[Radix] Vulnerability begets vulnerability ?

[James Lewis]

Dear Radix Readers:

The condition of vulnerability is commonly 
focused on the victim, collectively by group; its 
causes being homogenised as “poverty” and/or “marginalisation”.

A recent letter in The 
Guardian 
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/06/letter-bernhard-schlink-reader>http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/jan/06/letter-bernhard-schlink-reader 
, written in response to a review of the film of 
Bernard Schlink’s “The Reader” by Julian Dodd (at 
Manchester - philosophy and social science), uses 
an interpretation of “vulnerability” that could 
extend investigations into its causes.

Dodds writes: “The film's point, I think, lies in 
demonstrating that vulnerability can play a part 
in leading one - anyone, perhaps - to commit acts 
of barely comprehensible wickedness.” And he 
concludes: ”Hannah, though guilty of an appalling 
crime, is a rounded, vulnerable character...But 
unless we accept that people who commit 
atrocities have stories too, we will fail to 
understand how such atrocities can be committed in the first place.”

Is it making too much of Dodd’s view of personal 
vulnerability and its consequences, to envisage 
situations where the same personal condition 
multiplied within a group, community or nation, 
could become a cause of "barely comprehensible 
wickedness" at the scale of genocide, conflict or 
war ? Or, perhaps more simply, by the actions of 
individuals in later positions of power and 
influence directed against migrant, minority or 
otherwise impoverished groups and communities of 
a kind from whence the perpetrator may have originated ?

A depressing prospect looms as large scale 
vulnerability is perpetrated by those who have 
themselves been personally vulnerable. 
Vulnerability begets vulnerability begets 
vulnerability – if there is no intervention into its causative processes.

Any comments or observations ?

James
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