During one of those weeks of exceptionally depressing news headlines, just before Christmas, a former Obama administration staffer named Ari Ratner published an essay arguing that it was time to dust off an old German word, weltschmerz, which translates as “world pain”. The Germans, as you know, have a word for everything. (They presumably feel plenty of schadenfreude about the fact that the rest of us don’t.) But weltschmerz was the one we needed now, Ratner wrote, because it encapsulates a sense of grief at how the world keeps falling short of expectations. The special awfulness of the news in recent months has taken varying forms: not much may connect the horrific shootings at Charlie Hebdo, Isis killings or CIA torture to US police brutality or Twitter misogynists, let alone to those infinitely more minor tales, such as Emily Thornberry’s resignation, where it’s the very triviality that’s so depressing. But all of them trigger a feeling that humanity never fails to disappoint.
Of course, it’s hardly the most important thing about any given atrocity that it makes people like me, and others not directly affected, feel despair. Nor was that quite the original meaning of weltschmerz among the 19th-century Romantics who coined it: they were more concerned with how the world frustrated their own self-realisation. Still, we need some name for what we’re feeling, and weltschmerz works better than some other famous foreign words for everything being wrong, such as angst (too inward-looking) or ennui (too resigned). When Ratner explained weltschmerz to two ex-colleagues, one agreed that for the idealists around Obama, his first term had been all weltschmerz. “The second term has just been schmerz,” said the other.
A major problem here is that we’ve created a world in which weltschmerz is almost inevitable: if anyone, anywhere on the planet, is being appalling enough, the media will let us know, where previously we might not have heard. Then there’s the irony that Steven Pinker identifies in his book The Better Angels Of Our Nature: life’s getting less and less violent, he insists, but our moral norms are improving even faster, outpacing reality, so we’re constantly affronted by things we’d once have accepted. The CIA torture report was so sickening largely because torture’s no longer a daily part of public life.
One irritatingly glib response is “just stop watching the news!”: if things are getting better overall, why bring yourself down by focusing on the negative? But it doesn’t follow from Pinker’s arguments that we’re wrong or irrational to feel weltschmerz. Indeed, as Ratner notes, it’s what drives progressive change: unlike angst or ennui, weltschmerz springs precisely from seeing that things could and should be better. The capacity to be disappointed is a good thing. There’s a parallel here with physical pain: though it’s unpleasant, the inability to feel it is an extremely dangerous disorder. World pain is bad – but numbness to world pain would be worse.
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oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com
