The Politics of Humanity

The tragedy of humanitarianism may be that for all its failings and all the

limitations of its viewpoint, it represents what is decent in an indecent

world. Its core assumptions – solidarity, a fundamental sympathy for victims

and an antipathy for oppressors and exploiters – are what we are in those

rare moments of grace when we are at our best.^3

But is the formulation of such a package, even in the worst contexts, not an
achievement in and of itself? Moreover, beyond humanity’s theatres of disgrace, it
is a package that has been quite substantially institutionalised, as I argued in
Chapter 6, in a number of liberal democratic states, and interstate organisations, of
which the European Union is an important example, often through domestic
humanitarian reform campaigns. Indeed, it is important to remember that in the
nineteenth century humanitarianism was not the predominantly international
category it has come to be identified with today. I put forward this argument not to
defend a complacent view of Western interventionism, the failings and excesses of
which I have acknowledged throughout this thesis. Rather, I wish instead to point to
the substantial lived experience of past humanitarian gains.
To give one example, the fact that, as a citizen of the United Kingdom, it
seems in no way unusual that, as far as I can tell, I have no particular disposition
towards racial prejudice, clearly represents a past humanitarian gain. No
humanitarian credit should accrue to me for this fact, nor is there any kind of
humanitarian impulse at stake. It is precisely the banality of no longer seeing others
through dehumanising lenses that represents the achievement of a humanitarian
politics in this example. The more general point is that once one moves beyond the
requirement for a certain kind of active motivation, and the requirement for
altruism, to be present in every encounter or action, one can take a more expansive
view of moral progress regarding human solidarity in a Rortean, non-deterministic
sense.^4 Rorty writes that:

3
4 Ibid., 334.
Though for compelling arguments against the still-powerful humanist hope that underpins
this thesis, see John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London:
Granta Books, 2002). John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia
(New York: Farrar Straus and Giroux, 2007).