The distinctly modern keenness to try to "fix" suffering

Worldviews from Christianity to Buddhism assert the inevitability of suffering. Why does the modern human being search for the elixir that will supposedly eradicate it forever? Michael Knox Beran at NRO looks at what happened to our species's perspective once it had begun to make some material progress, and its suffering was of a different order from what it had been when squalor was a given.