The Inhumanity of Humanism

If we follow the standard line of sociological interpretation beginning with Émile Durkheim in the 20^th century, then politics and humanistic compassion or emotion cannot be separated. Politics, as the collective formation of a social contract to mitigate the uncontrollable forces of nature, required an element of ‘social cognition’, of empathetic relationality. At the same time, however, and especially since the dawn of neoliberal State-planning in the 30s, political structures and financial powers seem to largely proceed mechanistically, divorced from any humanistic concerns. Politics, if we are to judge by the global exploits which have characterised Western foreign policy in the last 100 years, operates by a cold and calculating rationality aimed at territorial domination and financial accumulation. A consideration of global human welfare is unsurprisingly irreconcilable with the aggressive tactics of concentrated ideological and economic appropriation.

In older times, we avoided the news in order to shut out the ‘real world’. Today, however, this ‘shutting off’ is performed by the very act of watching the news we once avoided. By a sophisticated, mediated inversion, we watch the news only to avoid confronting the reality of what is taking place. The abstract and helpless sympathy which is invoked in the most horrifying images of death, starvation, genocide, and disaster serve to immobilise us: they invoke precisely the same form of humanism which, rather than act as the cause for political intervention by the layman, prevents any sustained critique of the political economy responsible for these horrors. Humanism appears to justify the very crises which generate a humanistic compassion. Even worse, it is clear that, for almost any political crisis, the aspect of humanism involved can easily play both sides.

The violent expansion of the post-war US empire (through financing coups and far-right militias) justified itself though the Truman doctrine by appealing to compassionate anti-fascist sentiments in the Western body politic. The destruction of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos, for example, ‘worked’ by claiming to defend the humane ideals of liberal democracy. Even the ‘friendly faces’ of Bush and Obama, claiming to compassionately defend individual rights, justified countless brutal attacks on civilian populations under the banner of the war on terror. It seems, then, that the coldest forms of political exploitation have functioned by appealing to a close sense of personal compassion for individuals. Even (failed) resistance movements and anti-establishment activists have deployed the same reliance on humanism, on a universal