Post-skeptical humanism

"The young adults who have spent several weeks or months doing volunteer work in the field are likely to feel these days that, in having done so, they may have paradoxically engaged in a misguided act of global citizenship that is ultimately irresponsible (whether their concerns relate to women’s rights, decolonial aid, environmental responsibility or equality of opportunity), thus rendering them ‘complicit’ for being, as a participant put it, ‘part of the problem rather than being part of the solution.’" (p.236)

"For decades, Western states have been opening their bureaucratic gates to a plurality of private interventions. We have come to live with a model of governance whose aim is to create overly responsible and entrepreneurial subjects whose vital goal and purpose for existence is to continuously scramble for resources whether for social or other personally meaningful life projects. As a by-product of this ‘ethico-politics’ (Rose, 1999), which has been substantially supported by a post-radical ‘humanitarian’ discourse (Douzinas, 2007), there are countless ways democratic citizens can today incorporate a humanist ethical sensibility into their lives and lifestyles and, noticeably, however they choose to intervene, it currently matters much less whether what they do seems conscious, altruistic, social, political or public enough (see e.g. Chouliaraki, 2013). To grapple with this jarring development, social critics have often aspired to the possibility of refining collaboration by denouncing market contamination.

... [And yet] the belief that a ‘purity politics’ is still possible is what Alexis Shotwell has qualified, in a broader analysis of the Anthropocene, as a ‘paradoxical politics of despair’, which is, as she incisively reflects, most probably ‘a bad approach because it shuts down precisely the field of possibility that might allow us to take better collective action’ (2016: 8-9)." (pp. 117-118)

"Rousseau would immediately agree with Diderot if he thought that, were he somehow a skeptic, he could be converted by simply reading or hearing about Diderot’s exhortations on the rightfulness of humanity as a natural law. Yet since he cannot find any self-evident reason in this text or elsewhere for his inner skeptic to follow such a general will, he must assume that the humanitarian perception is, in spite of his own common sense, a rather rare sensibility. Smith and Rousseau do not need to go as far as becoming humanitarian skeptics. For the time being they must remain skeptical humanitarians." (p. 112)