<html>
<body>
<br>
Dear Radix Readers:<br><br>
The condition of vulnerability is commonly focused on the victim,
collectively by group; its causes being homogenised as “poverty” and/or
“marginalisation”. <br><br>
A recent letter in The
Guardian
<a href="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</a>
, 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. <br><br>
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.”<br><br>
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 ? <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Any comments or observations ?<br><br>
James<br>
</body>
</html>