The Disease Without a Name
“Words are the bugles of social change,” [i] wrote London Business School professor Charles Handy.
Whatever symptoms you might experience, there’s a word somebody has created to capture the essence of what seems to be ailing you. If a friend says they have symptoms like fever, the chills, nausea, diarrhea, upset stomach and headache for example, what’s the first thing that comes to your mind? “You’ve come down with the flu!”
It seems as if the ability to name a disease is dependent upon identifying a certain set of symptoms that alert ourselves and our physicians to the distinct possibility that we are unhealthy. When the sheer numbers of people afflicted become large enough, somebody, somewhere seems to step up and begin looking for a cure. Epidemics have a tendency to get people’s attention. Where do these breakthroughs come from?
Take the New York born (October 28, 1914) son of Russian-Jewish immigrants, for example. The first in his family to go to college, he enrolled at the medical school of New York University, researching influenza. The existence of the flu virus had recently been documented by others. This young student was eager to determine if the virus could be deprived of its ability to infect, while preserving the basis for immunity to the illness. He succeeded in this effort, continuing his research endeavors over the next decade. On April 12, 1955, the discovery of the polio vaccine was announced to the world. Dr. Jonas Salk became a household name. Salk never patented the vaccine nor had any desire to profit from its deployment.
Throughout history, cultures develop symptoms that evidence broader, societal ills. Yes, countries can become afflicted with maladies just like individuals unfortunate enough to contract the flu or polio. Who typically alerts the broader public to these sorts of social ills and the need for their eradication? Madleine L’Engle suggests, The first people that a dictator puts in jail are the writers and the teachers because these are the people who have vocabulary. Artists are dangerous people because they are called to work with human clay, with the heart and the soul.”[ii]
On June 24, 1901 a boy was born in a town in eastern Poland. He arrived in the United States on April 18, 1941 as a Jewish, immigrant-refugee. Raphael Lemkin has been characterized as one who belonged to a virtual community of frustrated, grief-stricken witnesses.[iii]
Lemkin’s distress was attributable to the evil he observed evolving in Europe. He focused on developing a readily recognizable term that captured the essence of the malady. He studied semantic theory and linguistics. He discarded terms like barbarism and mass murder. In November 1944, Columbia University Press released his book entitled Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. The word that he created to populate the discourse about the reality of Hitler’s horrors was unleashed. ‘Genocide,‘ the crime without a name had been born. Shortly after his death on August 28, 1959, approximately 70 countries had ratified a treaty criminalizing genocide. His funeral was attended by seven people.
Daniel Malaan became Prime Minister of South Africa in May 1948. He mis-diagnosed the ills of South Africa and was a central architect in the deployment of the prescribed treatment: apartheid. According to the dictionary, apartheid is defined as, the policy or practice of political, legal, economic, or social discrimination, as against the members of a minority group. The apartheid prescription developed by South Africa included the molecular components for the preservation of white supremacy, separation of the races and a retribalization of Africans. By 1991, a period of forty-three years, the final vestiges of apartheid legislation were repealed and free elections were held in 1994. Making a poor diagnosis and prescribing the wrong treatment can eviscerate the soul of a nation.
Today in the United States, we are not immune to the insidious maladies that come to infect the souls of our people and the heart of our nation. The symptoms are evident, th