The Politics of Humanity

then we would expect to find them buttressing a theory of political

humanitarianism.^19

If humanity comes into focus in large part through encounters with human
suffering, then an empathetic encounter with suffering is the most plausible basis
for, on the one hand, understanding suffering, and on the other, conceptualising
common humanity as something genuinely shared: your experience of being human
is potentially mine, and mine potentially yours, however unlikely this may be in
practice. This raises the issue of how much weight that last question of likelihood
carries. That is, does it place a limit on the possibility of an empathetic reaction
characterising the humanitarian impulse?
The problem of practical likelihood relates to the question of pity, which can
also, if more problematically, underlie and enable humanitarian impulses. I might
recognise the suffering of another as appalling and feel deeply sorry for them, but
not really envisage or imagine that suffering as my own. Luc Boltanski argues that
humanitarianism is in large part characterised by what he calls a “politics of pity”.
“The politics of pity regards the unfortunate together en masse , even if ... it is
necessary to single out particular misfortunes from the mass in order to inspire
pity.”^20 Pity leads to a somewhat different kind of humanitarian impulse, in which
we feel sorry for the other but do not really recognize ourselves in their suffering.
Boltanski draws on Arendt to argue that this has been a characteristic of a certain
kind of humanitarian impulse at least since the French Revolution. For Arendt:

Pity, because it is not stricken in the flesh and keeps its sentimental

distance, can succeed where compassion always will fail; it can reach out to

the multitude and therefore, like solidarity, enter the market-place. But pity,

in contrast to solidarity, does not look upon both fortune and misfortune,

the strong and the weak, with an equal eye; without the presence of

misfortune, pity could not exist, and it therefore has just as much vested

interest in the existence of the weak. Moreover, by virtue of being a

sentiment, pity can be enjoyed for its own sake, and this will almost

19
20 Sherman, "Empathy, Respect, and Humanitarian Intervention": 104.
Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 4. Italics in original.