View article

Alison Brysk why do we care about the suffering of strangers, and how can that care construct a social world that protects human dignity? The normative basis for political will is a key determinant of our ability to promote human rights, yet we have an incomplete and sometimes contradictory understanding of how it works. Sometimes “naming and shaming” brings down dictatorships, while with others an enlightened world community ignores well-documented genocides. Realists and materialists of every ilk scoff at humanitarian solidarity as epiphenomenal or hypocritical—yet every day a “small determined group of people” do sacrifice their own personal and political interests to speak for strangers and do occasionally change history. Most of all, even as biology, culture, and power seem to conspire to draw boundaries around solidarity with “our own kind,” the quest for cosmopolitan norms and compassion—bridging every conceivable form of social difference—-are equally recurrent features of the human condition. What do we mean by “care”? Care means compassion, but it also means engagement.“Taking care” of someone is other directed and often transcendent, but it is not always altruistic, in the sense of conscious self-sacrifice. Caring as a verb means giving attention and worth to someone else’s experience, in a way that makes us available for solidarity with that person. We manifest care in individual actions, social attitudes, transformations of communities, and political campaigns for human rights. The meaning of human dignity is limned in the destruction of care by every form of oppression; at the climax of Orwell’s 1984, the protagonist’s …