Iain Wilkinson, a professor of sociology at the University of Kent (United Kingdom), visited the University of Navarra to teach a course within the Master of Social Science Research, which the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS) coordinates. Wilkinson is an expert in issues related to the problems of social suffering and the sociology of humanitarianism. In his research, he tries to understand the cultural and social conditions that have given rise to humanitarianism, moral sentiments and the role of compassion policies.

Is the concept of humanitarianism universal or does it change between cultures and countries?
Yes, of course. But I would say there are some common themes in modern humanitarianism… i.e., pain and suffering are morally unacceptable and should be combated. Of course that understanding is always interpreted within a culture. Another common theme is the connection between the moral protests about suffering and social reform. Now how does take place? Again, it varies considerably.

So when Harriet Beecher Stowe, an antislavery activist and the author of Uncle’s Tom Cabin, did a book tour in Britain it was put to her that she ought to care about the white slavery of the industrial workers in Britain. She refused to acknowledge adult workers as worthy of that humanitarian concern. She recognized children and black slaves, but not white workers.

Could we say nowadays what the most important humanitarian issue is within a country, for example, in the UK?
I'm not sure how we could draw a map of concerns. In Britain, compared to many other countries, we have a more international humanitarianism. This is a legacy of its empire and the World Wars. Oxfam begins in a protest against the famine in Greece after Word War II. But, if you look at the activities of Save the Children, they have been involved in East Africa, in India, Bangladesh— their activities have followed the shadow of what the British Empire used to be.

You could argue that, if you look at different cultures and different nation states, the extent to which the Government has taken responsibilities from humanitarian concerns has shaped the way the population thinks about its moral responsibility towards the needs of others. Where you have a strong tradition of moral democracy, some Scandinavian countries, France… There is an expectation that the State is going to do more of the care work. Where you have more independent humanitarian organizations, like in America, there is a moral tradition of localism that individual communities have to take more responsibility for the healthcare, education and so on.

And the case of Spain?
In a country like Spain, with quite different regional politics and cultures, you’d anticipate the translation of humanitarian concerns would be again quite varied depending upon the region and its experience of government as well.

But these things do vary as well. So, for example we know that new forms of communication media are refashioning the currency of political and moral concerns. Jeremy Rifkin, who talks about the rise of a new empathic civilization, was interested in how digital technologies are making it possible for global types of empathy. Things such as how quickly people responded to the 2010 Haiti earthquake. It was very quick going through smartphones.

What other changes have taken place in humanitarianism in the twenty-first century? Beyond the speed of reaction…
I’m interested in the ways in which we are beginning to fashion, first of all, institutions that can help us order and channel reactions and also I’m looking for the kind of enlightenment where we recognize ourselves as being inevitably involved in these conflicts for learning how to pragmatically manage them. So, for example, I don’t think there are simple solutions for the world’s problems but what I do think, where wisdom lies is in the pragmatism of people like Jane Adams who hold that what you need to do is involve yourself in trying to create the social conditions that you want to see come into existence.

So there is a kind of pragmatism which I think is possible for us to acquire: I would advocate for a moral education so the people know what this moral, these complex feelings are. We need to teach people how to manage the emotional experience in the kind of world we are living in as part of an induction into being good citizens.

But that may lead to the problem of the government trying to teach their ideology though academic curricula…?
We need to go, again, back to pragmatism like that of Jane Adams and John Dewey. What we need to be working through is how to realize democratic participation. How do you make democracy work properly? And this is the problem of course, that contemporary Spain or contemporary Britain or modern democracies are continually having to deal with. What are the institutional arrangements that make possible a working democracy? But we do live in times now where it is possible to realize an active participation.

For example, grassroots movements?
Well I do think the direction that we are travelling needs to recognize the need of more localism, in terms of education, suffrage ... We have a lot of problems with democracy in the UK at the moment. There is a movement trying to rebump social democracy again because of the big gaps between rich and poor. There are big problems in the UK about differences between regions as you have here [Spain]. So, the solution to these issues has to be one that enables democratic participations. How you do it is of course complicated because the social conditions that we are all subject to understand rights as a demand.

Do you think problems arise because governments, who are in charge of humanitarian labors, and societies are thinking different things?
Of course they are. I mean government has got the real practical problem: how do you make a society work when you have competing interests within it. So inevitably the government is set in a pragmatic problem that the protest groups don’t have. Those problems vary considerably; it goes back to this whole question we’ve early talked about: what form of democracy is adequate or should be cultivated?

I also want to claim the importance of humanitarianism as social understanding and understanding people as social beings. What I would claim is that our ability to question what a human being is and what is good moral treatment or moral relationship with the human being is made possible by that controversy. It’s a useful provocation to make us question.

The origin of humanitarism When did humanitarianism start? There is a conventional story in which modern humanitarianism begins with the funding of the Red Cross. At the end of the XIX century, certainly by the time of the Geneva convention (1860), there is a shared discourse in civil society about humanitarianism’s meaning: Efforts to campaign for peace or look after the victims of various disasters regardless of which side was wrong.  I’m critical of that story because I think there is a longer history. Originally, the word humanitarian was used negatively by orthodox theologians who were complaining about the rise of Unitarian theology (which emphasizes the humanity of Jesus Christ).  My argument would be that, the eighteenth century is very important. You do have what could be called a “proto-humanitarianism,” an early humanitarianism in the evidence in the activities of someone like Bartolome de las Casas. So, could we say that humanitarianism is a reaction to others’ suffering? Well, for Bartolome de las Casas, of course. He was witness to the brutal treatment of the Amerindians. For him, the suffering done to these people means a moral problem that needs to be addressed with a reform.   Now, the idea of that being unjust suffering is radical in its time because, most people in the sixteenth century and for many years after, would understood suffering as connected to some divine intervention. In the eighteenth century, this starts to become more common and protest against human suffering is more explicitly linked to movements for social reform.  No doubt people like Bartolome de las Casas have contributed to this. There is a great awakening, which is partly emotional; there is a new emotional experience that happens in the seventeenth century, which is related to the rise of novels and the cultivation of moral sentiment. It’s also very much linked to an understanding of sentiment as social and that the moral feeling we have about suffering should direct us to questions of social organizations. There is an explosion of protest tracts and pamphlets. You see the origins of women’s rights, children’s rights, animal rights and, of course, antislavery.