suffering is bleak: a tale of people “burned out and listless as they hunched over at
hotel bars”.^46 The key point here is that for concern for suffering to remain
nourished, the possibility of not suffering has to remain imaginable. This is arguably
another of humanitarianism’s paradoxes. In attempting to identify, alleviate, and
hopefully eradicate the most extreme forms of human suffering, it risks describing
common humanity wholly in relation to human suffering, because of the core
dynamic of defining itself against suffering.
Clearly a high degree of ignorance or naivety about suffering is unlikely to be
conducive to plausible action to alleviate that suffering. But is there not an initial
danger too in potentially ranking all human activity according to how focused it is
upon extreme forms of human suffering, and of experiencing our humanity entirely
through the pain of others and our response to it? This might seem an exaggeration,
but in fact such tendencies dangerously contribute to the myth of the humanitarian
as perfect, pure altruist, a figure just as unlikely as the famed rational, utility-
maximising economic man. Tony Vaux’s own memoir is characterised by a quasi-
religious yearning as he discusses “’minimizing’ the self and increasing awareness of
the ‘other’”.^47 The title of his book, The Selfish Altruist , is alive to the paradoxical
nature of humanitarian concern, but its pages still contain phrases like “human bias
affects the purity of our altruism”, which implies a measuring of oneself against a
transcendental ideal.^48 We will examine in Chapter 5 Amartya Sen’s caution that
transcendental ideals of justice do not necessarily provide the best guide to
action.^49 Arguably his point has a wider resonance that is useful to consider here:
should humanitarians really measure themselves against saints? And does such a
move not contain its own selfishness and narcissism? A requirement of pure
altruism is ultimately entirely paralysing to any proposed humanitarian project, for
it abstracts away from the lived experience of human life that necessarily provides
the resources of empathy. It is also inegalitarian, if your experience of human
46
John Norris, The Disaster Gypsies: Humanitarian Workers in the World’s Deadliest
Conflicts 47 (Westport: Praeger Security International, 2007), 99-100.
48 Vaux, The Selfish Altruist , 7.
49 Ibid., 60.
Sen, The Idea of Justice.