The Politics of Humanity

Stan Cohen focuses on the many modes and layers of denial that
characterise our engagement with the suffering around us in everyday life, and that
can be amplified in the case of distant suffering.^60 He unpacks the complex workings
of denial in great detail, from the individual psychological to the collective social
level. While social shame was suggested as a motivating factor above, there can
exist powerful social mechanisms to counteract that and enhance denial, including
collective modes and acts of normalisation, self-defence, collusion and rhetorical
adjustment.
During the campaign to abolish the Atlantic slave trade, overcoming the
mechanisms of denial was often a lengthy process, both at personal and collective
level. It took John Newton, an ex-trader turned Evangelical preacher, almost thirty
four years to make the psychological journey and publish his Thoughts Upon the
African Slave Trade in which he set out the trade’s cruelties.^61
Furthermore, as, Cohen points out, knowledge of suffering is likely to lose
some of its urgency when it has to be mediated.^62 Mediation increases perhaps the
biggest barrier to enabling humanitarian impulses, which is simply abstraction. For
Judith Lichtenberg, “[other] people’s suffering is almost always abstract.”^63 We
recall Adam Smith’s reminder that a man who lost his little finger could not sleep a
wink, whereas, “provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound
security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of
that immense multitude seems plainly an object less interesting to him, than this
paltry misfortune of his own”.^64
This abstraction can have a double effect not only of limiting our
engagement with the suffering of distant strangers, but also of serving as an excuse
not to really engage with any human suffering. A love of humanity does not always
60
61 Cohen, States of Denial , 51-75.
Hochschild, Bury the Chains , 130-131. John Newton, The Journal of a Slave Trader (John
Newton) 1750-1754: With, Newton's Thoughts Upon the African Slave Trade , ed. Bernard
Martin and Mark Spurrell (London: Epworth Press, 19 62 62).
63 Cohen, States of Denial , 73.
64 Lichtenberg, "Absence and the Unfond Heart", 82.
Cited in Thomas W. Laqueur, "Mourning, Pity, and the Work of Narrative in the Making of
'Humanity'", in Humanitarianism and Suffering: The Mobilization of Empathy , ed. Richard
Ashby Wilson and Richard D. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 46.