humanitarianism always involves a strong conception of the practical and the
possible. This dimension will be examined in the next section. But this intangible
sense of rescue also speaks to a more practical notion of témoignage, which
situates testimony squarely in the present, in relation to on-going injustices, and is
central to much of the French humanitarian tradition, and especially important to
MSF.^18 For José Antonio Bastos: “[even] if it is impossible to help the refugees, we
must keep trying, and find the truth of what is happening, and we must speak.
Sometimes speaking is the only action that is possible. To not speak is to fail the
possibility of humanity.”^19 The implication is simply that, at times, if we cannot
rescue the individual lives under threat, we can at least save a “possibility of
humanity”.
Even in the case of a single individual, at a single moment in time,
humanitarian action as rescue potentially has to negotiate conceptions of humanity
across a wide range of contexts, which include humanity as a set of biological
properties and humanity as ethical, political and legal identities. For some, these
would include less tangible notions of a soul or of unity with a divine being. For
others, they might include the ability to care, love, laugh and cry.
Humanity can be understood across all these parameters, understood to be
violated across any of these parameters, and rescue of that humanity
conceptualised across any of these parameters. The complexity of that which is to
be rescued and preserved is inextricably interwoven with the complexity of how we
articulate the distinctiveness, value and beauty of humanity. It is likely that
attempts to pin it down once and for all will always fail, just as a lepidopterist’s
display case must always fail to reveal the most vital characteristic of the butterfly:
its mesmeric flight. Among influential recent attempts to grapple with this
complexity, we might think of Martha Nussbaum’s list of the central human
capabilities, a thoughtful and rich questioning of what constitutes a human life, of
what people should be able to do and be to live a life that might be considered fully
human, including, for instance the ability to have an emotional and imaginative
18
On MSF and témoignage see D. Robert DeChaine, Global Humanitarianism: NGOs and the
Crafting of Community 19 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2005), 82-90.
Orbinski, An Imperfect Offering , 290.
marcin
(Marcin)
#1