The New Social Politics of Pity

The New Social Politics of Pity Iain Wilkinson The cultural experience of so-called ‘late’ modernity is distinguished by an unprecedented expansion in our field of cultural vision (Jenks 1995). It is also recognised that in this development, large scale acts of violence and extreme experiences of human suffering feature as routine components of media representations of the social world. John Thompson observes that via television and the Internet, we are regularly brought into contact with forms of mass destruction that would be unknown to previous generations (Thompson 1995: 225-7). Similarly, when highlighting the peculiarity of the cultural landscapes we occupy, Michael Ignatieff observes that through modern media of mass communication we have become routine ‘voyeurs of the suffering of others, tourists amid their landscapes of anguish’ (Ignatieff 1999: 11). Analysts claim that such experience is serving to radically transform our political outlooks and moral dispositions; and further, that this is made particularly evident in our interpretation and response to human suffering (Chouliaraki 2006 Tester 1994; 1999). It is very likely that the moral and political contradictions that now arise for people in connection with the experience of being positioned as remote witnesses of other people’s suffering are without precedent. Luc Boltanski (1999) contends that the experience of being a ‘detached observer’ of human affliction creates a shared sense of political powerlessness and moral inadequacy; for we routinely find that we have no adequate means to respond to the imperative of action that the brute facts of suffering impress upon us. On a more critical footing, it is argued that, when repeated over time, such experience erodes our capacities for moral feeling and thereby makes it all too easy for us to dissociate ourselves from ties of responsibility towards others (Cohen 2001; Moeller 1999). Indeed, some suggest that the mass dissemination of the imagery of suffering ‘normalizes’ a vivid awareness of human affliction in contexts that foreclose possibilities for participation in public debate and withhold the option of a compassionate engagement with human needs; and all the more so where this is packaged for us as forms of commercial news ‘infotainment’ (Biehl, Good and Kleinman 2007; Thussu 2007). Whilst recognising these dangers, others would caution us to attend to the extent to which these developments have often been accompanied by new social arrangements for the institutional channelling of public sentiments of compassion toward a more responsive engagement with human problems on a grand scale (Hoïjer 2004; Tester 2001). It is argued that when focussing on the negative potential of the cultural arousal of our pity, critics often fail to attend to the scale and force of mass movements to care for the needs of strangers; and further, how this marks out our times as quite different to any others for which we have record (Wilkinson 2005). Organisations such as International Committee of the Red Cross, Oxfam, Save the Children, Médecins Sans Frontières and Amnesty International are unique to modern times and bear testimony to the fact that we dwell amidst social institutions and political cultures where, arguably, more is done to promote the sanctity of human life than ever before. Indeed, in the work of such organisations we may be witness to the institutional realization of a ‘cosmopolitan political community’, which for most of the last two hundred years was thought of as no more than a utopian ideal (Beck 2006; Beck and Wilms 2004: 176-94). On these grounds it can be suggested that we are still only just beginning to piece together an understanding of how the courting of humanitarian sentiment contributes to the large-scale institutional provision and funding of social care; and most certainly, we have not yet arrived in a position to judge the extent to which our social sympathies might be cultivated as a political virtue. I am inclined to take seriously this latter view. I am, moreover, concerned to work to develop a more historically and sociologically elaborated account of modern humanitarianism and its presence within the social conditions and cultural experiences that we are made subject to. At the same time as I aim to devise a contribution to a critical sociology of humanitarianism, I also intend to pay heed to the cultural history and development of humanitarian forms of social inquiry. I approach the cultural artefacts of humanitarian campaign work both as objects for study and as holding value as a means to promote social understanding; particularly, where these serve to underline the ways social life takes place as an enactment of substantive human values. Indeed, here I am concerned to promote a conception of social life as an inherently moral experience; and further, as sets of meaningful relationships that greatly matter to people. For these reasons I approach the attempt to document and explain the forms of human interaction that take place through sentiments of ‘pity’, ‘compassion’ and ‘sympathy’ as holding vital importance for the acquisition of social awareness and the arousal of social conscience. I aim to explore the ways such sentiments serve not only as a spur to social consciousness, but also, as bonds of social attachment and moral responsibility. To this end, my approach to social inquiry aims to recover eighteenth century traditions of critical debate over the origins and bounds of ‘social sympathy’; and further, it works to chart their development through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and up to the present day. It marks an attempt to develop a new sociology of humanitarian sentiment and moral sensibility. It also aims to understand how sociological thinking might be rooted in and take its course from cultural responses to the problem of suffering. This is a career project. In this chapter I outline some of the analytical terrain that is involved in this work and I also raise a couple of points for further argument and debate. In first place, I contend that where contemporary scholars devote the larger portion of their critical endeavour to initiating debates over points of definition and principle, they often go no further than to repeat moral concerns raised by cultural critics in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is possible to re-trace nearly three hundred years of critical inquiry into the virtue of moral sentiment; and this is often accompanied by sophisticated attempts to understand how our sentimental attachments to others might be fashioned for the purposes of social reform. I argue that, to critically evaluate the character and force of our contemporary social politics of pity, it is vitally important to recognise this as part of an extensive history of cultural debate over the ethics and bounds of modern humanitarianism. Secondly, I argue that as part of this endeavour we need to be particularly attentive to how the problem of suffering features as part of our cultural visualization of the social world; and further, to how this has changed over modern times. To this end I contend that it demands that we give privileged place to the task of understanding the ongoing development of our visual literacy of society. Indeed, where it may be argued that the development of social theory has suffered due to the ‘denigration of vision’ in Western cultures of critique, my work contributes to a counter-trend that aims to give due recognition to the role of visual experience in the advancement of critical thinking about society (Jay 1994). I hold to the view, however, that we are still only beginning to piece together an understanding of how to pursue this goal. We are still very much in the process of gathering an appreciation of the methodological difficulties involved in documenting the mediatised constitution of the cultural realities we inhabit. We have not gone very far towards applying this to sociological understanding. More often than not sociology is left struggling to explain the influence of mass media over how we experience and relate to one another, let alone how media representations of the world might be appraised as forms of ‘sociological knowledge’. For these reasons, I hold there is still much work to be done in order to clear an analytical space that is adequate to explore our capacities for moral feeling. I further contend that we have yet to devise conceptual frameworks that are adequate to document and explain our contemporary social politics of pity. In what follows, I work with the understanding that progress towards these goals lies in clearing the ground for a new approach to questioning how the human social condition is made part of our moral imagination and an object of humanitarian social concern. The Forging of a Controversy At least as far as contemporary sociological theory is concerned, Luc Boltanski is generally recognised as having provided the most theoretically elaborated account of the social experience of being positioned by mass media as a witness to ‘distant suffering’ (Boltanki 1999; Chouliaraki 2004; Hoijer 2004; Scannell 2004). Boltanski contends that, as a possible response to media representations of suffering, this is more accurately depicted as a form of ‘pity’ (Boltanski 1999). Drawing on earlier arguments advanced by Hannah Arendt in her famous essay on ‘The Social Question’ (1963), such a view holds that where ‘compassion’ connotes profound feelings of sympathy for and a strong identification with the situation of those ‘in’ suffering, by contrast, pity lacks such emotional intensity and is more loosely configured as a moral conviction. When caught up in ‘the passion of compassion’, as Arendt puts its, it is most likely that people will have no patience or capacity for reasoned debate over points of ethical principle (Arendt 1963: 70-90). She claims that compassion is a ‘boundless emotion’ that drives rash decisions and inspires thoughtless actions. Whilst ‘pity’ invites debate over appropriate levels of social concern for those in suffering, by contrast, ‘compassion’ compels action and leaves no room for debate. As Boltanski emphasises, the possibility of responding to a person with ‘pity’ is a mark of our moral and social distance to them; one might feel ‘pity’ and at the same time lack any impulse, let alone the compulsion, to take actions to alleviate their suffering. With ‘pity’ there can and some might say must be politics. ‘Pity’ is loquacious, whilst ‘compassion’ does not lend itself to talk; rather, it is expressed in bodily gestures and passionate displays of care. Arendt warns: ‘As a rule, it is not compassion which sets out to change worldly conditions in order to ease human suffering, but if it does, it will shun the drawn-out wearisome process of persuasion, negotiation, and compromise, which are the processes of law and politics, and lend its voice to the suffering itself, which must claim for swift and direct action, that is, for action with the means of violence.’ (Arendt 1963: 86-7) Such analytical distinctions and critical viewpoints draw on a long tradition of public debate over the ways in which moral sentiment might serve as a civic virtue. At least as far as its philosophical lineage is concerned, this can be traced back to the Latitudinarian theology of the seventeenth Century Cambridge Platonists (Crane 1934). In this context, humanitarian sentiment was promoted as a counter-reaction to the sectarian prejudices that fuelled the English Civil War and as a progressive riposte to the pessimism of Thomas Hobbes’ political philosophy (Herdt 2001). It is in the eighteenth century ‘Enlightenment of Sympathy’, however, that cultural critics made the most concerted efforts to understand how moral sentiment serves to endow us with our sociability and capacities for social solidarity (Frazer 2010). Indeed, here the very possibility of conceiving of ourselves as ‘social beings’ with a ‘common humanity’ was held to be relative to the depth, range and quality of our sympathetic attachments to others. In this respect, it was argued that the cultivation of social recognition and social understanding is sustained by the force of ‘fellow feeling’ (Mullan 1988). Key figures in the Scottish Enlightenment such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume and Adam Smith recognised ‘social sympathy’ as a form of moral experience in which we are set to encounter our ties of responsibility to others. Whilst by no means agreeing among themselves as to the means by or extent to which our ‘moral sense’ might be cultivated for the good of society, they all shared in the understanding that social life was founded on ‘fellow feeling’; and further, that such sentiment has a positive role to play in the pursuit of civic virtue. Through their works it is also possible to detect an increasing concern to defend such views against the charge of political naivety. Whilst in his earlier address to the topic Hutcheson simply promotes the idea that our human thought and behaviours can be motivated by benevolence, through Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature ([1739-40] 1969) and An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals ([1751] to Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments ([1759] 2006), it is possible to trace the development of a more conceptually elaborated analysis of the apparent frailties and partiality of our sympathetic attachments to others. In this regard it is important to recognise that the suggestion that ‘social sympathy’ might serve as a morally progressive force for the good of society always courted controversy; and further, that this grew more heated as the century progressed. Francis Hutcheson’s interventions were motivated by a concern to refute Bernard Mandeville’s portrayal of humanity as fundamentally selfish in The Fable of the Bees ([1714] 1970) (Carey 2000; Sprague 1954). Furthermore, Adam Smith was moving to engage with outbreaks of critical concern surrounding ‘the eighteenth century cult of sensibility’; particularly those addressed to the extent to which feeling might be divorced from action. Indeed, on many accounts the period between 1780 to 1800 now stands out as the time where moral sentiment was taken up as a key matter for critical public debate. Here essayists such as Henry Mackenzie turned from an heroic portrayal of ‘the man of feeling’ to adopt a position of critique that condemns the ‘enthusiasm of sentiment’ as a clear danger to society. Mackenzie now warned that all too often sentimentalists are to be found ‘talking of virtues which they never practice’ and as being all too prepared to separate ‘conscience from feeling’ (Mackenzie [1771] 2001a; [1785] 2001b: 100). Similarly, albeit with the hope of rescuing moral sentiment as a public virtue, in the ‘Preface’ to his Lyrical Ballads William Wordsworth condemned the ‘degrading thirst after stimulation’ that he witnessed in the popular enjoyment of sentimentalism (Wordworth [1800/1802] 2003: 10). In addition to the widespread recognition that many people were more excited by the vicarious pleasures to be drawn from sentimentalism than by the possibility of making moral feeling a guide to the common good, it was also feared that the courting of high emotions in public life served as an incitement to violent conduct. Historical reviews of the period now inclined to bring emphasis to the ways in which the fear that the French Revolution might spread to Britain consolidated the movement to erase sentiment from public affairs (Ellis 1996; Jones 1993). It was widely held that Robespierre had exploited a culture of unregulated sentimentality to initiate the reign of the Terror, and thereby had brutally exposed the potential for moral feeling to be co-opted for the purpose of mob rule. Indeed, William Reddy argues that more than any other factor at this time, it was the widespread belief, at least within governmental and élite intellectual circles, that an excess of moral feeling had fuelled a passion for revolutionary violence in France that subsequently led to it being cast as an anathema to civilized conduct and rational debate (Reddy 2000). On Reddy’s account, moreover, it is in this counter-revolutionary movement to portray moral sentiment as an intellectual weakness and political vice that we find the origins of a cultural tradition wherein “the Enlightenment” is portrayed, and indeed celebrated, above all as the harbinger of modern rationality. Thereafter, it became commonplace for civilized conduct to be identified with the extent to which a person behaves with a dispassionate regard for others; and where later commentators such as Arendt and Boltanski adopt a critical standpoint in which matters of sentiment are cast as a hindrance to reason, then we should understand that this as a view that is still very much coloured by events at this time. The Rebellion of Sentiment in Social Thought In historical accounts of the rise of social science in the first half of the nineteenth century, it is now widely recognised that this was characterised by a culture of strict rationality; and indeed, that many of the pioneering attempts to render ‘society’ an object of scientific study were at the same time allied to governmental policies designed impose stricter measures of rationalization upon human conduct (Goldman 1983; 1991; Poovey 1995; 1998). Part of the explanation for this is sought in the extent to which the early practitioners of social science were driven by a ‘moral aspiration’ for orderly social reform. Indeed, on many accounts, at its origins sociological inquiry was politically conservative; and insofar as it was oriented towards the progressive development of society, then it was largely utilitarian in its ethos and intent (Giddens 1976; Nisbet 1966). Taking Edwin Chadwick’s 1842 Report on The Sanitary Condition of the Labouring Population as her prime example, Mary Poovey argues that, at least as far as Britain is concerned, the official account of social life took on a highly abstract form. The intellectual validity and worth of social investigation was identified in the extent to which it served as a means to translate social problems into numbers for statistical calculation. She argues that Chadwick pioneered a technical form of representation that, whilst working to present aggregated populations as an object for policy debate, also provided a means to ‘disaggregate’ the production of knowledge about the moral experience of social life. Here it became possible to engage in debate social conditions as though they were ‘objectively’ removed from the bounds of morality and politics. In this cultural setting, more sentimentally geared accounts of social life were decried as mere ‘literature’ along with the charge that they relied on excessively subjective interpretations of reality and experience (Lepenies 1988). In the sentimental cast of their portrayal of the plight of people suffering extreme conditions of material poverty, they were moreover, frequently identified as an obstruction to the implementation of ‘sound policy’ to discourage the ‘undeserving poor’ (Crocker 1987). Indeed, by the middle of the nineteenth century, it was widely recognised that, through their sympathetic accounts of people’s social hardships and miseries, some ‘humanitarian’ writers were operating from a critical position that was designed to provoke the ire and consternation of establishment authorities. Moreover, it was frequently designed to question the morality of industrial capitalism and its favoured principles of political economy. In 1844, the Spectator magazine called for the creation of a new political party to oppose ‘laissez faire’ by the ‘rebellion of sentiment’ (Roberts 2002: 258). In this setting, the novelist, political journalist and newspaper editor, Charles Dickens was a figure of considerable influence. Indeed, when it comes to assessing the cultural politics of moral sentiment within mid-century Victorian culture, many are inclined to treat Dickens’ work as the exemplar of the genre (Ledger 2004; Mason 2007; Poovey 1995: 155-81: Williams 1973: 218-9). It is widely understood that in his opposition to the cold-calculating statistical representation of social problems, Dickens sought to fashion a style of writing that evoked moral feeling and thereby a wider awareness of the moral values enacted within economic transactions and everyday social behaviours. In his satirical report on the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (1943) and in Hard Times (1854) in his caricature of Thomas Gradgrind, ‘the man of facts and calculations’, he makes clear his opposition to any form of symbolic representation that aims to deny attention being brought to the moral texture of social life as it is encountered in experience (Dickens [1843] 2009; [1854] 1995). As Mary Poovey notes, he decried the ‘frightful empiricism’ that holds that it is only in the contexts of its representation in the form of statistical laws, that ‘society’ should be held up as an object for policy debate; for in this move individual human beings are all too easily ‘obliterated’ by numerical averages (Poovey 1993: 269). By contrast, in his journalism and novels, Dickens made it his mission to have his readers experience the sensation of sentimentality so as to raise the volume of public debate over the forms of moral experience that they were subject to, and how in turn, their actions were morally implicated in the discord of society (Mason 2007). Similarly, in his ‘letters’ to the Morning Chronicle ([1849-50] 1971) and later book London Labour and the London Poor ([1861-2] 2010) Henry Mayhew did not shy away from making a moral appeal to social sympathy as part of his effort to document how people struggle to survive in insanitary urban conditions and on desperately low wages. Indeed, this was widely recognised as a major component of his ‘success’ in awakening the social conscience of the London middle classes. At the same time, it was identified by his critics as a primary reason to condemn his work. For example, following Mayhew’s break from the Morning Chronicle in the summer of 1850 over the editorial censoring of his criticisms of ‘free trade’ and arguments in favour of protective tariffs, a fellow journalist, Angus Bethune Reach, reported on the incident by declaring: I am disposed to think….that the editor of the Chronicle would have done well had he struck his pen through at least four of every eight columns of the disjointed lucubrations and melodramatic ravings of Mr Mayhew’s sentimental draymen and poor artisans. Ever since Mr Mayhew’s communications on the state of the poor attracted any attention, their author has kept summoning together public meetings of the classes among whom he had been mingling, apparently for no other purpose than to puff his own benevolent spirit. (cited in Thompson 1971: 39) The suspicion that the literary attempt to arouse social sympathy was motivated by a project of self-aggrandisement or other insidious political motives was also voiced on many occasions as part of the critical response to the best selling novel of the nineteenth century, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ([1852] 1994). It is widely held that the power of this work to awaken sympathy and direct moral feeling towards the plight of slaves was decisive to the anti-slavery cause; indeed, Jane Tompkins goes so far as to suggests that is ‘the most dazzling exemplar’ of the power of literary sentimentalism to influence the course of history (Tomkins 1985: 125). At the same time, however, from the moment of its publication it attracted an inordinate amount of criticism. As Ted Hovet Jr notes, throughout the 1850s many reviewers sought to publicly condemn Uncle Tom’ Cabin for its overly contrived and inaccurate portrayal of slavery, and at the same time moved to claim that Stowe revelled in her notoriety as a means to promote her career as a best-selling author (Hovet Jr 2007: 69). Through most of the twentieth century, moreover, at least within the field of American literary criticism, Stowe’s writing was dismissed as morally degenerate, anti-intellectual, narcissistic and naively duplicitous. For example, in one of the more scathing dismissals Uncle Tom’s Cabin, James Baldwin claims that the overall effect of the book is to ‘activate’ and ‘reinforce’ the very oppression it sets out to decry. He writes: Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a very bad novel, having, in its self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality, much in common with Little Women. Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty. (Baldwin 1949: 578-9) On this account, Stowe should be condemned not only for propagating racial stereotypes, but also and above all for the sensational tone of her writing. For Baldwin, Uncle Tom’s Cabin represents no more than a crude outburst of moral panic. He contends that Stowe’s display of ‘virtuous rage’ and anguished dwelling upon acts of cruelty leaves no space for the development of critical thinking. He claims that the possibility of questioning society is denied by the passion of protest; and thereby, holds that Stowe unwittingly colludes in the maintenance of social structures and cultural attitudes that are implicated in the conditions that give rise to the violation of people’s human rights. An alternative view now holds that whilst Uncle Tom’s Cabin deploys a morally odious form of racialism as a means to tell its story, we should still be concerned to work at understanding how it served to equip its readers with an expanded vision of the social world as well as the moral conviction whereby they were moved to accept an obligation to care for others. Accordingly, the greater danger here is that we fail to attend to the ways in which here, as well as on many other occasions, the cultivation of moral sentiment allowed for a mass awakening of social conscience on a scale that was previously deemed unimaginable. In this respect, it is with a greater concern to explain the role played by social sympathy within the cultivation of a sociological imagination and progressive movements for social change that we may venture to recover and critically reappraise the history of sentimentalism and its social politics of pity. The Social Politics of Pity When working to understand people might be motivated by moral feeling to care for distant others, Adam Smith held that this was limited by the social and cultural conditions under which we were made witness to their suffering. In this regard, moreover, he saw more cause to underline the frailties rather than strengths of our moral imagination and impulse. At one point he argued that, on being presented with news of a great disaster in China, a European may be moved to express his sorrow on behalf of the misfortunes of the Chinese people; but that nevertheless, he would quickly return to his own pleasures and ‘provided he never saw them, he will snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred millions of his brethren, and the destruction of that immense multitude [would be] an object less interesting to him [a] paltry misfortune of his own’ (Smith [1759] 2006: 132). Elsewhere, he argued that when provoked by moral feeling, people tend to be caught up in a complex struggle to moderate their sympathies in line with how they understand themselves to be judged by others. For Smith, social behaviour is akin to a dramatic public performance in which we are concerned to win the approval of our audience (Marshall 1984). He further suggests that, in the majority of cases it is more with a concern to look good in the eyes of our peers than from a genuine commitment to the welfare of others that we are provoked into action (Smith [1759] 2006: 113). For many years now it has been possible to argue that Adam Smith greatly under-estimated the extent to which social sympathy might be cultivated as an active force within the political arena. When devising his thesis, he was not in a position to reflect back on the history and development of modern humanitarianism and the many political campaigns that have sought to provide us with an education of compassion. Smith was alert to the fact that such work relied on media of cultural exchange such as novels and newspapers, and further, that our moral imagination was animated in connection to our capacity to visualize a person’s social circumstances; and particularly, how these involved them in the experience of suffering. He hardly began, however, to see how the symbolic representation of social suffering might be crafted to provoke our pity; and further, how humanitarianism organisations might work to channel the emotional response to ‘distance suffering’ into active programmes of social reform. The inclusion of engravings of bodies in pain was an essential component of the earliest narrative attempts to evoke moral sentiment on behalf of the welfare of others (de Las Casas [1542] 1992). Indeed, some argue that the pictorial representation of human suffering was the ‘ammunition’ that did most to win public support for campaigns against the cruel treatment of women and children in the workplace and the enslavement of black people (Abruzzo 2011; Halttunen 1995; John 2006; Klarer 2005). It is also suggested that, more generally, when it came to recognising the experience of urban poverty, it was the enormous expansion in the cultural means to visually represent the lives of poor people on a grand scale that served to engage the public in debates over the need for social reform (Casteras 1995). When taking stock of the cultural experience of modernity, we should recognise that on many occasions it has involved people ‘in a sort of frenzy of the visible’ which has induced quite dramatic awakenings to the reality of social worlds (Comolli 1978; Flint 2000). The great multiplication and dissemination of visual representations of society as well as the unprecedented expansion of the technological means to visualize human experience has radically transformed our capacity for self and social understanding. Moreover, it is also the case that in this history humanitarian social reformers are often found operating in the vanguard of movements to develop and expand our social vision. This is certainly the case in Henry Mayhew’s pioneering use of daguerreotypes to enhance his illustrative accounts of the lives of the London poor. In his pioneering use of flash photography to document the conditions of New York tenements in the 1890s, Jacob Riis also stands out as prime example of a humanitarian social activist, who whilst pursuing his cause, cultivated his readers’ sociological understanding of human experience (Riis [1890] 1997). More recently, it is often through co-ordinated attempts to mobilise humanitarian sentiment on a grand scale that we have been alerted to the technological potential to visualise society in global terms; and further, for this to inspire global social consciousness and global bonds of sociality. In this respect, arguably, we are still only beginning to culturally decant the experience and impact of events such as ‘Live Aid’, the scale of the response to the 2004 Sumatra-Andaman earthquake tsunami or the speed with which international aid agencies gathered the resources to engage in the effort of saving lives in the aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake. It is also the case, moreover, that we now find organisations such as Oxfam, Amnesty International and Save the Children operating at the forefront of attempts to explore how so-called ‘social media’ might be used to forge political alliances and virtual communities actively committed to the pursuit of the means to combat human suffering. For example, Kate Nash argues that the possibilities afforded by new interactive communication media such as the internet and mobile phones for a two-way engagement between humanitarian campaign organisations and publics are creating a new ‘cultural politics’ where larger numbers of people than ever before in human history are actively involved in expressing their solidarity with the suffering of distant others (Bash 2008) On these grounds, I suggest that the visualisation of the human experience of society is still much in the making. I also hold that we are still very much caught up in the process of realising the technological, cultural and institutional means to interpret and respond to this. We are not yet near to apprehending the range of possibilities for crafting moral sentiment in a pro-social direction. As yet we do not know how far it may be possible for people to be socialised into a sentiment-fired practice of care for others. Whilst courting many longstanding hazards relating to the potential for moral feeling to be driven along a course of ideological abuse, those operating with a social politics of pity are still in the process of discovering the cultural forms and terms of social interaction in which this serves the good of humanity. In this regard, there may be many more occasions where our capacity for social understanding will be re-made anew. Concluding Remarks By the mid-nineteenth century there was already a highly sophisticated ‘economy of attention to suffering’ (Spelman 1997: 1-14). In many instances, anti-slavery novelists and feminist pamphleteer writers were keenly alert to the many conflicts of interpretation as well as the wide range of political responses that might take place in response to their sentimental framing of social problems. Whilst working to ‘educate’ moral feeling so as at to enable a sympathetic understanding of people’s lives, they were very much aware that their style of writing was liable to court a great deal of controversy. For example, Elizabeth Clark notes that anti-slavery campaigners such as Theodore Dwight Weld and Lydia Maria Child devoted a considerable amount of energy to crafting texts that openly challenged those who would denounce them as mere purveyors of ‘sensationalism’ (Clark 1995). She claims that Weld and Child were not only concerned to appeal to the most ‘scrupulous standards of proof’ so as to combat skeptics’ dismissal of their work, but also, that they sought to carefully temper their accounts of the violence done to slaves with detailed depictions of their friendships and family lives. Clark argues that, particularly following the success of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was widely recognised that where readers’ sympathies were engaged by ‘fleshed out’ accounts of slaves as ‘whole people’, then the depiction of their suffering would hold greater ‘strategic value’ as a means to shape public opinion in favour of the anti-slavery cause. Similarly, Karen Halttunen notes that whilst crafting their studies and reports, mid-nineteenth century humanitarian social reformers, were also concerned to guard against the possibility that their readers would relate to the portrayal of human suffering as a sensational form of entertainment. In this respect, she argues that many were alert to the fact that by their critical praxis, they were ‘caught in a contradiction of their own making’; namely, that while working to expose the ‘obscenity’ of unnecessary pain and violence, they might also make people inured to the shock of being a remote witness to human suffering, even to the point where some would treat the experience of gazing upon the pain of others as a gratuitous pleasure (Halttunen 1995). Both Clark and Halttunen note that, in their concern to inform the emotional dispositions and practices of ‘the public’, most nineteenth century social reformers were conversant with longstanding debates over the virtues of moral sentiment. It may be argued, furthermore, that they were more sensitive that we may ever be to the fact that their work was liable to court a hostile critical response. By their literary tactics they were declaring themselves to be opposed to establishment politics and elite moral opinion. The courting of social sympathy was a radical act by which one was liable to dismissed as a sensationalizing self-promoter, a soft-hearted friend to the ‘underserving poor’ or a revolutionary giving succour to violent protest and civil disorder. Yet this was a risk that they were prepared to take; for aside from embracing the fact that moral feeling matters in the conduct of social life, they remain convinced that it was an integral part of the attempt to understand the human social condition. In this regard, to take flight from social sympathy was tantamount to an abandonment of human social concern. Past criticisms and current controversies are an insufficient guide to understanding the limits of possibility. The quest for the ‘professional’ accreditation of social science, particularly in the British and American academy, involved a concerted attempt to disassociate sociology from humanitarian movements of social reform (Lannoy 2004; Deegan 1981; 1988; Lengermann and Niebrugge-Brantley 1998; Turner and Turner 1990). On this setting, an ideology of rationalism often served to propagate an impoverished account of social life; particularly in terms of its embodied consequences and its effects as moral experience. The frequently gendered and racial hurt left by the drive to remove moral feeling from the work of sociology is contributing to a new movement to question how social bonds of sympathy may once again be studied both as an elemental part of the constitution of society and as a vital component of the attempt to research the human social condition as such. In domains of social inquiry inspired by feminist scholarship, American literary criticism, working-class studies and the medical humanities there is now a widespread suspicion that there is a good deal of ‘unfinished business’ to be explored within the cultural politics of sentimentality (Berlant 2008). By no means should this require us to forsake the attempt to understand the ways in which emotive portrayals of social life might serve to establish and sustain unequal power relations. We should also recognise that there are many occasions where our moral sense might be indulged to the cost of the effort to engage in critical thinking. It should, however, leave us prepared to treat social sympathy as a necessary component of social understanding. To this end, we might also initiate our sociological endeavour from the understanding that insofar as moral experience is strained from the record of social life, then it is rendered sterile as a means to attend to how society matters for people. References Abruzzo, M. (2001) Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty and the Rise of Humanitarianism, Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press Amato, J. A. (1990) Victims and Values: A History and a Theory of Suffering New York: Greenwood Press Arendt, H. (1963) ‘The Social Question’ in On Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin Berlant, L. (2008) The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, Durham: Duke University Press Baldwin (1949) ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’, Partisan Review, 16: 578-85 Barbalet, J. (2001) Emotion, Social Theory and Social Structure: A Macrosociological Approach, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Barbalet, J. M. (ed) (2002) Emotions and Sociology, Oxford: Blackwell Publishing/The Sociological Review Barker-Benfield, G. J. (1992) The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth Century Britain, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Beck, U. (2006) Cosmopolitan Vision, Cambridge: Polity Press Beck, U. and Willms, J. (2004) Conversations with Ulrich Beck, Cambridge: Polity Press Beecher Stowe ([1852] 1994) Uncle Tom’s Cabin, New York: W. W. Norton & Co Brewer, J. D. (2007) ‘Putting Adam Ferguson in his Place’, British Journal of Sociology, 58(1): 105-22 Biehl, J. Good, B. and Kleinman, A. (2007) ‘Introduction: Rethinking Subjectivity’, in Biehl, J. Good, B. and Kleinman, A. (eds) Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, Berkeley: University of California Press Boltanski, L. (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Campbell, C. (1987) The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism, Oxford: Blackwell Carey, D. (2000) ‘Hutcheson’s Moral Sense and the Problem of Innateness’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 38(1): 103-110 Casteras. S. P. (1995) Seeing the Unseen: Pictorial Problematics and Victorian Images of Class, Poverty and Urban Life’, in C. T. Christ and J. O. Jordan (eds) Victorian Literature and the Victorian Visual Imagination, Berkeley: University of California Press Chouliaraki, L. (2006) The Spectatorship of Suffering, London: Sage Publications Cohen, S. (2001) States of Denial: Knowing About Atrocities and Suffering, Cambridge: Polity Press Clark, E. B. (1995) ‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak: Pain, Sympathy and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America’, The Journal of American History, 82(2): 463-93 Comolli, J.L (1980) ‘Machines of the Visible’ in T. de Lauretis and S. Heath (eds) The Cinematic Apparatus, London: Macmillan Crane, R. S. (1934) ‘Suggestions Towards a Genealogy of the ‘Man of Feeling’’ English Literary History, 1(3): 205-30 Crocker, R. H. (1987) ‘The Victorian Poor Law in Crisis and Change: Southampton, 1870-1895’, Albion 19(1): 19-44 Dickens, C. ([1843] 2009) The Mudfog Papers, Texas: Talamh Books Dickens, C. ([1854] 1995) Hard Times, London: Penguin Books De Las Casas, B. ([1542] 1992) A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, London: Penguin Deegan, M. J. (1981) ‘Early Women Sociologists and the American Sociological Society: The Patterns of Exclusion and Participation’, The American Sociologist, 16(February): 14-24 Deegan, M. J. (1988) Jane Addams and the Men of the Chicago School, 1892-1918, New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books Flint, K. (2000) The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Forget, E. L. (2003) Evocations of Sympathy: Sympathetic Imagery in Eighteenth Century Social Theory and Physiology, History of Political Economy 35(1): 282-308 Frazer, M. L. (2010) The Enlightenment of Sympathy: Justice and the Moral Sentiments in the Eighteenth Century and Today, Oxford: Oxford University Press Giddens, A. (1976) ‘Classical Social Theory and the Origins of Modern Sociology’, American Journal of Sociology, 81(4): 703-29 Goldman, L. (1991) ‘Statistics and the Science of Society in Early Victorian Britain: An Intellectual Context for the General Register Office’, Social History of Medicine, 4(3): 415-34 Goldman, L. (1983) ‘The Origins of British ‘Social Science’: Political Economy, Natural Science and Statistics, 1830-35’, The Historical Journal 26(3): 587- 616 Halttunen, K. (1995) Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo- American Culture, The American Historical Review, 100(2): 303-34 Herdt, J. A. (2001) ‘The Rise of Sympathy and the Question of Divine Suffering’, Journal of Religious Ethics, 29(3): 367-99 Hill, L. (2001) ‘Eighteenth-Century Anticipations of the Sociology of Conflict: The Case of Adam Ferguson’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 62(2): 281-99 Hoijer, B. (2004) ‘The Discourse of Global Compassion: The Audience and Media Reporting of Human Suffering’, Media Culture & Society, 26(4): 513-31 Hovet, Jr. T. (2007) ‘Harriet Martineau’s Exceptional American Narratives: Harriet Beecher Stowe, John Brown and the Redemption of Your National Soul’, American Studies, 48(1): 63-76 Ignatieff, M. (1999) The Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience, London: Vintage Jay, M. (1994) Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth Century French Thought, Berkeley: University of California Press Jenks, C. (1995) Visual Culture, London: Routledge John, A. V. (2006) By the Sweat of their Brow: Women Workers at Victorian Coal Mines, London: Routledge Klarer, M. (2005) Humanitarian Pornography: John Gabriel Stedman’s ‘Narrative of a Five Year’s Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam’ 1796’, New Literary History, 36(4): 559-87 Lannoy, P. (2004) ‘When Robert E. Park was (Re) writing “the city”: Biography, the social survey, and the science of sociology’, The American Sociologist, 35(1) 34-62 Ledger, S. (2007) Dickens and the Popular Radical Imagination, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lengermann, P. M. and Niebrugge-Brantley, J. (2002) ‘Back to the Future: Settlement Sociology, 1885-1930’, The American Sociologist (Fall): 5-20 Lepenies, W. (1988) Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Mackenzie, H. ([1771] 2001a) The Man of Feeling, Oxford: Oxford University Press Mackenzie, H. ([1785] 2001b) ‘Henry Mackenzie, The Lounger, No 20 (Saturday, 18 June 1785)’, in The Man of Feeling, Oxford: Oxford University Press Mandeville . B. ([1723]1970) The Fable of the Bees, Harmondsworth: Penguin Marshall, D. (1984) ‘Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments’, Critical Inquiry, 10(June): 592-613 Mason. E. (2007) ‘Feeling Dickensian Feeling’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century, (4) www.19.bbk.ac.uk Mayhew, H. ([1849-50] 1971) The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849-50, E. P. Thompson and E Yeo (eds) , Merlin: London Mayhew, H. ([1861-2] 2010) London Labour and the London Poor: A Selected Edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press Moeller, S. (1999) Compassion Fatigue, London: Routledge Mullan, J. (1988) Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century, London: Clarendon Press Nash, K. (2008) ‘Global Citizenship as Show Business: The Cultural Politics of Make Poverty History’, Media, Culture & Society, 30(2):167-81 Nisbet, R. (1966) The Sociological Tradition, Heinemann: London Nussbaum, M. C. (1996) ‘Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion’, Social Philosophy and Policy, 13(1): 27-58 Poovey, M. (1993) ‘Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Statistics in the late 1830s’, Critical Inquiry, 19(2): 256-76 Poovey, M. (1995) Making a Social Body: British Cultural Formation 1830-1864, Chicago: University of Chicago Press Poovey, M. (1998) A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society, Chicago: Chicago University Press Reddy, W. M. (2000) ‘Sentimentalism and its Erasure: The Role of Emotions in the Era of the French Revolution’, The Journal of Modern History, 72(1): 109-52 Roberts, F. D. (2002) The Social Conscience of the Early Victorians, Stanford: Stanford University Press Riis, J. A. ([1890] 1997) How the Other Half Lives, London: Penguin Scannell, P. (2004) ‘What Reality Has Misfortune?’, Media, Culture & Society, 26(4): 573-584 Smith, A. ([1790] 2006) The Theory of Moral Sentiments, New York: Dover Publications Spelman, E. V. (1998) Fruits of Sorrow: Framing Our Attention to Suffering, Boston: Beacon Spierenberg P. (1984) The Spectacle of Suffering: Executions and the Evolution of Oppression: From a Pre-industrial Metropolis to the European Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Sprague, E. (1954) ‘Francis Hutcheson and the Moral Sense’, The Journal of Philosophy, 51(24): 794-800 Sznaider, N. (2001) The Compassionate Temperament: Care and Cruelty in Modern Society, Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Swingewood, A. (1970) ‘Origins of Sociology: The Case of the Scottish Enlightenment’, British Journal of Sociology, 21(2): 164-80 Tester, K. (1994) Media Culture and Morality, London: Routledge Tester, K. (1999) ‘The Moral Consequentiality of Television’, European Journal of Social Theory 2(4): 469–83. Tester, K. (2001) Compassion, Morality and the Media, Buckingham: Open University Press Thussu, D. K. (2007) News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment, London: Sage Tompkins, J. (1985) Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, Oxford: Oxford University Press Turner, J. H. and Stets, J. E. (2005) The Sociology of Emotions, Cambridge University Press Turner, S. P. and Turner, J. H. (1990) The Impossible Science: An Institutional Analysis of American Sociology, Newbury Park, CA: Sage Thomas, K. (1983) Man and the Natural World: Changing Attitudes in England 1500-1800, London: Penguin Thompson, E. P. (1971) ‘Mayhew as Social Investigator’ in The Unknown Mayhew: Selections from the Morning Chronicle 1849-50, E. P. Thompson and E Yeo (eds), Merlin: London Thompson, J. B. (1995) The Media and Modernity: A Social Theory of the Media, Cambridge: Polity Wilkinson, I. (2005) Suffering: A Sociological Introduction, Cambridge: Polity Press Williams, R. (1973) The Country and the City, London: Hogarth Williams, S. (2001) Emotion and Social Theory, London: Sage Wordsworth, W. ([1802] 2003) ‘Preface to Lyrical Ballads’ in Wordsworth and Coleridge Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd