The West must Abandon Humanism

Historicism and Humanism Inhibit our Understanding of Crises

(This piece is adapted from one of my recent OpEdNews articles: Humanism isn’t Enough: There are no more Crises ‘Far from Home’. To see the original article, press the embedded link.)

In the UK, the beginning of April saw Prime Minister Rishi Sunak heavily criticised for his unsympathetic policy towards Palestinians, as he opted to unquestioningly continue supplying Israel with military aid. A well-placed humanistic concern was apparent here. Yet in the same week, criticisms shifted from Sunak's policy towards the Middle East onto his choice of (Adidas) trainers during an interview with Abigail Foster. Universalist concerns for Palestinian liberty were inexplicably exchanged with a flood of op-eds and articles about why Sunak should not be wearing Adidas trainers simply to appeal to youth culture. This conditional inconsistency - a fetishised exchangeability between moral and fashion-based outrage - is not an ‘exception’ to an otherwise faithful and unequivocal humanism, but is rather inscribed in the very essence of humanistic concerns for our ‘care towards others’.

Public reaction to this Adidas controversy is a reminder to be critical not merely of reactionary political discourse which justifies military-economic interventions directly contributing to humanitarian crises, but (as French philosopher Louis Althusser insisted during the 1960s) to also be critical of a sympathetic (inevitably conditional) discourse which stresses our humanistic duty towards others. A ‘duty’ which always remains un-actualised, and which hinders any collective, critical engagement with the political systems responsible for global crises, whilst reducing ‘the other’ to a virtual point of detached, speculative enquiry.

Humanism is grounded in this apparent universalist appeal to our duty of care towards foreign lands and unfamiliar populations. However this universalism of care is often underscored by a relativistic anti-humanism. With the threat of global environmental catastrophes and humanitarian crises that begin by disproportionately affecting underdeveloped countries, the archetypes of sympathetic Western narratives on foreign aid return. The problem, however, is that by an abstract appeal to duty, such aid is rarely unconditional.

Whilst in the US, pro-Palestine campus protests suggest a stronger fidelity towards a directed critique of American policy towards the Middle East, a similar (and inevitable) fragmentation of the humanistic narrative eventually rears its head. Protests have been marked by internal frictions regarding what is to be chanted ('From the river to the sea' being a particularly divisive phrase in pro-Palestinian movements), tactics by which protests should be organised (either by external third-party mediation or as organic grassroots protests with students and faculty staff), as well as how popular attention is to be divided between crises such as Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan.

The problem is that humanitarian concerns often miss their own mark, or more appropriately they cling on to a false universalism. Their 'duty of care' is a humanism coloured by the implicit conviction that whatever is going on, is going on 'far from home'. It is this conditionality of standard humanist discourses of care that allows for narratives to quickly change, and for consistent and targeted policy criticisms to often be dissolved or fragmented in their very conception. The deviations and inconsistencies constitutive of humanistic discourse means that it often stumbles back onto an incomplete historicising narrative - where a generalised use of historical comparisons and a temperamental fidelity to ‘the other’ inevitably appear side-by-side.

With Ukraine and with Gaza, precisely such a historicisation underscores our attempts at articulating the need to directly engage with and alleviate a series of crises. Russia's invasion is conveniently conceptualised in the narrative on fascism, allowing for numerous WWII comparisons, and the recent military escalations in the Middle East have been compared to the moments preceding the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War of 1973. Political commentators concerned with what it is that we should do seem drawn towards a tendency to see the idiom of 'history repeating itself' actualised before their eyes. It is a historical frame which allows for concern to be articulated, yet it is this same historical frame which often obscures our capacity to deal with an immanent crisis for the global catastrophe that it truly is.

In itself, there is of course nothing wrong with a need to construct narratives of current geopolitical events by relying on historical comparisons. Yet it is worth remembering Marx's famous reformulation of Hegel's argument that history repeats itself: it may repeat itself, but it does so once as tragedy, and then as farce. 'Farce' is to be understood not as a description of some form of humorous quality latent in a political event, but rather as our inability to respond to events even though they have seemingly occurred twice. Even in its historical recurrence, a political event inevitably occurs as something radically new and at first inarticulable, for which our responses are unable to rely on a preformulated historical template. That a repetition in itself appears as a singularly inconsistent and a-historical moment (the subject of my Master’s thesis), can be framed according to Althusser’s interpretation of Marx’s historical materialism as a breakthrough in our scientific conception of the temporal development of independent economic and political narratives. The capitalist mode of production and circulation reconfigures the forms of knowledge which supports this political economy, and in so doing articulates itself through a series of “differential temporalities” which are only ideologically (and falsely) homogenised into a singular continuous development. The ‘scientific forms’ of capitalism are only differentially related, constructing a communal ideology only where, as Marx famously stated, their order of appearance is furnished by a retrogressive ‘determination in the last instance by economy’. Ultimately, a historicising narrative, which conveniently constructs a politics of historical repetitions, is itself possible only as an ideological obfuscation of the radial breaks and discontinuities constitutive of the fragmented discourse of a globalised political economy. The insistence to see history ‘repeating itself’ makes an accurate historical understanding, as well as a direct comprehension of a political situation, impossible.

It is precisely this historicist humanisation which we must be cautious of. The sense, underlying a humanist appeal for a duty to those countries that are far from home, that our Western compassion can be best utilised by historically framing global crises, is at times deeply misleading. Properly speaking, each humanitarian crisis is a crisis precisely because it is so unrecognisable. It is a crisis because we cannot coherently place it or manage it according to a pre-conceived formula. Whilst it can (and should) be studied as belonging to a historical development framed on a political-economic stage, serious responses to a crisis should recognise its qualitative break from historically comparable forms.

The humanitarian approach to our 'neighbours' on the other side of the globe often leads to a form of indifference: a paradoxical recognition of the cruelties and brutalities plaguing a population which simultaneously disavows our organised, collective political intervention. Crises are historicised, and in so doing the disparity of the current event from its historical avatars produces only a conditionality of our 'duty' to care, contingent to the narrative frame which any current crisis may be fitted into.

What should concern us is that there is no humanitarian crisis 'far from home' - the divide between 'here' and 'there' is quickly losing ground. The current crisis in Gaza may echo aspects of the 1973 war that deeply changed political relations in the Middle East, yet the Israeli focus being on Hamas and not Arab-backed resistance movements and the PLO, and the major displacement of Palestinian civilians which the West will have to respond to, means that a new dimension to the Israel-Palestine conflict is emerging. A new type of global question is becoming apparent in which the underlying security in humanitarian narratives that the conflict is taking place 'far from home', will have to be abandoned. Similarly, global internet-based disinformation campaigns and the obscure conjunction of right and left-wing support and criticism for Russia in the Ukraine war make this conflict categorically irreducible to historical comparisons to fascist movements. Any comparison of Putin to Hitler, for example, cannot be sustained when we recognise a further degree of inconsistent radicality, or an ideological disparity, in Russia's narrative: for example, Russian political philosopher Alexandr Dugin ('Putin's brain') insisting that, not only a conservative Orhtodoxy, but a post-modern relativism justifies the war on Ukraine ('Russia have their own relative truth which the differing Western truth must nevertheless respect...'). Dugin often refers to what he calls the ‘structuralist conception of language’ (whether he refers to the Saussurean signifier/signified divide or Lyotard’s later description of irreconcilable narratives [récits] in postmodern discourse) to insist that Russia will never speak the language of the West. There is certainly no dearth of right-wing justifications for the invasion of Ukraine, yet the more intimate justification is simultaneously a postmodern, relativistic one. Here the Hitler-comparison clearly reveals the inadequacy of a vulgar historicism. Hitler finding justification for the final solution or the invasion of Poland within post-modernism or cultural relativism is inconceivable.

Fundamentally, humanitarian crises must be placed under a new light. They are no longer external to Western identity, but shake the Western position at its own core. Historical comparisons, which all too often cause a conditional and indifferent support, no longer hold up. The humanistic narrative that we have a ‘duty’ towards crises taking place far from home has often led to a temporary and conditional sense of responsibility. Humanistic concerns have in other words often been marked by a kernel of indifferent anti-humanism. This is however no longer an option.

Today's crises are to be conceived on a global scale, components of a political economy which intimately disrupt the Western sense of security. There is repetition in humanitarian crises only insofar as each repetition is simultaneously discontinuous and irreducible to historicist frames. It is for this reason that collectively organised and critical diplomacy movements are more crucial than ever. Crises should be unconditionally and unequivocally recognised as our crises, as a threat far more serious than any contingent humanist 'duty of care' would have us think.