It's quite a reasonable response -- but it's also a voluntary one. I'm considerably less thrilled by Lewis including it as part of the salvation package by default. That seems -- well, manipulative is one word for it, but convenient might be an even better one. It's as if he's resolved a conflict between human emotion and his religious beliefs by declaring that the conflict magically won't exist in any sense that matters long-term.
Of course, that's not much comfort to the living people whose loved ones he's implicitly condemned to Hell.
Agreed. Although it feels to me like there are other appalling things about the situation in the story; I'll reflect some more and say what those are.