"The humanitarian would, of course, have us meddle in foreign affairs as part of his program of world service"
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Babbitt’s line lands like a polite eyebrow-raise: “of course” is doing the dirty work, tagging humanitarian intervention as something his opponents treat as self-evident, even fashionable. He’s not attacking compassion so much as the moral swagger that often travels with it. The “humanitarian” here isn’t a nurse in a war zone; it’s a type, a modern reformer who converts conscience into a program and then mistakes that program for destiny.
“Meddle” is the tell. It turns what advocates call “engagement” or “responsibility” into busybody intrusion, implying arrogance, unintended consequences, and a thin grasp of local realities. Babbitt’s phrasing suggests that foreign intervention is less about the people supposedly served than about the interveners’ need to feel virtuous, competent, historically necessary. “World service” reads like a secular gospel: expansive, uplifting, and conveniently vague, the kind of phrase that can launder power into benevolence.
The context is early-20th-century moral politics, when progressive idealism, missionary zeal, and an emerging American global posture began to sound like each other. Babbitt, a leading humanist critic of Romantic moral sentimentality, distrusted politics driven by emotive certainty rather than disciplined self-restraint. The subtext is a warning about ethical overreach: when private virtue becomes public policy, it can mutate into coercion with a smile. His skepticism anticipates later critiques of liberal interventionism: not that helping is wrong, but that the will to help can become a rationale for managing the world.
“Meddle” is the tell. It turns what advocates call “engagement” or “responsibility” into busybody intrusion, implying arrogance, unintended consequences, and a thin grasp of local realities. Babbitt’s phrasing suggests that foreign intervention is less about the people supposedly served than about the interveners’ need to feel virtuous, competent, historically necessary. “World service” reads like a secular gospel: expansive, uplifting, and conveniently vague, the kind of phrase that can launder power into benevolence.
The context is early-20th-century moral politics, when progressive idealism, missionary zeal, and an emerging American global posture began to sound like each other. Babbitt, a leading humanist critic of Romantic moral sentimentality, distrusted politics driven by emotive certainty rather than disciplined self-restraint. The subtext is a warning about ethical overreach: when private virtue becomes public policy, it can mutate into coercion with a smile. His skepticism anticipates later critiques of liberal interventionism: not that helping is wrong, but that the will to help can become a rationale for managing the world.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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