"A Bed for the Night" by David Rieff

Humanitarians are a mixed bag : some of us work in full awareness of the limitations of humanitarian action, others still believe that large-scale transformation is possible through what we do (e.g., our advocacy work, such as MSF’s Access to Essential Drugs Campaign). But Rieff is an anti-utopian, and sees contemporary humanitarianism and its added advocacy component as riddled with utopian aspirations. By showing us our failures, he is defending a version of humanitarian assistance that is stripped of this idealistic baggage, and thus unencumbered by improbable causes and impossible ideals. More streamline and less idealistic would mean more saved lives-we should leave the project of addressing "root causes" and of transforming the human condition to politicians, military advisors, or other civil actors better suited to this task.

You can be an anti-utopian like Rieff, and still work happily as a humanitarian practitioner. Where you and he would part ways, however, would be over your commitment to the ethical imperative at the heart of humanitarian work. The humanitarian vocation is highly ecumenical, and yet there is at least one basic feature shared by all non-state humanitarian actors. I am thinking of the core of "humanitarian reason" : when faced with the suffering of others, near or far, silence and inaction are impossible to countenance. Thus is passivity indistinguishable from complicity, which explains the activist, interventionist nature of humanitarian logic. Of course, the humanitarian injunction against silence and passivity is not itself a solution to the suffering of others, but it captures the essence of the moral logic behind humanitarian action.