International Journal of Cultural Studies 14(4)

441446 The Author(s) 2011

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DOI: 10.1177/1367877911403561
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Charity and chilliness

Article

John Durham Peters

University of Iowa, USA

Abstract
This article discusses the five contributions to the special issue on Roger Silverstones work,
focusing specifically on the interplay between Judeo-Christian and Stoic themes.

Keywords
cosmopolitanism, emotion, humanitarianism, media, Silverstone

Out of the complex intellectual genealogy of modern humanitarianism one can discern
two main lines: Judeo-Christian care for the other and Stoic cosmopolitanism. For the
first, all humans have a duty to care for the suffering of others. To lack compassion is to
fail as a human being. The other is usually understood here as the neighbour, the proximate one. In the Stoic tradition, in contrast, not caring is precisely a virtue. By transcending the particularity of pain, one mimics the natural order and can attain the status of a
citizen of the world, better able to catch a vista of all humanity in its global span. I see
these two traditions at play in Roger Silverstones vision of the mediapolis and in the
enriching and stimulating responses to it in this issue.
John Tomlinson analyses the communication conditions of cosmopolitanism, comparing the views of intellectuals toward, and their place within, the media worlds of the
1930s and today. He finds something valuable in the relatively nave but robust cosmopolitanism of the earlier period, noting an affinity between medium and message. The
nationally supported, mass-distributed media of the 1930s enabled a confidence in the
public pedagogical mission of intellectuals while the new media landscape, with its
surfeit of unedited inputs (Habermas), makes thinkers hesitate before taking on a
prophetic pose. The newsreel and BBC not only gave people like J.B. Priestley a platform
for a particular vision; they were an enabling condition the media apriori as German
scholars like to say of that vision. The difficulties in any call for a progressive, just,
Corresponding author:
John Durham Peters, University of Iowa, Iowa City, USA.
Email: john-peters@uiowa.edu

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humane, and plural cosmopolitan culture today are a result of our changed media
environment. But Tomlinson points to something subtler, the disappearance of progressive nationalism. Priestleys happy modernist politics, his blissfully unselfconscious
didacticism, rested on the nation-state. The first of his two worlds, after all, was the
national system, and his cosmopolitanism saw the nation as the precondition for the
international. He would endorse a poets hope to be, like some valley cheese, local, but
prized elsewhere (W.H. Auden).
Priestley was at once a progressive, cosmopolitan and nationalist. Do such creatures
exist today? Cosmopolitan thought today tends to leave the nation and nationalism to the
right wing. This, I think, is Tomlinsons key insight and diagnosis. And yet, like Priestley,
he underestimates the potential corrosiveness of cosmopolitanism, its whiff of disloyalty as discussed by Shani Orgad. Indeed, a tropism toward national culture is evident in
Tomlinsons essay, which provides us with a story that is, perhaps ironically, almost
completely British! Given the explicitly anti-cosmopolitan animus in some resurgent
patriotisms as noted in Marita Sturkens contribution I wonder about the large-scale
viability of Tomlinsons endorsement of nationalist cosmopolitanism. We might ask who
would not want a progressive, just, humane, and plural cosmopolitan culture? Probably
all of us reading this journal would, but clearly lots of other people would not! There are
lots of political movements around that care only for the nation-state. Tomlinson calls for
something lovely but endangered today: a left nationalism that is cosmopolitan without
being nave about its communicative conditions of possibility.
Chouliaraki examines the age-old moral conflict between theatricality and goodness.
I see her analysis of the potential for narcissism and self-congratulation in humanitarianism as ultimately drawing on the long Christian tradition of examining this very conflict.
The Sermon on the Mount, sometimes taken as a founding text of humanitarian dogooding, in fact never bothers to encourage people to do good/share goods. It assumes
people will do so and instead cautions people to hide good deeds from the gaze of others
lest hypocrisy set in. It says: do not make a spectacle out of your goodness, do not help
the poor for the sake of glory. It sets a high ethical bar, noting the perversion and pathology that can attend the smallest gestures. We are to do good fugitively, furtively, in such
radical secrecy that the right hand does not know what the left hand is doing. Even the
self, then, is barred from being a spectator at the scene of goodness. But over the last two
centuries or so, starting with abolitionist movements, humanitarianism has depended on
images and narratives of suffering that mobilize action at a distance, which in turn build
on older grammars of morally arousing depictions of suffering, the crucifixion above all
(pity comes from piety.) Philanthropy became a branch of public relations.
Chouliaraki is a keen critic of the intertwined, often contradictory ethical and
aesthetic aspects of humanitarian appeals. Pity and irony, the two historical paradigms
of humanitarianism, she writes, fail to sustain a legitimate appeal to action on vulnerable others. Neither achieves proper distance, as pity involves arrogant proximity and
irony narcissistic self-distance. Both modes, she says, are aesthetically and ethically
exhausted and have given way to post-humanitarian strategies. But then, perhaps no
appeal to humanitarian action is ever ultimately legitimate or sustainable, at least by the
exacting standards of the Sermon on the Mount. Goodness seen by the public gaze curdles into show or hypocrisy. Chouliarakis final point, however, is less about the moral

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malodorousness of self-congratulation than the injustice of a public sphere in which

many have no access at all to the means of communicative production. Like Tomlinson,
her vision has a simultaneously utopian and normative bite. A mediapolis of agonistic
solidarity on a global scale would require a radical reorganization of the symbolic and
material conditions of public life.
Froshs call for an ethics of inattention, in turn, has a clear Stoic genealogy. In contrast to the politics of pity or politics of recognition, he celebrates a low-temperature
morality that resembles the neo-stoicism of figures such as Adam Smith and Kant. Frosh
turns down the Hegelian heat; Hegels politics of recognition, after all, starts from a
battle-to-the-death. Citizenship consists in small gestures of coping with strangers
whose presence or silence is not taken as hostile. In ancient cultures the same word often
meant stranger and enemy; Frosh praises the modern decoupling of the two. He follows
Goffmans famous point that inattention can be civil. Thin sociability is a key mode of
being human among others. TV is a teacher of civil inattention, a cultivator of the art of
peaceably ignoring strangers. For Frosh, non-reciprocal face-to-face communication is
not a pathology; it is a prophylaxis against real pathologies. Encounters with strangers
on buses, the streets, or television sets accumulate into what he calls a serial aggregate
of the human figure as a shared condition.
Frosh thus makes an appeal to statistics as a potentially ethical form of narration and
experience. Kant was perhaps the first major thinker to consider the ethical effects of
statistical thinking and he did so, not by chance, in an essay on cosmopolitanism. He
thought a genuine ethics would be statistical, that is, concerned with the whole rather
than the part, the population rather than the person. Pity, Kant said, was not an ethical
virtue; it was a tactic of persuasion. Pity overvalues the particular. A single face can
captivate the news, which ignores less dramatic yet systematic suffering. (A lamb misused breeds public strife, said William Blake, and yet forgives the butchers knife.)
Pity fosters a perceptual inflation, a skewed sense of proportion. Cosmopolitanism
allows a more elevated glimpse of the whole. Froshs call for benevolent composites falls
in this lineage, especially since Kant thinks that a more reserved emotional palette better
enables a civic and sympathetic imagination. Frosh shows the ethical strength of weak
ties. In a world in which some are ready to kill each other at first sight, low-affect mutual
navigation, a peaceable world of stranger sociability is no mean achievement, and we
should not denigrate such mutual indifference as improper distance. The abject, he says,
are often under our noses, that is, sometimes behind our noses. There are ethical and
political treasures packed into his notion of the human as the ultimate aggregation.
Orgad is more ambitious in her claims about the ethical and aesthetic mission of the
media. Indeed, the very notion of proper mingles aesthetic and ethical concerns in what
Silverstone would call a fugal way, and Orgad follows up nicely. The core of her argument is to give to media the office of art, especially as described by the Russian formalists but widely shared in modernist aesthetic thought. Art should shake our perceptual
habits, intensify our ways of seeing, and expand our imagination of the fate of other
people. The mediapolis, she writes, should be a primary location where we can
learn to practice forms of disloyalty to our own cultures, histories, and narratives, and
the news should allow for significant experiences of self-displacement. Her call for
strategic disloyalty as the aim of a morally arousing news media is bold and exciting.

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But I have two worries. First, why is it the news that should do this? To overgeneralize,
the media consist of the left-brain world of non-fiction (news) and the right-brain world
of fiction (drama). Silverstones vision (2007: 5) of the mediapolis was, as he says, deliberately indiscriminate in its definition of media. It seems to me that the news media, at
least the daily journalism of newspapers, radio and television, are less apt than the media
of drama for sustaining self-critical estrangement. Fact is a more brittle, less plastic
element than fiction, as Aristotle argued. Media indeed already do show us images and
stories that are often uncomfortable, strange, and disturbing. A disturbing factual image
has a very different status from a fictional one. A fictional depiction of violence allows a
freedom of imagination that a factual depiction cannot morally afford.
Second, such freedom of imagination seems to be the property of a particular class.
As Silverstone noted (2007: 11112), Paradox, like history, is a luxury of the elite.
Orgad is fully aware of this problem; she simply wants to make irony democratically
available to all classes. Great plan; but tough to execute. From classic communication
research on prejudice, we know that some audiences completely miss ironically formulated consciousness-raising messages and fully identify with the parodied attitudes.
Some of the most shocking and deviant images on television for example, populist
chat and reality shows are placed within extremely mainstream norms. (Jerry
Springers moralizing is a perfect example.) As Lazarsfeld and Merton remarked long
ago scandal reinforces social norms. And from current politics we know that some
people despise media institutions designed for disloyalty. Sarah Palins ongoing attacks
on the lamestream media, for instance, directly attacks a cosmopolitan vision of a
self-distancing news media. For her, self-critique is a plague media should teach us to
be loyal! Orgads analysis of criticism of Yonit Levis reporting shows that Orgad is
fully aware of this problem. Like Chouliaraki, her vision of a news media that would
foster what Friedrich Schiller once called an aesthetic education would require a
radical organization of the world as we know it. Maybe, however, it could also help
contribute to such a radical reorganization. I hope so.
Sturken provides a rather melancholy answer to Orgads call by revisiting the sad
question: why didnt Americans see through the policies of the Bush administration,
especially the sanctioning of torture? This remains a very important question and I also
admire her call to find access to the others pain in our own, to tarry (wonderful term)
with grief. Like all of contributors in this issue, she wants a mediapolis in which citizens
are willing to be troubled and to take moral profit from the experience. Rather like
Silverstones chapter 3 (2007), she sees a grotesque inversion of such in an American
public that is comfortable with torture (awful oxymoron!).
Sturken gives us a compelling, dreary and, I think, incomplete picture. My main
objection is the failure to discuss the representativeness of her generalizations about
American support for torture and its culture. U.S. culture is fundamentally structured
she says. But structuralist notions of national culture have totalizing effects. The evidence she provides that the nation acquiesced to torture is an incomplete sample: fatuous
statements by officials like Donald Rumsfeld, 24, gift shop kitsch, Lynndie Englands
gesture of vainglorious wallowing, and Coney Island visitors whose outrage wilts before
a cold lemonade. Taken together, it is indeed a demoralizing picture, especially inasmuch as it does represent a significant portion of the American public. But there was

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significant resistance against Bush and torture. Many people, including many Americans,
were outraged at the sanctioned torture revealed in the Abu Ghraib photographs. The
American public is certainly not uniformly comfortable with torture, at least if you
believe public opinion polling (Flavin and Nickerson, n.d.).
Here we have a clash between social science and post-structuralist methods. Of course
Sturken knows all this, but her analysis remains too total for my taste. No one wrote more
eloquently about the traps of positivism than Theodor Adorno. And yet he, ever the
dialectician, also admitted the potential critical power of opinion polling under some
conditions. In Hitlers Germany, for instance, representative polls would have punctured
Hitlers claims to a perfectly unified Volk by showing resistance and weak support
(Adorno, 1972). Bush, too, tried to hail a public into being that provided his policies
with a unitary mandate. In treating the American public so unitarily, I fear that Sturken
reproduces Bushs totalizing rhetoric. I am not denying that the United States has a
violent past and present. In its favourite self-story, America uses good violence against
bad violence. The good cowboys in westerns are precisely those who dont torture, that
is, who kill not because they want to, but because they have to. This narrative of the
reluctant killer tries to keep violence cordoned into sacred and profane varieties. But it
easily breaks down: it doesnt take much work to expose all the ethical assassins who
walk through the pages of American history as essentially torturers in everything but
their own minds. This is where Sturken ends up, with American history stained by torture.
I say the United States has a violent history; Sturken says it is structured by torture. Is
there a difference that matters here? I think it there is.
The positions of these five papers offer an exciting array. In contrast to Frosh, Sturken
has a more maximalist moral vision. Frosh likes it when people let each other alone;
Sturken, quite like Orgad, wants people to be disturbed, and both see comfort as a moral
pitfall. Sturken calls for more intense emotions an ethical ire that endures, a concern for
the real man tortured in the picture, not just the iconic figure. Chouliaraki, in contrast,
notes the fading of grand emotions in humanitarian discourse and their replacement by
an emotional division of labour that does not require every citizen to have a tender heart
and open wallet. Tomlinson, in turn, calls precisely for a bit more of that earlier grandeur.
Frosh basically approves of a blas public, as long as it can be occasionally activated for
things that really matter, but Sturken thinks indifference is pacification. Frosh says a
certain affective blankness toward the other enables peace; Sturken says it enables
torture. Orgad says the media can achieve the supreme moral work of awakening us to
self-questioning by disrupting our placid emotional doldrums. On a scale going from hot
to cold as the preferred emotional temperature for civic life, I think our authors rank as
Sturken, Orgad, Tomlinson, Chouliaraki, then Frosh.
For my part, I run hot and cold. All these articles, like Silverstone, confront the fact of
a media environment that, like the world itself, is vaster than any single human being can
monitor. An occasional Afghani blacksmith might move our hearts, but otherwise the
vastness of the media today raises the enigma of the division of labour all over again,
something that Durkheim thought was the key to understanding modernity. Whether
each citizen should know or care about the world can be debated by diverse moral
theorists, but the answer has long been very clear about whether each citizen can do
so fully, and the answer is no. Chouliarakis acute phrase, the instrumentalization of

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solidarity, captures the point. To say that not everyone needs to know or care undercuts
the educational ideals of bourgeois life, and yet institutions of care and justice (NGOs,
governments) do not require the emotional or cognitive participation of every citizen any
more than a television channel needs a mass audience to be profitable. By Stoic standards, a division of ethical labour is a pragmatic way to handle the potential infinitude of
duties. Like Frosh I would prefer instrumentalized solidarity to sincere hatred. Who
wouldnt? Thus the wintry climes of the Stoics look quite appealing and the argument for
compassion looks weak against the argument for chilliness. According to an ethics of
compassion, any kind of distance between hearts is improper. By these standards, we are
all lost. Care has, after all, always been intermittent and rare. The neighbours face or fate
may call for charity, but even up close, the effectiveness of ones succour will range
statistically. Our efforts to help others are always hit or miss on any scale of action. A
moral division of labour might seem modern and offensive, but indifference has always
prevailed toward others near and far. The long-distance appeals of television and the
close-up appeals of the beggars hand are both routinely ignored. So too are the feelings
of those we love, live and work with. Improper distance is not just an effect of the media;
it is built into the human equipment.
This is what the Stoics will say. And that is exactly why we still need an ethics of
compassion. Loves unworldliness is salutary. We moderns have gotten used to specialization in every realm but love and citizenship, and it may be a very good thing to remain
fiercely uncomfortable about such specialization. Compassion is the ultimate in discomfort and self-estrangement. Nothing jolts you out of your seat like it. Or your skin. It can
ambush you like illness or age or joy. The question of proper distance is intractable, and
we are fortunate indeed to be stuck with it, and to have such interesting thinkers to think
with as these five authors, and the late Roger himself.
References
Adorno T (1972) Zur gegenwrtigen Stellung der empirischen Sozialforschung in Deutschland
[On the current position of empirical social research in Germany]. In: Soziologische Schriften
[Sociological Writings]. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, vol. 1, 478493. First published 1952.
Flavin P and Nickerson DW (no date) Reciprocity and public opinion on torture. Working paper.
Available at: www.nd.edu/~dnickers/working/Nickerson.Torture.pdf
Silverstone Rr (2007) Media and Morality: On the Rise of the Mediapolis. Cambridge: Polity.

John Durham Peters is A. Craig Baird Professor in the Department of Communication

Studies at the University of Iowa. He is the author of Speaking into the Air (1999) and
Courting the Abyss (2005), and numerous articles on the philosophy of media and
communication, the public sphere, and the history of media theory and culture.

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