seems appropriate. But they remain at the heart of the possibility of humanitarian
action (broadly understood). The problem that we cannot empathise with everyone
will not go away, and does not make processes of empathetic interaction any less
important for envisaging a world in which more humanitarian action takes place.
The size of the category of humanity is an important consideration, but so is
the quality of our human relationships. The danger is of being equally indifferent to
all - equal opportunities egotists. The contrasting danger is to reify altruism as the
quintessence of humanity. This leads to a dichotomised morality, in which a lack of
understanding of the complexity of ourselves as humans is likely to hinder a
complex understanding of the threads of any common human
Conclusion
"The politics of empathy are fickle”, writes Adam Hochschild^123 It is this recognition
that prompts humanitarians to seek a more stable politics, such as a politics of
rights or justice, as we will see in Chapter 5. Yet the selective play of empathy, in
enabling the sense of a shared human identity and therefore the possibility of
human solidarity, cannot simply be dismissed because of its contingent character.
This chapter has made clear that there is no neutral affective terrain that can
process humanitarian concern in a non-contingent manner. It has suggested that
the line between successful and abusive ways of mobilising humanitarian empathy
is rather thin. The next chapter will examine what happens when there is a will to
act. But by way of coda to this chapter, and lest the exposition of the contingencies
of empathy are seen as themselves representing a kind of inhumanity, we might
recall W.H. Auden’s lines from the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts”:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully
123
Adam Hochschild, King Leopold's Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial
Africa (London: Pan Macmillan, 2002), 282.