By Stan Le Quire of Eastern University and Jay Renfro, member of Nashville A Rocha
Jay and Stan are two guys who dream about changing the world. Together, they are reading Paul Farmer’s To Repair the World. Paul has a great reputation as someone who changes the world. This week, Jay and Stan are talking about the first chapter, “General Anesthesia for the (Young Doctor’s) Soul?”
STAN ASKS JAY: On page 17, Paul Farmer says, “I believe we’ll be judged by how well we do among the destitute sick. Strategies designed to prolong life into the tenth decade will flourish in the affluent world, but only if general anesthesia puts all souls to sleep will history judge us by the longevity of the affluent. No, discerning judges will look instead for falling life expectancies among the poor, wherever they live.” I like Farmer’s image of a society as souls asleep. However, I want to hear what you would say about this. Do you think our society is asleep? If so, what are the evidences or the signs of this condition?
JAY: I’ve heard the “Wake Up, Sleeper” sermon at least three times that I can remember, the one in which the preacher points out how we are all spiritually asleep and then emphatically charges us to wake up (hoping, perhaps, that we’ll react much like we do on Monday mornings when we sleep through our alarms and then sprint out of bed to make up for lost time). I think there are some people who are asleep— probably a lot of people, actually— but it’s unfair to call our society “asleep.” Paul Hawken’s book Blessed Unrest documents the current and very large movement of people who are working for the common good. It shows that people are motivated to do good when given the means to do it. Today it is extremely difficult to sleep through all of the world’s problems (and your “friends’” first-world problems) unless you shun all forms of currently trending social media. Actually, I wonder if it isn’t that we don’t know of any problems out there, but that we are bombarded by too many seemingly out-of-reach crises. Take a couple environmental problems for example: most people probably know that the rainforest is in need of saving—but the rain forest is way over there in some other country, and it’s not as if the things I buy here are contributing to the deforestation in any way, right? And I know that the ozone layer is shrinking or something— but I don’t use hairspray in aerosol cans so I’m good, right? Right?!?
So I don’t think everyone is asleep, just unaware of the practical solutions that exist. I’d like to think we (as a society) didn’t just roll over and hit the snooze button the first time we heard people were dying from preventable diseases. But each time we hear news like that without any kind of practical, personal solution available, it becomes hype that is increasingly more difficult to phase us. If your response to all this is something like, “Yeah, but by just sitting there confused and not doing anything, that’s basically as useful as curling up in a ball and going to sleep,” then I have to agree that you have a good point. Just because we don’t know what to do doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything. I think what is needed, then, is not a shot of adrenaline to kick us awake, but a much more dangerous stimulant that Dr. Farmer has only begun to mention: Re-imagination.
JAY ASKS STAN: Is doing the kind of work that Dr. Farmer models for us (repairing the world) restoring justice or showing compassion? Or maybe both?
STAN: My short answer is “Yes.” However, I bet you want the long answer. We probably need to let our readers know that Farmer is devoted to global health for the poor. These are his gifts and strengths. So, the “repairing” work that Farmer advocates is not planting a cute flower in the ground or releasing white doves into sunny skies. In this first chapter that we have just read, Farmer speaks bluntly that access to health care favors the wealthy. He challenges us to work for equity so that all can have their needs met. This is not just compassion, but rather a call to restoring justice and equity. So, I think that what Farmer is calling us to is a radical re-orienting of our society. Dr. Farmer touts the good news of amazing progress made by medical science, but warns that progress eludes those “who cannot pay” (15). Farmer says, “I believe we’ll be judged by how well we do among the destitute sick” (17). Inequity demands justice; therefore, our work is to restore justice for those who have seen so little of it in our world.
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