against cruelty in the expansion of existing particularist, indeed parochial,
identifications.^69
Consider, first, those Danes and those Italians. Did they say, about their
Jewish neighbors, that they deserved to be saved because they were fellow
human beings? Perhaps sometimes they did, but surely they would usually,
if queried, have used more parochial terms to explain why they were taking
risks to protect a given Jew – for example, that this particular Jew was a
fellow Milanese, or a fellow Jutlander, or a fellow member of the same
union or profession, or a fellow bocce player, or a fellow parent of small
children. Then consider those Belgians: Surely there were some people
whom they would have taken risks to protect in similar circumstances,
people whom they did identify with, under some description or other. But
Jews rarely fell under those descriptions.^70Here Rorty is telling an empirical story, which does not quite exhaust the
possibilities of solidarity according to the empirical evidence, as Geras, using
examples of rescue by the “Righteous Among the Nations”, has demonstrated.^71 In
fact, many Rescuers of Jews seem to have had a much less parochial, more
expansive sense of what “like us” might entail, in many cases so expansive as
precisely to see humanity as the crucial shared identity. Indeed, Kristen Monroe’s
important work on Rescuers, which draws on psychological literature on the
categorisation of others, notes the particular psychological salience among many
rescuers of a category of “human”.^72 The path from concern to action, and the
emotive mechanisms that underlie it, will be examined further in the next chapter.
For now, the important point is that we should take on board Rorty’s insights into
how the categories of “human” and “inhuman” can function in terms of narratives
of dehumanisation and, for want of a better term, rehumanisation. Humanity is the
key category within and against which humanitarians conceptualise suffering. We
69
Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity. Rorty, "Human Rights, Rationality and
Sentimentality". 70
71 Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity , 190-191. Italics in original.
Geras, Solidarity in the Conversation of Humankind , 7-46. See also Wheeler, "Agency,
Humanitarianism and Intervention": 22-23. 72
Monroe, The Hand of Compassion. See also her earlier work, Kristen Renwick Monroe,
The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1996).