Kleinman Arthur - A passion for society: how we think about human suffering

He wept as he spoke, making his words sound choked and broken. An elderly Shanghainese now, he had come from a desperately poor, tiny village in Anhui Province. A friend of a friend, he was telling me how the Great Leap famine of 1960 had destroyed his family: one death from starvation following another. And how he himself had run away with two cousins to a Shanghai suburban town, where he had survived only to be caught up half a decade later in the mass violence of the Cultural Revolution. My life was bitter, he said. I had to endure great hardship. This was not a problem just for me: many, many fared the same. We felt, in our bodies, we saw terrible, horrible things. When I think back, I wonder how I survived. Even now, all these years later, I am carrying with me this grief. (Interview with Arthur Kleinman, Shanghai, 2006)

A small, elderly American woman now, with lively eyes and a charming but constrained expression, she quickly became solemn as she read from the books she had written about her experience in the Auschwitz death camp: bare, unadorned prose and saddening poetry conveyed the systematic brutality and inhuman horror of her Holocaust life. (Arthur Kleinman, conversation with Judith Sherman, Harvard University, 2013)

Both of these witnesses lived through now iconic times of mass violence. Their painful memories conjure not just their own, but widespread social suffering. If that collective experience of death, starvation, injury, forced displacement, and despair sounds like history, then read todays newspaper, watch the nightly news, or better yet speak with refugees in your community who came from one of the dozens of wars, civil conflicts, floods, earthquakes, or epidemics that are devastating human communities in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and Latin America. And then speak to the poor, marginal, and broken families in Europe and America who are living the effects of structural violence in unemployment, inadequate schooling, substance abuse, mental illness, and chronic stress-related physical conditions. They too are experiencing social sufferingwhat Hannah Arendt referred to as the social problem.

This modern sensibility that human misery, no matter how deeply interior in the individual, is often a collective experience resulting from large-scale societal forces that in turn break neighborhoods, villages, networks, and families emerged out of the concern of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European and American thinkers with what human beings have had to endure. These early pioneers of social inquiry were, as we still are today, moved to witness and respond by doing something to assist not just individuals caught in desperate conditions, but whole populations, communities, and society at large. They understood that the sources and consequences of what was the matter were part of society itself, so that the interventions also had to be social.