Poverty,Politics,and Faithful Witness in the Age of Humanitarianism

Introduction

This essay addresses a number of questions that have direct bearing on what it means to engage with the world around us as faithful witnesses and as democratic citizens. ¹ The questions arise from my involvement in various forms of political engagement while working with and teaching those involved in running faith-based organizations, both local and international. An often unacknowledged set of tensions and questions plagues these kinds of engagements:

I cannot hope to address all of these questions thoroughly in this essay, but I do hope to suggest some ways for how we might think through them constructively. To begin developing such a framework we must face a certain type of anxiety that is found particularly among those who have drunk deeply from the wells of critical theory and continental philosophy, yet who are committed to addressing issues of injustice and inequality. It is an anxiety born out of what we might call the modern “paradox of care.”

The paradox of care is that we tend merely to tolerate or leave alone those for whom we do not care or have compassion, even if what they are doing is harmful or goes against our values. However, when we see someone for whom we care or feel responsible doing something wrong or harmful or suffering in some way, we feel compelled to help, usually at the expense of that person’s agency. Even if what we do to help is not intentionally paternalistic or colonial in orientation, our interventions are more often than not an attempt to govern the lives of others. While the impulse to rule is often a loving one born out of humanitarian concern for another’s welfare, that impulse is distorted by the belief that we think we know better how those in need should live, and we end up removing their agency in order that they might conform to our notions of what is good and right and proper. Another way to put this is that we exercise paideia over them, and this often involves strict forms of discipline—albeit “pastoral” in nature—in order that they might live well. ² Loving concern thus often produces modes of domination. This paradox of care represents a central dilemma in all means of welfare provision that attempt to address poverty and inequality, whether through local, national, or international initiatives.

In order to move beyond the stasis that can be produced by the paradox of care, it is vital to find ways to take seriously the agency and wisdom of “ordinary” people: that is, to put people before program. But this regard for people’s agency represents a profound challenge to systems of welfare, education, and health, and to the professional identities of those who are paid to give care. It also challenges how we conceptualize poverty. Poverty is not simply a condition of material scarcity. It is, in every case, also a political problem. This is because poverty undermines and threatens the mutual recognition and gestures of neighborliness necessary for politics as the negotiation of a common life between distinct others. That is to say, the problem of poverty is not just material lack but also the need for participation in and a sense of responsibility for the body politic.

Any attempt to take seriously the agency of “the people” risks generating a romanticized populism that pits the innate wisdom of hard-working and down-trodden ordinary folk against the machinations of privileged elites. Here we must reckon with the ambiguity of what we mean by the term “the people” (Greek dēmos) and thence what it means to be democratic—that is, to be committed to rule of, for, and by the people (dēmokratia). “The people” can refer to a specific faction of the political community, such as “the have nots,” or it can denote the whole, or the body politic as such. What I will explore here is what it means to pursue the good of the whole as a way of addressing poverty, how we can frame pursuit of the whole theologically. The first step is a discussion of how such a theological framework challenges the way in which public concern for those who are impoverished and suffering is often framed via discourses of humanitarianism.

The Age of Humanitarianism

Let me begin with the term humanitarianism and the question of what it might mean to call our current context “the age of humanitarianism.” The logo of the Red Cross encapsulates much of what I will say. A red cross on a white backdrop can be read as a form of the Christian symbol of salvation and sign for Christ’s pattern of rule: the empty cross. Christ’s sovereignty over the cosmos, symbolized by the empty cross, takes the form of a supreme act of self-emptying (see Phil 2:5–11). The event of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection relativizes all other claims to power and authority; all forms of power that are not Christ-like are, in the light of the cross, shown to be “earthly” and fallen.

The logo of the Red Cross plays on the symbolic resonance of the cross of Christ in interesting ways. Its use as the sign of humanitarianism par excellence aligns the cross with the humanitarian claim to transcend all earthly, political communities. Humanitarianism prioritizes “neutral” service, irrespective of religious, racial, and other divisions, and calls into question attempts to put political and ideological programs before the requirement to meet the basic needs of people. Whatever the differences between oneself and another, the duty to be humane should never be over-ridden by any other claim.

At the same time, despite its explicitly Christian origins, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has shorn the cross of any explicit theological framings. Their logo stands for care and compassion for suffering and impoverished others apart from any particular theological tradition or dogmatic reference. Yet it is wrong to see this discursive separation as a sign of secularization. The use of the cross by the ICRC does not represent a decline in the significance of religion as part of a broader process of modernization (which is what classic secularization theory would suggest). This would be the case if the Red Cross logo had been replaced by the widespread use of the Red Crystal, the non-religious alternative to the Red Cross and the Red Crescent. But this replacement has not happened.

Rather than being understood as “neutral” and tradition-free, the Red Cross (and humanitarian organizations in general) is part of the transmutation and re-description of theological categories such as sin and charity into more immanent and moralized ones such as vice and altruism. Auguste Comte, who coined the term “altruism,” made a conscious effort to supplant theological categories with humanist ones. ³ For philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, this shift represented the death of Christianity by its own hand. ⁴ Yet it is wrong to see this as a sign of secularization. Rather, it represents the re-sacralization of Christian commitments in a different discursive register, that of humanitarianism. Historian Michael Barnett contends that humanitarianism has itself become a form of faith. ⁵ He, along with a number of other critics of humanitarianism, see it as a means of atonement for the suffering the West has caused “the rest,” that paradoxically goes with a commitment to save the “under-developed” through incorporating them into a new “civilized” world order. ⁶ Building on Charles Taylor’s analysis of secularity, love for strangers may now operate within an “immanent frame,” but that does not necessarily make it less “religious.” ⁷ On Taylor’s account, humanitarian regard for the suffering of others can generate a sense of what he calls “fullness” and a Durkheimian form of the sacred, one that creates social solidarity. ⁸ At the same time, at least in the West, humanitarianism as an instantiation of the sacred is simultaneously Christ-forgetting and Christ-haunted.

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American Red Cross recruitment poster created by C.W. Anderson between 1914 and 1918. Photo Credit: F&A Archive/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

Humanitarian organizations such as the Red Cross undoubtedly echo and build on what the church historically called works of mercy. These works of mercy are a way of recognizing another person as human, as one who is the same as me, and thereby communicating to one in distress or peril that he or she is not rejected, abandoned, or forgotten but exists in a common world. This is especially necessary at points of crisis—natural disasters and famine being paradigm instances—when others find they are without the necessary resources to act for themselves. In the Christian tradition, following the pattern of Christ’s incarnation and crucifixion, such works of mercy may necessitate radical renunciation or kenosis (emptying) on the part of the giver so as to enable a deeper, intimate, and more meaningful relationship with those in need. ⁹ One can see something of this kenosis in the witness of monks and nuns down the centuries, whose way of life illustrates the ongoing need to renounce idolatrous ties to property, kinship, comfort, and status if meaningful relationships to God and neighbor are to emerge. This type of renunciation is an element almost entirely absent in notions of humanitarianism. Rather than focus on practices of personal and material renunciation, humanitarianism generally takes the form of noblesse oblige and philanthropic donation, both of which emphasize rather than bridge the distance between giver and receiver and too often leave intact the structures of inequality.

The Iconography of Poverty

The iconography of poverty in humanitarianism re-inscribes structures of inequality. From pictures of poor farmers in Depression-era America to victims of the Ebola virus in West Africa, the contemporary aesthetics of poverty subtly re-inscribe the ancient division between the “children of the soil” (chthonoi) and “children of the gods” (theion) familiar to us from Greek and Babylonian myths. Those who live some form of what is often deemed the ideal Western lifestyle look down from Olympus with sympathy on the sons and daughters of the soil and their visceral imprisonment to nature and necessity. “We” who benefit from consumer lifestyles, technological advancement, and decent sewers contemplate the photographs of stricken faces and think: “If only they could be more like us.” Images of poverty, war, and disaster—what Susan Sontag calls the “iconography of suffering”—provoke a response. ¹⁰ What these images invoke is sympathy, indignation, and alarm (often accompanied by an unacknowledged yet ever present voyeuristic curiosity about the gruesome, the excruciating, and the calamitous). ¹¹ As Sontag notes, the modern representation of the suffering other, whether of the dead soldier or famished child, is “regarded only as someone to be seen, not someone (like us) who also sees.” ¹² These images stimulate help that is tinged with elegy for the inescapable “naturalness” (read barbarity and savagery) of these suffering others. We offer them the gifts of Olympus, but heaven forbid that the chthonoi should invade or infect our heavenly palisades through migration and thereby soil and threaten our perfect, cozy life.

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Refugee mother and child. Photo Credit: Kharbine-Tapabor/The Art Archive at Art Resource, NY.

The modern iconography of human suffering invites the onlooker to envisage himself or herself as the one who should stop the pain or shocks him or her into greater awareness of what is going on. But the iconography does not question the onlooker’s way of life and basic priorities. Seeing the poor does not catalyze different ways of living together with the poor. These images do not provoke mourning and humility but activism and altruism. Yet the modern representation of poverty owes a great deal to earlier representations of Christ’s suffering body and in particular traditions of contemplating the wounds of Christ. In contrast to the modern iconography of suffering, this Christian representation operates within an iconography of sorrow.

The Iconography of Sorrow

The appropriate response to contemplating Christ’s suffering and broken flesh is not empathy leading to philanthropic action or political activism on behalf of a less fortunate other, but rather sorrow, repentance, and conversion. Christians are to contemplate the suffering and death of Christ in order to become aware of their own complicity in his suffering—caused as it is by humanity’s sinful, broken, and disordered relationships with God and neighbor. Only by coming into a transformed relationship with Christ can we properly respond to the suffering body we contemplate. And we can only do this through repentance. Repentance requires a change of life and recognition that what we value materially is of little worth in contrast to the “pearl of great price” that relationship with Christ represents. It is not the sinful human who has something to offer the one suffering. Rather, Christ’s situation represents our true predicament, if only we could see it. Rather than having a gift to offer the impoverished suffering other and the strength that the other needs, we are the ones who need the broken body we contemplate.

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Anonymous, Painted Crucifix, ca. 1280–1300 CE. Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria, Perugia, Italy. Photo Credit: Scala/Ministero per i Beni e le Attività culturali /Art Resource, NY.

Contemplation of Christ crucified leading to repentance and conversion helps disrupt and reconfigure our practices of recognition. Our gaze should not be conformed to that of the Western media that determines who should appear as the subject of care—this week they show us those made homeless by a tornado, and next week, those afflicted by famine—rather, it is proximity to Christ on the cross that determines who and what we should see. Uncoupled from contemplation of Christ crucified, we will mis-categorize suffering and who is the stranger to be welcomed. Our fallen and fad-driven standards will determine who and what is worthy of our sympathy.

At its heart an iconography of sorrow challenges the position of being a “third party” (Latin testis) who observes, who is not directly involved, and who speaks out on behalf of another. This third-party testimony too often positions the one suffering as a passive victim wholly defined and determined by his or her suffering. Rather, as with Christ, we must hear the testimony of the superstes, the person who has lived through the events described, exists beyond what happened, and so speaks from direct experience. This person is never merely a victim. Like Christ, these people exist in excess of the horror and suffering they have lived through. They are not merely in need of our help but come forth and challenge us to work together with them in order that we might be fellow pilgrims journeying towards something new. We are familiar with the Greek term martyr to describe such testimony. Theologically, the Christian martyr or superstes is an embodied witness to the eschatological order in which all may flourish in communion with God and each other. The eschatological end to which the martyr witnesses holds open the need for the fundamental transformation of every aspect of our finite and fallen age. Such a theocentric vision is very different from the anthropocentric and Eurocentric vision of humanitarianism.

Still, humanitarianism is the default way in which concern for suffering others is framed in the contemporary context. Moreover, Christian aid agencies and churches have readily adopted humanitarianism as a way of publically framing what they do. Love for neighbor has become for many Christians synonymous with humanitarianism. Within this framework, it is often the case that concern for distant strangers is seen as superior to concern for more proximate neighbors in distress, because concern for distant strangers is perceived as more neutral, independent, and universal (core commitments of humanitarianism), and so more agapē -like.

Healing Rule and the Justification of Good Order

While humanitarianism claims to be neutral with regard to politics in the name of serving humanity, politics is not neutral in its relationship to humanitarianism. Humanitarianism has become a touchstone for justifying everything from war to welfare. Even certain justifications of capitalism center on how it is the most effective arrangement for meeting the needs of and efficiently allocating resources to the poor. In contrast to state welfare regimes, capitalists claim that incorporation into the market will enhance the morality, wealth, and opportunities of the poor. ¹³ In short, humanitarianism has become a necessary part of the justification of what constitutes “good order.” And it is this link between the justification of a prevailing order and humanitarianism that warrants calling our time the “age of humanitarianism.”

Why do political and economic regimes seek to justify themselves in terms of the service they render to the least, the lost, and the last? To answer this question we must invert Friedrich Nietzsche’s critique of Christian morality. Nietzsche identifies the emergence of a humanitarian sensibility with the transvaluation of Christian commitments. He sees this as the triumph of the “lambs” (the inherently weak) over the “eagles” (the “naturally” aristocratic and strong). ¹⁴ However, while Nietzsche is right to identify in humanitarianism a transvaluation of theological commitments, he is wrong to see this as the triumph of the weak over the strong. Rather, humanitarianism represents a way for the strong to regain control and demand the obeisance of the weak. In many ways this logic is seen most clearly in justifications of imperialism that were framed as a material and spiritual benefit to the colonized and as a sacrifice undertaken by the colonizer on behalf of the weak. Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The White Man’s Burden” is one expression of this sentiment. ¹⁵ Gustave Moynier, one of the original five members of the International Committee of the Red Cross and a key figure in its initial success, saw the spread of Red Cross societies around the world from the 1870’s onwards as a means to “humanize” what he called the “savage peoples,” and to rescue them from their “brute instincts.” ¹⁶

Bureaucratic, colonial, collectivizing, and commodifying programs of rule are more often than not justified in terms of the disinterested benefit they bring to the poor. In the name of “development,” “modernization,” “ending suffering,” and other tropes of humanitarian discourse, a huge array of top down, technocratic schemes are legitimated. Current moves to forcibly replace agrarian traditions of farming in the Gambella Province of Ethiopia with industrialized forms of agriculture in the name of “food security” and the need for “economic development” is an example of this kind of discursive justification in action. ¹⁷ Yet such schemes concentrate wealth and power, and rather than improve resilience and deepen the agency of the “have-nots” to solve their own problems, they tend to exacerbate ecological and human vulnerability. ¹⁸

Rulers are still expected to bring benefit of one kind or another to the body politic, and in the modern period, a measure of the goodness of any form of rule is the degree to which it benefits the impoverished and the suffering. Justifications of governance structures in humanitarian terms frame them as neutral and disinterested, to be done in the service of others rather than as the outcome of power struggles and negotiations between vested interests. In light of this, many critics of humanitarianism call for unveiling the power relations intrinsic to all humanitarian claims. This criticism takes a variety of forms. Some worry that for all the high ideals, aid and development work is more often than not a technocratic and utilitarian exercise driven by self-appointed “experts” that undermines indigenous attempts to address collective problems. More radical voices question the validity of the enterprise as such and ask whether development and aid work are anything more than the assertion of capitalism and the normativity of a Western and white way of life. ¹⁹ Indeed, many of the rationales for humanitarian aid and development bear a striking resemblance to those given to justify European colonialism in the nineteenth century. ²⁰ Some critics now see humanitarianism as part of how the “poor”—whether distant or near—are managed and governed. ²¹ Other critics see humanitarian work as inescapably premised on and re-inscribing inequality and a hierarchy of human life whereby the flesh of aid workers is of considerably greater value than those they go to help. ²²

Beyond issues of hegemony and inequality is the fact that humanitarianism is inherently anthropocentric and thereby ill equipped to help us frame the environmental challenges that are a root cause of so much poverty in the contemporary context. Such critiques call into question the viability of what have become core principles of humanitarianism, notably neutrality, impartiality, independence, and universality, and are part of a broader critique of humanitarianism as a “social imaginary” that shapes our responses to poverty and suffering. ²³ One response to such criticism, one that represents a big shift in development practice since the 1990’s, is the tying of aid and development to the promotion of democratic accountability through such measures as elections and increasing the capacity of civil society.

Linking humanitarianism to democratization is considered a way to address the inherently political and politicized nature of responses to poverty. However, the promotion of democracy as a means by which to address the problems of humanitarianism introduces a new set of moral imperatives. In contrast to humanitarian approaches, democracy demands we favor those who live nearby rather than those who live far away. Democracy is about “we, the people” (i.e., not those who do not count as part of the people). Here we encounter a different form of neighbor-love. Democracy is built on reciprocity, koinonia, or fellowship: that it is to say, it entails concern for those who are proximate rather than those who live far off.

Citizenship and the Closed Circle of Reciprocity

Notions of citizenship that involve forms of generalized reciprocity are attempts to articulate the basis for democratic citizenship. A notable modern example of this approach is that of the political philosopher John Rawls, who saw generalized reciprocity as the basis of a well-ordered society and who envisaged reciprocity as lying between mutual advantage and altruism. ²⁴ For Rawls, reciprocity involves the mutual recognition of persons as free and equal and is thus a condition of justice, for it ensures that only that which can be reasonably acknowledged by persons who are free and equal will be accepted. He states:

Reasonable persons, we say, are not moved by the general good as such but desire for its own sake a social world in which they, as free and equal, can cooperate with others on terms all can accept. They insist that reciprocity should hold within that world so that each benefits along with others. ²⁵

In contrast to Rawls, philosopher Jacques Derrida sees reciprocity as the heart of the problem with our notions of democratic citizenship. For Derrida, democracy involves drawing some and not others together in a circle that thereby excludes those on the outside. We call the inner circle “the people,” and democratic government is to be of, by, and for, and therefore entirely enclosed within this circle of people. Those inside the circle constitute the friend/fraternal relationship, and everyone outside it is considered either an actual or latent enemy. ²⁶ The problem with the revolutionary cry of “liberty, equality, and fraternity”—and, by extension, with modern conceptions of citizens as free and equal—is that such postulations are premised on citizens being the same. Derrida seeks to re-open the circle to “others.” His strategy for doing so is to contend that the circle constitutes only one pole of democracy. Its other pole is the absolute value placed on the equality and singularity of the one. When the value is placed on the irreducible singularity of each one, a universal horizon opens up that allows democratic politics to include others who have been outside the circle. For Derrida, realizing some kind of open-ended, hospitable democracy necessitates severing the link between democratic citizenship and fraternity. There is much more to be said about both Rawls’ and Derrida’s conceptions of democratic citizenship, but this brief summary illustrates how the question “Who is my neighbor?” is answered differently within a democratic frame and a humanitarian frame.

A Preferential Option for the People

We seem to be at an impasse. On the one side, there is the advocacy of disinterested love for distant strangers that we find undergirding humanitarianism, which turns out to re-inscribe inequality and justify the exercise of often oppressive forms of power. On the other hand, we have the advocacy of reciprocal, “fraternal” love for proximate neighbors that undergirds democratic citizenship, which is proposed as the remedy for the problems of humanitarianism, but which itself generates an exclusionary and highly partisan set of political relations. Let me suggest a constructive way of resolving this dilemma, a way that takes as central the agency of churches as both conduits of care and as political actors.

Concern for the poor should not be divorced from concern for the political (and we might add biological) order and the formation of a people and their common life with non-human nature. Such a concern calls into question the primarily technocratic and anthropocentric ways of addressing poverty that characterize much humanitarian work and most welfare regimes. The ambiguous identity of the people helps us see why a preferential option for the poor must at the same time be a preferential option for the formation of a people as a political community and the widespread distribution of and participation in patterns of rule.

Talk of “the people” should prioritize the aspirational use of the term as denoting “the whole.” An emphasis on the people as a whole emphasizes the heterogeneity rather than the homogeneity of the people. ²⁷ The people as a whole are not monolithic. Rather, the people as a whole are an intricate and differentiated body. ²⁸ An emphasis on wholeness rather than oneness or sameness encourages a vision of peoplehood as a network of mutual exchanges between different parts of the whole. ²⁹ Wholeness (at whatever scale) necessitates making contingent the boundaries of who constitutes members of the people so that it can be changed to include those whose contribution is not obviously recognizable within current patterns of membership (for example, the incarcerated, the severely disabled, and the mentally ill). A whole and healed body politic is not one where everyone is the same but one in which all may be recognized as having gifts to bring, even if these are difficult gifts to receive. For wholeness to stand, there is a need to identify and pursue goods in common. Democratic politics (i.e., a politics that aims at forming a people as a whole through distributing political agency as widely as possible) is one ongoing way in which to do realize this goal.

The problem with democratic politics is that to emphasize the formation of a democratic people as the central aim of humanitarian action is to inevitably be caught in a sectarian logic. Those who are not citizens (part of “the people”) do not count. ³⁰ Non-citizens either do not matter politically, or they are enemies. Moreover, democratic citizenship necessarily involves a scandal of particularity: it demands loyalty to these people in this place. We cannot, despite the exhortations of cosmopolitans, be citizens everywhere, all at once. The challenge is to imagine some form of relationship that transcends current political boundaries and that includes non-members of “the people” as worthy of our care. They must be defined in relation to a horizon beyond the political community in order to conceptualize the enemy or stranger as those to whom we owe a duty of care to and with whom we can form reciprocal relations.

In Christianity, it is the eschatological horizon that provides the point of reference through which we navigate the inevitable tensions between, on the one hand, the poor as “the people” and the poor as “the stranger,” and on the other hand, the poor as either the near or distant neighbor. The church has to define the stranger and answer the question “Who is my neighbor?” in relation to Christ and thereby expand the terms and conditions of who counts and discern whether, at a certain point in time, it is the near or distant neighbor who is to be prioritized. ³¹

When we imagine the poor as destitute or afflicted or powerless, irrespective of whether they are part of or contribute to a body politic, we get caught in the paradox of care, in which we de-politicize the relationship between poverty and privilege, so that an important systemic dimension of why the poor are poor is occluded. The poor become subjects of humanitarian or pastoral concern, not people enmeshed in and in need of transformed political and economic relations. ³²

How does this discussion affect the church? If the dēmos needs the church to bring an opening horizon of reference and relationship to bear upon its sectarian concerns, the church needs the dēmos to remind it that pastoral care must be orientated towards the reformation and healing of a body politic. Corporeal works of mercy (such as feeding the hungry) are not ends in themselves but the beginning point of the formation of a people. They are part of how the political order is reconstituted into something that is not wholly defined by the conditions of a fallen world.

Conclusion

In conclusion, loving near and distant neighbors is constitutive of what it means to be a disciple of Christ and of how to live as a Christian community. But the telos or ultimate goal of this love is not merely the material alleviation of destitution; rather, it constitutes what it means to be a faithful people. A theo-politics of “aid,” “development,” and “welfare” must begin with the repentance and conversion of the privileged. Any intervention should be more than relieving suffering. Intervention should be an act of healing that builds up of the body of Christ and simultaneously re-constitutes the body politic as a penultimate order of blessings. In short, the cure of the soul, the cure of the soil, and the cure of the polis must go hand in hand.