The view that I am offering says that there is such a thing as moral progress,
and that this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human solidarity.
But that solidarity is not thought of as recognition of a core self, the human
essence, in all human beings. Rather it is thought of as the ability to see
more and more traditional differences (of tribe, religion, race, customs, and
the like) as unimportant when compared with similarities with respect to
pain and humiliation – the ability to think of people wildly different from
ourselves as included in the range of “us”.^5Furthermore, when it comes to current action, professional humanitarians find it
especially difficult to accommodate the more partial, in both senses of the term,
humanitarianisms of the ordinary individuals who make up so-called “global civil
society”, and of states, the failings of which so often fill their schedules. But the
popes of humanitarianism have had to recognise their own fallibility in recent years.
Indeed, those who would have others see them as infallible generally have to issue
a Bull to that effect, a term arguably as descriptive of such a document’s content as
it is of its form. Simultaneously, professional humanitarians should be aware that,
one of the greatest dangers for humanitarianism is to become, or remain, an elite
project, as then its fate will rest with that of the elite in question.
Moreover, on the account presented here, it is precisely the interaction of
these two kinds of actors, individuals and states, that both determines the
operating context for professional humanitarians, but also sustains more durable
humanitarian gains. This is not to say that there is no place, for, say, a humanitarian
organisation like the ICRC that clearly states the political neutrality of its action, and
consistently respects its own operating principles. On the contrary, the point is that
the ICRC does not need to make a hegemonic claim on the identity of
humanitarianism to succeed in its endeavours. It can truthfully state the principles
according to which it operates, without needing to state, mendaciously, that this is
5
Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity , 192. I take Norman Geras’ point that Rorty
neither needs to or quite succeeds in escaping essentialism entirely here. But this does not
undermine the relevance of the process he describes. Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation
of Humankind.