‘Our first priority,’ David Cameron said this week, ‘has of course been to deal with the acute humanitarian crisis in Iraq.’ One knows what he means, but isn’t humanitarian an odd way of putting it? If it had been a vegetarian crisis or a disestablishmentarian crisis, it would be one either caused or suffered by people who professed either of those schools of thought.
Humanitarians used to be people who followed the teachings of Pierre Leroux (1797–1871), who believed in the spontaneous perfectibility of the human race. He’d soaked up the ideas of Saint-Simon and squeezed them out over Auguste Comte and George Sand. The dogma-free religion of humanity was all fairly transparent tosh, and very popular in its time.
In the first half of Victoria’s reign humanitarian and humanitarianism were generally terms of disapprobation. In the 20th century, humanitarians gradually became thought of as people who act out of humanity.
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