A Word on Humanitarianism
Near the conclusion of his 2025 Touchstone conference talk, Matthew Crawford said that “the humanitarian focuses on suffering because the existence of suffering is thought to impugn God’s rule. This animus against God is the real source of the animus against hierarchy.”
While most readers today might regard this as a bit of a stretch, it would have a case of stating the obvious to those who coined and promoted humanitarianism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The following image comes from the 1929 edition of the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (an 1889 entry in The New Century Dictionary is essentially identical):
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J. Douglas Johnson is the executive editor of Touchstone and the executive director of the Fellowship of St. James.
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