by Laurence Peterson
I do not specifically remember when I lost my you-know-what about the way the word “humanitarian” is being tossed around these days. Possibly it was when a State Department spokesperson referred to what he called “humanitarian circumstances”, implying thereby that the designation could be sensibly applied to purely chance events. Or maybe the sheer obscenity of tagging the word to “zones” in middle of what is probably the most hellish place on earth right now (only to bomb the same areas anyway, subsequently) did the trick. Whatever it was, I have decided to try, for what it is worth, to come to terms with the matter. So here goes.
In my lifetime, which has spanned 63 years and some change now, I don’t recall the word being used that much except to describe individual persons and certain organizations, until rather recently. But, maybe starting in the ‘nineties, conditions began taking on the designation, especially in the media and in public relations; and phrases like the one I have chosen for my title, “humanitarian disaster”, or “humanitarian catastrophe” became more common. I distinctly remember at this time being annoyed by this: was the disaster supposed to be experienced primarily by the humanitarians? It kind of sounded to me like that was a real possibility. If that was not the case, why use the word humanitarian at all? Why not just call it a disaster or catastrophe? It seemed like something unseemly lay at the core of the reasoning that surrounded the employment of such phrases; like something rather sanctimonious was being smuggled in, too.
So I decided to try to understand what might be at the logical core of this kind of usage of words. What struck me at first was the employment of the word humanitarian was possibly being invested with a tacit, but palpable preeminence amongst possible adjectives in any specific case. Humanitarian concerns are somehow supposed to reflect a self-evident moral superiority over other ones, so that when the word is employed, there is a suggestion that the humanitarian concern should, perhaps prima facie, be considered the most important consideration. I am certain many people would, naively or otherwise, assent to this assertion (some environmentalists might consider environmental concerns to be paramount compared to humanitarian ones in certain cases, but, even here, many of them would consider both environmental and humanitarian matters to be of utmost importance).
Where this kind of thinking, if it exists, and is as important as I believe it might be, becomes problematic consists in the following: the unspoken assumption of moral precedence actively deprives the further employment of the word as an adjective of sense when other adjectives are also deemed capable of being used in any specific situation. When we speak of a “humanitarian corridor”, or something that clearly can be described in other ways, or take on other attributes that actively militate against the unique moral sense, like, say, noting that the corridor is situated right bang in the middle of a war zone that has been reduced to complete rubble, there is something of an unresolvable tension in meaning; and we are left either with an impression that use of the word humanitarian within that context is absurd or just plain phony. In such instances, it may be even worse: the very attempt to use the designation humanitarian in conjunction with more everyday, prosaic, non-morally inflected adjectives, will undermine itself and probably reveal a serious rupture in meaning.
Allow me to develop the thought a little more: the word humanitarian applies to every human being in an important sense, and so it becomes impossible to limit the application of the term to certain human beings, which happens invariably when the presence of other adjectives themselves specify the scope of application. In the case of our humanitarian corridor, what can possibly differentiate, in meaningfully human terms, the human beings on the outside of the corridor from those within? Nothing. So the designation humanitarian corridor actually describes nothing essentially related to human beings or their welfare; it exists as a kind of filler which people are free to inject whatever they want, in whatever quantities, and however value-laden. Many of us are being conditioned by the increasingly casual extension of the designation humanitarian to apply it to subjects that have never been seen as humanitarian at all, and which may clearly resist the application in obvious (and embarrassing) ways.
One thing we can do is to squarely face the issue of assessing what specific value we wish to attribute to the word humanitarian, if and when we decide to use it, rather than to rely on an unmentioned assumed general sense concerning the word’s emotional and normative character. When we ourselves specify from the beginning what it is about human beings that we value, and what precedence these considerations should take on relative to other ones, we may be able to avoid the serious gaps in meaning that, as I have tried to indicate here, debilitate the attempt to be discriminating when the word humanitarian is employed. Or maybe we should just avoid using the word except in the most limited circumstances, like when we speak of persons or organizations, as seemed to be the case maybe thirty years ago.
The notion that there is a designation that can apply to all human beings equally in some significant, but essentially inexpressible way, such that we can make some of the most important decisions imaginable on its basis, may not be the best approach, especially when that kind of logic is clearly being increasingly employed in the worlds of propaganda and promotions. This in and of itself should be enough to make us exceedingly wary, and we should become even more suspicious when we find ourselves in situations in which otherwise absurd formulations are employed, which reek of a tacked-on sanctimony on top of it all. That would be the humane thing to do, wouldn’t it?
Finally, if anyone thinks I am trashing the humane, or even humanitarian impulse, nothing could be further from the truth. I believe that casual employment of a word as potentially troublesome as humanitarian should be avoided, and unashamedly replaced by more straightforwardly moral language like “right” and “just”. We should not risk disguising our actual moral sentiments by appealing to less emphatic terms like humanitarian, and recognize, say, the unabashed horrors we confront with expressions of a sincerely determined will, rather than smuggling in, quietly, bureaucratized and diluted justifications for what we claim to feel most strongly about. The humanitarians will try to whitewash the world; the point, however, is to change it, to quote a great humanitarian.
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