on transcendental ideals, recalling Sen’s warning against their value in making
comparative judgements. We all know people around us who are comparatively
more empathetic and more humane than us. Is it not better to look to them for
inspiration, rather than to seek it in a transcendental ideal of perfect humanity, or
to enact it only with respect to distant strangers? After all, Jean Pictet quotes
Francis Bacon as saying that “a man who does not treat his neighbour humanely is
not truly human”^13
Simultaneously, we need to constantly avoid the peril of this kind of
comparison reifying humanitarianism as a solely ethical endeavour, and recognise
that of those empathetic and humane people, those who engage seriously with
their political context, and take on the responsibility of getting their hands dirty,
tend to achieve more than those who merely dispense well-motivated charity.
This leads to the important last item in Walzer’s list: ruling. Again, this
reminds us of the half-formed nature of placing one’s faith in global civil society. For
all of the benefits of a grassroots politics “from below”, there always comes a time
(if the politics is successful) of rule from “above”.^14 Professional humanitarians have
found themselves ill-suited to this task, and as Chapter 6 argued, the democratic
state, as imperfect as current incarnations of it might be, still clearly presents the
most viable option, both in terms of sensitivity to the claims of domestic politics and
of an internal humanitarian space, and to the possibility, through such claims, of
taking seriously the needs of others.
Humanitarianism may be an emblem of failure: failure because we are still
impossibly far from stopping people being cruel to each other, and on a smaller,
more intimate scale, failure for the same mysterious reasons that some families do
not get along.^15 But it also succeeds if we can come to care about cruelty in
common, shared ways, and that can not entirely be captured by particular practices
13
14 Pictet, The Fundamental Principles of the Red Cross , unpaginated text.
We might think here of the disillusionment of many of Obama’s supporters almost as
soon as he took office and began to govern. 15
There are interesting links here to discussions on the relationship between kinship and
humanitarian projects, involving discourses such as those referring to a “family of man”.
See David Mole, Discourses of World Kinship and the United Nations: The Quest for a
Human Family , unpublished doctoral thesis (London: London School of Economics, 2009).