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25 June 2009 9:25 AM
"AIDS Relief and Moral Myopia"
Travis Kavulla offers an intriguing long form piece on AIDS in Africa that focuses on the cultural reasons the disease persists:
HIV is a mysterious virus, and even Western scientists consider there to be a fair degree of randomness in its behavior. A person may be infected with HIV, but never become ill with AIDS, while still infecting others along the way. People's chances in contracting HIV during intercourse depend on whether they are men or women, circumcised or not, and other factors. Even condoms have a failure rate, so that over time even a "cautious" sexually active African's exposure to infection is almost inevitable, just as a gambler shooting craps will eventually roll snake eyes. This is all to say that it appears to many Africans that who is stricken and who is spared is not simply governed by obvious physiological factors: always present is the matter we might call "chance."
It is natural for anyone facing a terminal disease to ask, Why me? This is an exasperated, unanswerable cri de coeur in the rational West--one of the steps of the grieving process, we are told, that we all just need to get through. But many Africans have their own kind of answer to that question.
African tribes are not a homogenous, undifferentiated mass, but the vast majority traditionally held in common a worldview of causation very different from our own. With reference to illness, it is called the personalistic theory of disease. Even today, most Africans believe that any major occurrence, good or bad, has two causes. The first might be called physical: for instance, that a retrovirus causes AIDS by destroying the cells of the immune system. The second is a spiritual, less tangible cause, but is perceived to be no less real. Edward Evans-Pritchard, whose ethnography of the Nuer people of Sudan is a foundational work of anthropology, put Africans' cosmological outlook this way: One might understand that a house collapsed because termites damaged it. But the more important question is, Who sent the termites?
This view isn't so different that prevailing wisdom in the recent history of the West, he goes on to say. The whole fascinating piece is worth a read. Kudos to The New Atlantis for publishing it.
One more enticing sample below the fold:
Let us state, for the record, the basic facts of the matter: A vaccine for HIV is not an impossibility, and as long as it isn't, it remains the greatest and in some ways the only hope in the battle against HIV/AIDS. It is also clear that current Western methods of preventing and treating AIDS are objectively, scientifically valid. Condoms, properly and universally used among an "at-risk community," would prevent the vast majority of HIV infections from occurring. ARVs, administered in a brightly lit and non-judgmental setting, would give life to the unlucky few infected.
Yet short of a vaccine, the practical value of a scientifically proven implement, like a condom or an anti-retroviral drug, depends not on science alone but on whether it can be socially and culturally embedded. It is here where the West has faltered. Too often, policymakers take a device's or method's apparent scientific worth as a prospective indicator of how it will be valued in human society.
Read the whole thing.
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