The Politics of Humanity

ignorance”.^36 At the heart of the battle to engage the human capacity for empathy
is a public and private negotiation of the knowledge and ignorance of others’
suffering.^37 In her thoughtful study Regarding the Pain of Others , Susan Sontag
reminds us that: “[to] designate a hell is not, of course, to tell us anything about
how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames”. She
continues:

Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense

of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we

share with others. Someone who is perennially surprised that depravity

exists, who continues to feel disillusioned (even incredulous) when

confronted with evidence of what humans are capable of inflicting in the

way of gruesome, hands-on cruelties upon other humans, has not reached

moral or psychological adulthood.

No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of

superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia.^38

Anyone who has spent any time reading about the human ravages of the twentieth
century will be familiar with, and sympathetic to, the indignation expressed by
Sontag. “One reads the newspaper these days shaking”, as Michael Walzer puts it.^39
But implicit in much of the literature on humanitarianism is the notion that to
spread the full word about just how badly humans can treat each other, and
thereby to lift the veils of denial, is the first step towards a more humane world.
There seems to be a requirement that we should all somehow take the full measure
of human suffering as a necessary, if not sufficient, precondition for engaging in
suitable action.
This is of course not the whole story, as a central plank of the humanitarian
traditions that emphasise the importance of bearing witness, for instance
Quakerism or the secular humanitarianism of MSF, is the idea that truth and

36
37 Cited in Boltanski, Distant Suffering , ix.
38 For an outstanding account see Cohen, States of Denial.
39 Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003), 102.
Michael Walzer, "The Politics of Rescue", Social Research 62, no. 1 (1995): 65.