Paul Farmer with an AIDS patient
This past weekend, I finished the book “Mountains Beyond Mountains,” Tracy Kidder’s biography of Paul Farmer and his work to start the public health organization Partners in Health (PIH). Farmer’s life is radically different from my own, stradled between Boston and Haiti (among other places), working with some of the sickest people in the world, all the while exposing himself to a variety of unfamiliar (to us) and uncomfortable (for everyone) conditions. But these lived priorities reflect what Farmer refers to as committment to “the long defeat.” As Farmer suggests:
I have fought the long defeat and brought other people on to fight the long defeat, and I’m not going to stop because we keep losing. Now I actually think sometimes we may win. I don’t dislike victory…. We want to be on the winning team, but at the risk of turning our backs on the losers, no, it’s not worth it. So you fight the long defeat.
Farmer goes onto contrast this approach with that of the WLs (white liberals) when he says:
I love WLs, love ’em to death. They’re on our side. . . . But WLs think all the world’s problems can be fixed without any cost to themselves. We don’t believe that. There’s a lot to be said for sacrifice, remorse, even pity. It’s what separates us from roaches.
And that is the tension for the reader of Kidder’s book, and Farmer’s life more generally. I find myself jointly inspired by Farmer’s approach, but feel incapable of making that kind of radical life change. A choice like this requires significant sacrifices, and sacrifices of things that are not inherently bad (e.g. stable family life, security, safety). And so, faced with this tension, my own tendency is to fall into the WL category, inspired towards giving, evangelizing for the book or the man, while still not doing much in way of a radical life change. To be honest, I don’t know what the ‘right’ approach is here, but it is just as hard to forget Farmer’s story as it is to live it, and any attempt at middle ground feels but tenuously stable.
**- The title of the post is translated from a group of Haitians in response to what it is like when Farmer is away from the hospital
