Well, thank you all for coming today. We're really, really lucky to have Tommie Smith with us from the Department of International Development
very often and promises to be a really interesting and topical talk started with him.
Get straight to it. If you don't have your name and email address within this past year.
And also just one more thing.
Aside from 87 a few years ago, I was very keen to do this and bring together students who were working on issues related to humanitarian assistance,
especially in conflict zones. If you are a student, you're not going anywhere.
I'd like to present to you fantastic or even an artist of some ongoing work you like to get to be back on.
You get in touch. And you know, I was until Monday evening, 30 minutes.
Yeah, 30 or 40 minutes. And then we all have questions and.
Thanks very much and thanks, everyone. Come in.
It's a it's a really good opportunity for me to share some of the research I've been doing with people working on similar issues.
And I'm really looking forward to the Q&A as well. I'm based at the part of international development and associated with the Refugee Studies Centre,
and this paper that I'm going to deliver is primarily based on my own field research, which I'm expanding into a dphil.
And broadly speaking, my research is looking into the history of humanitarian practices.
So it's an examination of how humanitarian agencies provide the essentials of life in disasters
and how these particular techniques that they use have emerged and developed in history.
And I'm interested in this topic because of the way that humanitarian action has recently become such a regularised and standardised industry,
particularly over the last 30 years,
it increasingly purports to undertake these kind of objective interventions that are just concerned with saving and sustaining human lives.
And my feeling is that any pretence to objectivity like this, especially when it comes to human lives, requires a lot more critical analysis.
And it's probably been given so far. And obviously I can't present all my thoughts or my findings from my research today.
So I thought I'd outline some of the main arguments that I'm making in my work with reference to this debate about humanitarian principles,
most notably these principles of neutrality, impartiality and independence.
It seems to me that this was a good way into my research because this neutrality debate continues to be one
of those tricky and intractable problems that most people who are working on humanitarianism are aware of.
And then you try to seize very. It was also what drew me personally into the study of humanitarianism in the first place.
It seems to be so confusing when I first looked into it that activities that only sought to help people in the most minimal ways could be,
first of all, so controversial. And second of all, so potentially damaging.
And it was also particularly interesting for me that the activities that sought to assist
people could often have the opposite effect of actually making things quite a lot worse.
So I was determined to look into how and why this came about. And although there's already a very rich literature in this area,
my intervention in general involves bringing in the issue of history and the issue of humanitarian techniques and bringing them stage.
First of all, I think there's been very little attention to history in the study of humanitarianism,
and humanitarianism is too often presented as a kind of a historical, transcendental, universal phenomenon.
And I think humanitarian desperately needs to be placed in some proper historical context.
And secondly, I think that there's been relatively little critical research into the particular mechanisms that humanitarian agencies use in disaster,
the actual ways in which humanitarian agencies help people, the kind of foods they provide,
the kind of shelters they build, the kind of information they process, the kind of outcomes they measure.
Well, these particular techniques and practices, I think, are rarely critically analysed in detail.
So my feeling is that both these areas, history and humanitarian techniques, can help us unravel the debate about neutrality.
And so just briefly, the structure of my talk today,
I'm going to begin with a description of this neutrality debate for people who are not familiar with it.
But I'm going to have to trace out rather broad terms just because the lack of time.
And then I'm going to highlight the way that scholars so far have contributed to this debate, pointing out the main gaps,
which, again, I think in there is a lack of historical analysis and a lack of analysis of humanitarian techniques.
And then finally, I want to argue that attention to history and humanitarian practices can help illuminate the whole phenomenon of humanitarianism,
but especially the neutrality debate.
And I want to illustrate this with some detailed attention to food and the way that food is provided by humanitarian agencies.
I should note that my research I'm also looking at the way that shelter is provided by the sanitation is provided by the water provided.
So different chapters on different areas of essential human life.
But just today, I went to look at food in detail.
So I've been looking at the techniques that humanitarian agencies use to provide food as revealed in their own operational documents.
I'm going to look at archival documents from history to reveal the way that these particular techniques developed.
And my main aim today, I think, will be to show that these mechanisms of humanitarian relief are not neutral and objective responses to suffering.
But they're the product of a particular moment in European history.
My argument, to put it very simply, is that humanitarianism can never be neutral and impartial.
It can never be separated from politics.
But this isn't because of the consequences of humanitarian action, the kind of unforeseen effects that humanitarianism has had.
But I think it's equally due to the particular cultural history of its techniques and technologies.
It's down to the way that humanitarian practices have been formed and the way
that these practices are the product of certain Western European circumstances.
So in essence, my aim is to shift the focus away from the consequences of humanitarianism,
which are very often examined with the conclusion that they are almost always political.
And instead of a focus to these technologies, these practices that humanitarian agencies use,
the kind of mundane technologies at play when humanitarian agencies intervene.
So let me start by summarising the neutrality debate in broad terms what it is, what it means.
First of all, I just wanted to clarify that I'm using this term as a shorthand. This is really a debate about humanitarian principles more broadly.
It's not just about neutrality,
but it's also about impartiality and independence and a whole set of principles that have been articulated in various ways at various times,
possibly most extensively by Peter, who I think outlined about seven of them in great detail.
But just to give you a flavour of the idea, I thought I'd go through what neutrality, impartiality and independence actually mean.
The principle of impartiality suggests that aid should be distributed according to need,
only ignoring all other considerations like nationality and ethnicity, location, convenience, and all these other things.
The principle of neutrality suggests that aid should be provided without attention to the grievances and opinions of either side in a conflict,
and the aid should be delivered without benefiting one side in the conflict at the expense of another.
The principle of independence suggests that agencies should not take money
from or be associated with any party to a conflict or their political allies.
So you can see that these three principles set out to distinguish a kind of partial political interest driven world of politics from an impartial,
imperative, value driven world of humanitarianism.
That basically about trying to situate humanitarianism as something that's apolitical,
something independent of politics, something driven by morality and values.
It's true that a lot of agencies have rejected some of these principles and accepted other ones.
And it's also true that there are a number of subtleties in the different ways that these principles have been articulated.
But for the purposes of clarity and brevity in this presentation, I want to identify two broad positions in this debate, in this neutrality debate.
Basically,
there are people who generally accept the idea of humanitarian principles and apolitical humanitarianism and those that generally reject them.
Those that accept the principles have often been termed classicists or denominators,
because the principles themselves go back to the beginnings of organised Unitarianism,
to the establishment of the International Committee of the Red Cross by Henry Art and a number of other agencies in the middle of the 19th century.
And those the rejection of certain principles have often been called political or politicised, and they've often been labelled also Christian areas.
After Bernard Kouchner, the founder of Médecins Sans Frontieres, who was possibly the most visible exponent of this view from the 1960s and 1970s.
These are visionary and reject classical principles on the basis of two main arguments.
Firstly, they argue that classical humanitarianism is of limited value because it fails to address the causes of suffering.
David Rieff characterise this view in a memorable phrase that humanitarianism just involves putting Band-Aids on malignant tumours.
In other words, it's a rather useless response. It doesn't really address the reasons people need help.
It just offers some basic forms of relief. And as long as those root causes aren't tackled, people are still going to suffer.
And relief is still going to be needed. But second, these people also attack classical humanitarians on the view that it's an unethical position.
This is an ethical argument rather than a practical one.
They say that staying completely neutral in the conflict often means staying quiet about human rights abuses.
When you don't make a statement that could be considered to advance the cause of one side over another.
You ignore the fact that one side actually might be worse than another, or that justice might actually lie with one side and not another.
They argue that we have an ethical obligation to condemn what's wrong and to assist what's right.
And if the delivery of humanitarian aid ends up people have committed atrocities, then humanitarian aid is counterproductive and unethical.
And this, of course, is the situation that a lot of aid agencies from themselves in after Rwanda.
And it's been the topic of a lot of academic work by people, actually, military movements.
And of course, yes, then whoops is not here today, but has been involved in this group.
So let me now briefly is the contribution of empirical academic work in this debate.
When taken as a whole, academic work on humanitarianism appears to suggest that this classical idea
of neutral and impartial humanitarianism has never really worked in practice.
In other words, they highlight that it's impossible to actually implement classical principles,
and they highlight the multiple ways that humanitarian agencies actually have very political consequences.
And I'm just going to give three examples of this.
It's a very, very big literature, but here is three illustrations of this view and overall of this body of work.
So first of all, there's work on the economic consequences of AIDS.
So when the agencies go into a new place carrying huge amounts of cash and resources,
it's inevitable that some people are going to benefit more than others.
Aid agencies might allow military forces to charge for the protection of deliveries.
They might allow militias to seize goods at checkpoints.
They might pay rents and buy items locally from traders and wholesalers who offer assistance to one side in the conflict or another.
They might provide opportunities for the final recipients of aid to trade things like cash and food for.
So to trade items like food and medicine, cash, weaponry.
So all these interventions in the political economy of aid have inevitably political impacts.
And David Keene is perhaps the most well-known author who makes this point.
Second, there's work on the political consequences of aid, or rather, the consequences of aid on political institutions.
When agencies intervene, they often end up acting very much like governments, and they often intervene where governments are already very weak.
They end up replicating replacing governmental structures or providing services that national governments
would otherwise provide or provide these kind of systems of patronage and opportunities for people.
Again, the governments are normally providing they can be accused of undermining existing political structures,
preventing democratic institutions from taking root and replacing the need for citizens to call their own governments into account.
So undermine democracy in this fundamental way has been the argument of Alex the world, again, probably the most notable author who makes this point.
And then finally, there's a lot of academic work on how donors and aid agencies themselves have very partial motivations.
Agencies are reliant on their income streams, obviously, and they remain paralysed like a lot of international agencies, by the funding cycle itself.
And they inevitably don't intervene purely on the basis of need, but also in the basis of where there's money available for them to intervene.
And usually because this money comes from governments or large donors that
influence by the geostrategic or political aims of those donors or governments.
As a result, there's a lot of examples and a lot of studies about this imbalance between the amount
of money that's spent on international aid and the level of need in a certain place.
Again, perhaps the most famous example comes from the late 1990s,
when many more millions was spent by humanitarian agencies in the Balkans compared to Central Africa.
And this was at a time when, according to pretty much every indicator,
the situation in Africa and the needs in Africa were far, far greater than in the Balkans.
So these three examples demonstrate the inevitably political consequences of humanitarian aid,
and they provide strong evidence that these classical principles that I went through are pretty much impossible to achieve in practice.
But curiously, and this is the beginning point, really, for my intervention,
this kind of empirical evidence doesn't seem to have led to a revision of the ethical position as it
relates to a revision of the way the agencies and the see themselves and the principles that they adopt.
In fact, if anything, there seems to have been an intensification of classical humanitarianism since the 1990s,
since these studies first came out in response to them,
and especially after Rwanda, a lot of agencies insisted the classical principle should remain as a key operational guide,
even if they appear impossible to sustain in practice. A lot of agencies ended up intensifying their search for this kind of classical ideal,
and the growth of standardised guidelines and handbooks I think is the main manifestation of this trend.
Over the past 40 years and the practical techniques used by humanitarian actors have become more and more standardised and prescriptive.
They've been set down in increasingly detailed hand lines and books and guidelines, these handbooks.
I think if you look at them from a distance, seem to be stipulating objective response to suffering.
They're trying to manage humanitarianism in a lot of detail. They're trying to control it scientifically.
They're trying to prevent and minimise the political consequences that reported by
Keenan de Waal and others by managing it in a much more bureaucratic and detailed way.
And they've expanded in reach and significance within pretty much every organisation.
So to take also as an example, when I was doing archival research with Oxfam.
The first humanitarian policy that I could find was produced in 1971.
There was nothing before them, and it was about 30 pages long.
It was typed. It was just an internal document. And it set out guidelines for Oxfam, who monitor interventions in its entirety.
Absolutely everything was there. But by the late 1990s, there was an extremely massive range of lengthy documents.
Every area of humanitarian practice had separate books that were published, often by and published and available for everybody.
And the catalogue of humanitarian equipment, the kind of technical things the humanitarian agencies used.
That catalogue alone is over 200 pages long. It's an absolutely massive list.
And this remarkable expansion in the length and detail of handbooks and guidelines is not exclusive to Oxfam.
And often humanitarian agencies are governed by handbooks collectively.
For example, many of you are probably familiar with the Sphere Handbook, which was produced according to them,
in consultation with over 400 organisations, and is adopted certainly by many more locally and internationally, and it's about 350 pages long.
It is quite brief in its descriptions,
but it does stipulate in quite astonishing detail the kind of requirements and minimum standards that humanitarian agencies are expected to adhere to.
And there are other handbooks as well that concentrate on just a particular area like this one I'm showing now on nutrition,
which is produced by the World Health Organisation and is also adopted by a number of
agencies and is equally long as this very handbook but just concentrates on nutrition.
So I suppose the first argument that I am making is that this whole project of
standardisation is driven by the idea that there is such a thing as a perfectly objective,
a neutral intervention, or at least it's something that we should aim at.
And it's suggesting that agencies can avoid being political by following these kind of intricate procedures that manage human life in a lot of detail.
And my feeling is that the content of these handbooks has been really critically examined historically.
And what I am setting out to do in my research is to look at where these particular prescriptions originated.
Is there really such thing as this objective response to suffering or other prescriptions in the handbook?
Actually, products of certain cultural and historical conditions that we can look into.
And I suppose my approach can be seen as the application of science and technology studies, science and sociology to humanitarianism.
It's going to attempt to look at the sociological and cultural context of these technological practices.
So I'm going to illustrate the kind of work I'm doing by looking at food.
Like I said, I want to first of all,
look at the way that food is conceived and presented in humanitarian documents and these handbooks that I've just presented.
And secondly, began to look at the history of this presentation. So the provision of food is obviously a very important part of relief.
And like other areas, it's been subjected to this kind of rationalisation process.
And I think we can identify two main features of humanitarian food programs, or at least there's only two that I want to concentrate on today.
The first one relates to the way that food is conceived and the relationship of who happens to the human body.
Humanitarian relief programs present food in terms of its biochemical properties.
That great food down is their carbohydrate, the protein, the vitamin, the mineral, the fat content.
And they define foods often by these kind of invisible nutritional parts rather than their visible forms.
So rather than being a plate of maize or lentils or rice things that people I mean,
the beneficiaries understand, they become a matter for expert intervention.
They become categorised according to the terminology of nutritional science.
And this is an example of a table from one cornerstone handbook,
which demonstrates the way that Russians are broken down into their component nutrients.
And this is a table for another one which shows common foodstuffs.
Again, by their nutritional content, but as well as food being conceived in this way,
the human body and the human need for food is conceived as a purely biological need.
Food is seen as an input which allows human to function. It's seen as a kind of fuel which drives human activity.
Providing food to populations becomes a matter of calculating what amounts are required to maintain bodily functions.
And then providing this table I put on the PowerPoint now demonstrates one handbook summary of a person's need for food,
which is articulated a set of exact quantities of each nutrient.
And these nutritional requirements are often adjusted depending on different
characteristics which relate to the population and adjusted according to age,
gender activity level and the ambient temperature of the country.
These factors affect the functioning of the body.
The point is that they affect the biological processing of food, the conversion of food into energy, and they take these into account.
Humanitarian agencies when they're planning for a disaster.
So can see in all these charts where the food is perceived as this biochemical inputs,
the human body and the humans are seen somehow as motors or machines or at least physical beings.
And food is seen as fuel, which drives these physical beings and this circulation of food.
The social values of food and eating are often replaced by this purely physical requirement to drive the human machine.
All the different cultural categorisations of food, which have enormous relevance in a lot of societies,
are replaced by an articulation of the nutritional content of food and its role in biological organism.
So I'm arguing in this part of my research that there's a very specific understanding
of food as a culturally and socially and historically specific understanding of food.
I suppose the first thing to mention is that food is perceived quite differently in other cultures.
There's obviously a rich anthropology of food.
There's a very large literature that one can draw and showing the different perceptions of food around the world.
And there's a number of fascinating books by anthropologists revealing how food and eating are so central to cultural life, social life.
They have social roles. They create food, create and maintain social bonds.
It's often laden with very rich, symbolic meaning. It has quite profound religious significance in a lot of places.
And there's even a large literature about how tastes about food.
The kind of foods that people Willimon eat is extremely different from French culture, and it remains very important to people,
even when on the brink of death, even when they're starving, they'll be very fussy about what they eat.
So my argument is that this idea of food as a biochemical input to the human body is culturally specific.
But my main emphasis is on how it's historically specific.
I've been tracing the emergence of this particular idea of food through history and how it became central to humanitarianism.
Nutritional science as an idea and a bulk of ideas first emerged in the mid-19th century,
and it was a new discourse on food that's generally accepted to have created
a revolution in the way that people understood what went into their bodies.
Within Europe, food became less a matter of cultural life or social status, and it became more about health and energy.
People began to relate their intake of their food more precisely with energy and health.
It became less of a social thing and the intakes of food more exactly quantified by scientists.
There was this new language of nutritional science, which was very quickly adopted by states and within industry.
The science of food became central to the mechanisms of the modern bureaucratic state.
Nutritional scientists drove standard diets, which articulated the minimum quantities of each nutrient are working man and woman would need.
This is a slide which summarises the work of nutritional scientists in the late 19th century.
They were disaggregating the kind of people who needed food and the occupation and their nationality and
the different types of workers in different places and how they needed different types of nutrients.
So you can see on this chart the difference between a French bourgeois with moderate exercise and a Swedish worker.
This standard diet was rapidly adopted by industrialists who in the late 19th century were increasingly concerned with efficiency and productivity.
There was the movement of tailor ism which involved the careful control of
production to minimise sorry to maximise efficiency in the workplace and tailors,
and began to see the intake of food by workers as a crucial part of their drive for efficiency.
They began to offer nutritionally balanced meals on the work floor in the workplace to
ensure that the energy that workers expended was matched by the meals that they paint.
And in the process, the human being began to see increasingly like this machine, which took input and produced and outputs industrial waste.
But this vision of the human body, which has been called the human motor by a very influential book by Robyn Buck, was also adopted in the military.
It was very common in the military, particularly the early 20th century.
The military became preoccupied by the health and the strength of their fighting troops.
But they also began to intervene directly in the policies of government to make sure that not only their troops were nutritionally well-off,
but the general population was, so that when they were drawing conscripts in population,
that they were healthy and sturdy and whole policies like canteen feeding, nutrition, education,
fortified foods and very detailed attention to the Russians that soldiers were given all manifestations of this kind of trend.
So this idea that food is a fuel that drives human motor,
I think is a cultural idea that emerged in the 19th century and became very much associated with the motor bureaucratic state,
particularly the military and the industry.
And I suppose the broad and provocative question I went to us today and I'm going to return to this is can we really see this as humanitarian?
This view of food, doesn't it failed to respond to people as humans with social and cultural lives of their own?
Doesn't it just respond to people as physical machines that require certain amounts of chemical energy in order to operate physically?
And what are the implications of these techniques? Actually, when we get into the field.
I return to these questions at the end and I hope we can talk about them because of course I recognise that it's a comparative question.
But secondly, I'll go through the second main characteristic of humanitarian feeding,
which is the actual delivery of food itself, the items that are provided in order to assist people in humanitarian situations.
And what I found when looking at these handbooks particularly,
is that if you take this specific vision of food as something as a biochemical input that you
need physically and you translate it and you end up with this kind of technical intervention,
you end up with these this desire to provide the required nutrients in the most efficient, most rational way possible,
and consequently humanity and feeding can involve it doesn't always,
but it can involve the distribution not of common foodstuffs like rice or lentils or so on, but industrial products.
And so these have been quite an important part of humanitarian action ever since the beginning.
This image that I'm showing on the PowerPoint is the BP five.
It's a compressed tablet which contains, and I'm quoting, everything necessary for the maintenance of a healthy body.
All moisture is removed from their stream processing, so it has to be eaten with lots of foil.
There's instructions for the eating, as you can see on the box, and it becomes a bulky wrapping foil and has to be eaten with lots of water.
But here's another example. It's what's known as the humanitarian daily ration.
This is what caused all the consternation a few years ago during the Afghan war, because it was kind of the same shade of yellow as the cluster bombs.
And again, they're industrially produced and preserved and packaged meals.
And the aim is that they contain all the nutrients that the body requires.
And again, what I want to do is link these techniques of feeding to the emotions and additional science
and the rational techniques that the modern bureaucratic state began to use to feed people.
And in the military particularly, the main concern, of course,
was to deliver nutrients to their soldiers in the most efficient manner, possible concern with health and strength of troops.
They led to this massive attention on the character of rations,
and military planners began to find new ways to provide the nutritional needs
of soldiers in the most durable and efficient and portable manner possible.
This document I'm showing comes from an Army handbook.
It shows the way that the British army planners were comparing the Russians of different countries
around Europe to give themselves a kind of nutritional advantage over their adversaries.
But these Russians had to be compact and portable. And we can see in this next image how army planners tested the biscuits that
were the mainstay of the Russian and not only for their nutritional content,
also for their durability and whether they could survive being transported big distances.
You can actually see and also both of these images how essential biscuits and
tin beef or beef were in military rations at the turn of the 20th century.
And when tracing the content of humanitarian rations by looking in the archives of humanitarian agencies,
you find an almost exactly mirroring of the kind of foods that they were giving to people in disasters and the kind of foods and technical food.
Staffs that the military were also pioneering at the same time.
After all, the concerns of the military in humanitarianism with respect to food were very, very similar.
Both were concerned to provide rations in the most efficient manner, the most powerful men of the most durable manner.
And both were concerned with meeting people's physical needs. Using these technological and rational means.
There's a large amount of work in, say, the shows in archives, particularly about the efficiency of the Russians and how you can find the Russians,
which get best value for money for their donors in the Ukraine.
And in fact, you could argue that the military biscuit in particular remains an essential part of humanitarian feeding.
In the 1960s and seventies, there were lots of experiments with modernising the biscuits and making these high protein varieties,
and I think a number of aid agencies continue to give out biscuits.
And in fact, the BP find, which I showed, could be seen as a kind of variety of biscuit since the moisture is removed.
But it's a much more modern, technologically, nutritionally balanced biscuit for the modern age.
But again, the point I suppose I'm trying to make here is that culture and taste are sidelined.
And what we're looking at is a rational and a modern solution for nutritional needs.
So just before I finish and I'm about to conclude,
I just wanted to and draw weight inclusion was based on the other part of my research about this relationship,
this particularly interesting relationship between military technologies and humanitarian technologies.
Because in my research,
I often noted the similarity between the techniques that were adopted in the military and those that were used by humanitarian actors.
And after I mean, it became fairly obvious, actually, when you think about it, that it was a 19th century military who,
first of all, responded to the kind of situations that humanitarian agencies would later face.
It was them who first tackled these challenges of sustaining large numbers of people who were on the move a long way from civilisation,
as I suppose they would have put it.
It was the army who had to provide food and shelter and water and sanitation to soldiers en masse, often a long distance from established settlements.
And it was then that developed technologies that were mobile and efficient and easy to construct when establishing a camp.
So I found that techniques of shelter provision that humanitarian agencies use often mirror and
are based on the prefabricated housing and the tents that were originally developed in the army.
And again, if you trace the humanitarian documents and the military documents, you find a very interesting similarity.
And I've also found that techniques of providing emergency sanitation very, very closely to those developed by the Army.
And there's also an extremely interesting resemblance between the handbooks that humanitarian agencies
use today and the handbooks that the Army Medical Corps used from the beginning of the 20th century.
I'm just going to show you a few examples here, but the chapters in the chapter headings almost identical.
Those two examples and the technologies and the solutions that they recommend are also very similar,
including the diagrams, the way that the diagrams are set out. And there's and there's two more examples there.
But these are just some examples from the wider research that I'm doing. So it's not just food that draws on these military technologies.
I think there's a great number of other areas of humanitarian work that also do, including sanitation, shelter provision.
You can also see a number of cross-referencing between the handbooks.
And of course, a large number of military men went on to work in humanitarian agencies after the Second World War.
But I suppose just to return to my original argument that a lot of these techniques are not mutual and objective,
but we can really place them in historical context. We can see where they came from.
We can see the cultural ideas and priorities that went into them.
And my aim in this talk is really even to focus on these techniques and practices and give some examples of how they've emerged in history.
And I suppose I really just want to rethink whether it's possible to have this
objective scientific intervention and to argue broadly that it's not possible,
but not because humanitarianism has political effects in the field, which I think is very well established in the literature,
but also because of the characteristics of these technologies that they use.
Of course, the big theme of the talk has been about how humanitarian relief is increasingly governed by these ideals of bureaucratic efficiency,
rationalisation, standardisation. But I think that maybe we can see this is the opposite of what humanitarianism should be.
I mean, this is a personal opinion that I feel that politicians should be more politically engaged and should stop trying to be an objective science.
Should respond to people more as a political beings. As cultural beings with political views and opinions.
I think that often humanitarianism, as it exists in the document, not necessarily as exists in the field,
tends to destroy the kind of diversity in the complexity of human life and all the
facets that really make people human and make them different and make them interesting.
The relationships, the cultures, the histories, the feelings, that opinions,
all these things end up being abstracted away and people are treated as purely physical, biological beings.
And so I was going to make a few comments about the kind of, I suppose,
the provocation that I'm making for some people today and defending myself against the
accusation that it could be accused of being rather nihilistic to make these points.
But I suppose the only point to make was the humanitarian community as a whole, I think has a.
Tendency to be not so much immune from criticism, but it tends not to be criticised or looked analytically by by scholars.
It's partly because of the image that it holds in the public eye.
It's partly because of the way the funeral agencies rely on the goodwill and the donations of the public, and therefore they need to retain this.
But I think it was Alex Doyle who originally said that nobility of aim doesn't confer immunity from sociological analysis or ethical critique.
But I also think that maybe we should go further and that there is this nobility of aim that makes the sociological
analysis so important because it's people who've got noble aims and that do things that are often amazing.
So in aware of the kind of power that they have, I think the negative things that they can end up doing.
I mean, people work so hard to try and change the world for the better and they often don't have the time
to examine what actually happens in the noble attempts and the kind of techniques that they use.
And certainly they will never have time to examine in a lot of detail.
Thanks very much.