Week 2 Reflection: Structural Violence
The ancestry of suffering is often informed by a constellation of social, economic and political forces which over time coalesce around the destructive structural violence of poverty. As The World Health Organization describes, “poverty wields its destructive influence at every stage of human life” (Farmer, 1996). But poverty goes beyond economic asymmetry. It robs those who suffer of hope, and the moral imperative to help is fatally hampered by delay. In the film Bending The Arc (Davidson & Kos, 2017), a young patient, Melquiades, lingers with long-term multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, but also chronic despair and exhaustion. A victim of disease, but also the structural violence imposed upon poor countries by economic administrations which withhold multi-drug resistant medication as ‘an expensive luxury’ (Davidson & Kos, 2017), and assign the violence of value to a hierarchy of human life (Farmer, 1996). A fatal violence which creates winners and losers.
But the film also offers optimism as a moral choice, and places the blame on a system which creates the suffering, instead of the patients themselves. As Doctor James Kim describes, “the key is to have a pessimism of the intellect, but an optimism of the will” (Davidson & Kos, 2017). As Kim’s program proves successful on the ground in developing countries, it empowers Kim and his colleagues to make the argument for investment at the economic source of the violence. When Melquiades recovers, Kim becomes emotional. “To think we almost let him die. Just because we didn’t think he deserved it” (Davidson & Kos, 2017). It’s optimistic treatment on the ground paired with economic argument at the source which bends the moral arc of history towards justice.
References:
Davidson & Kos. (2017). Bending The Arc. [Video File]. Retrieved from: https://video-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.library.upenn.edu/watch/bending-the-arc.
Farmer, P. (1996). On Suffering and Structural Violence. Daedalus , Winter, 1996, Vol. 125, No. 1. [Digital File]. Retrieved from https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20027362.pdf.
