Creating global moral iconicity

Theorizing global moral culture

To understand the nature of global moral culture, one can turn to the cosmopolitan political theorizing of Immanuel Kant, and the elaboration of it offered by Émile Durkheim. Taken together, the ideas of Kant and Durkheim provide an account of some of the central features of the genesis and operation of the world-level moral cultural field (Author, 2011).

For Kant (1963b), ¹ world history involves an initial human dispersal across the whole planet, followed by increasing levels of interconnection between geographically disparate social groups. For centuries, warfare is endemic between these groups, encouraged by ‘differences of language and of religion’, these differences breeding ‘mutual hatred and pretexts for war’ (Kant, 1963b: 111). However, humans ‘cannot infinitely disperse’ across the planet, and so must eventually ‘tolerate the presence of each other’ (Kant, 1963b: 103). In the very long run, the experiences of long and bloody warfare eventually teach humans

that which reason could have told them at the beginning and with far less sad experience…to step from the lawless condition of savages into a league of nations…[where] even the smallest state could expect security and justice,

Kant discerned in his own time ‘a rising feeling which each [state or nation] has for the preservation of the whole [world]’, such that ‘a universal cosmopolitan condition [is] com[ing] into being’ (1963a: 23). In this emergent, world-spanning moral culture, ‘a violation of rights in one place is felt throughout the world’ (Kant, 1963b: 105; emphasis added). This is an anticipation of later ideas about a world-spanning moral culture centred upon human rights regimes (Elliott, 2007). For Kant, this culture is based around, and generates, sentiments which condemn any actions which undermine human rights that are globally recognized. Wherever those actions may have occurred, the condemnation which follows is literally global in nature and scope, both because it comes from all over the planet, and because it is in a certain way the response of the whole world itself, operating as a single moral entity (Kant, 1963b: 103). The opinion-forming capacities of what would later be called ‘global civil society’ (Keane, 2003) are made possible by media such as newspapers. These disseminate information, especially that condemning wrong-doing, across borders and thus help construct world-level public opinion. The converse is also implicit in Kant’s claims. Such media can also play an important role in presenting persons and institutions that are recognizable around the world as exemplars of virtue, that possess such outstanding moral qualities that the whole world should take notice, and that should be recognized as role models.

Some of these themes were later taken up Durkheim. It is perhaps rather surprising that nowhere in his work does Durkheim explicitly discuss the phenomena of the emergent world moral culture of his own time, such as the re-establishment of the Olympic Games and the founding of the Nobel Prizes. Other thinkers who were influenced by Comte, like the Saint-Simonians, explicitly analysed the emergence of a new, morally-based world order (Iggers, 1970). However, the younger Durkheim (1964 [1893]: 369) did consider how relations of organic solidarity between different nations both produce, and require regulation by, moral regulations binding upon all the participants. These regulations are ‘cosmopolitan’ because they are emergent properties derived from interactions between different groups and irreducible to the social conditions of any particular group.

Moreover, trends towards the appearance of a world moral culture, which was beginning to regulate the very trans-national social conditions which had produced it, were analysed more directly in addresses Durkheim gave in the early years of the twentieth century (Lukes, 1973: 350). Durkheim (1992: 74) proposed that in each ‘civilized’ state, a situation was emerging whereby national citizens’ ‘civic duties…[are] only a particular form of the general obligations of humanity’. The latter was the core of emergent world moral culture. In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim (2001 [1912]: 322) claimed that today:

[T]here is no people, no state, that is not involved with another society that is more or less unlimited and includes all peoples…There is no national life that is not dominated by an inherently international collective life. As we go forward in history, these international groupings take on greater importance and scope.

This account of global moral culture and its icons glosses over power imbalances between the different groups whose interactions are understood to generate it and are regulated by it. The uneven playing field faced by different sorts of players, endowed with greater or lesser resources, in the field of global moral culture, is side-lined, as are hierarchies of ethnicity, region, gender, and so on. Instead, one must recognize that the realm of global moral culture and iconicity is a field, characterized by conflicts over who is allowed to enjoy renown and legitimacy within it, and who is not. One must also consider the differing levels of resources and qualifications possessed by different actors, upon which claims to legitimacy rest. These are themes that derive both from Bourdieu’s (1993) account of cultural fields, and Weber’s analysis of claims to legitimacy and the dynamics of orthodoxy and heterodoxy within cultural worlds (Schroeder, 1992). As in other fields, varying parties – ‘reputational entrepreneurs’ in Fine’s (2001) terms – struggle to get their own preferred candidates to be widely perceived as embodying the virtues held up as the most important ones in the field, while they also seek to define which virtues are indeed the most laudable.

Despite these caveats, the line of thought opened up by Kant and Durkheim still points to the existence of such a field, and gives a general sense both of how it has been created through mechanisms of trans-national social interaction, and also of the means and elements by which it operates. These include globally recognized (if not necessarily universally valorized) icons and person(a)s (‘international gods’), and ceremonies that claim global scope and significance, where awards and prizes are given to those deemed to be virtuous in literally ‘world’-level and globe-spanning ways. Those person(a)s are thought to embody and exhibit the highest moral values, which are themselves understood to be globally shared. Their personality, reputation and activities are thought to be significant for the whole world, and worthy of global, rather than ‘merely’ local or national, forms of recognition.

When Nelson Mandela was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, it was these kinds of phenomena that were at work. The consecration was intended to be a form of global recognition of those virtues of Mandela that were felt to be truly globally significant (Faflik, 2012). Mandela’s status as a global moral icon was not brought into being by the ceremony alone, but was certainly thoroughly cemented by it. The ritual awarding the Nobel Prize is, in Durkheim’s terms, an inter-tribal assembly that recognizes forms of virtuousness that (try to) go beyond any particular national or regional culture. It is precisely the globality of the status conferred on Mandela by the Nobel ceremonialization of his virtues, and his further elevation to global moral icon stature, which are pointed to by Durkheim’s analysis. It is the notion of outrages against the codes of common humanity, embodied and enshrined in global moral culture, being felt everywhere and anywhere across the planet, that is Kant’s contribution to understanding such matters. In this instance, the crimes of the Apartheid regime against which Mandela fought, and to which he became a martyr in prison for decades, were the outrages against which the whole world (was said to have) reacted and came to condemn. The globally recognized outrageousness of the Apartheid regime constituted the counterpoint against which Mandela’s globally recognizable virtuousness was created, was made discernible to a global audience, and rendered worthy of honour. The Kant–Durkheim line of thinking about global moral culture finds its prototypical object of analysis in the consecration of Mandela. Such thinking sets out the conditions of possibility – involving moral transgressions, iconicity, consecration, and inter-group ceremonials – that allow for, and demand, global moral icons such as the prisoner of Robben Island to be created in the first place.

Global moral culture institutionalized: The Nobel Prizes

We can now turn to examine in more detail the institutionalization – as well as performance and reproduction – of global moral culture through the mechanism of the Nobel Prizes, which are part of the complex of phenomena gestured towards by Durkheim.

It has often been noted by analysts of prizes and prize-giving – most notably English (2005) – that prizes can operate as very effective means of transforming one form of capital into another. The case of Alfred Nobel is exemplary here, and perhaps the most spectacular instance ever of capital conversion through the inauguration of prizes. It is an over-simplification to say that Nobel somehow ‘whitewashed’ the vast sums of money he accrued through sales of armaments and explosives by setting up in the terms of his will the famous prizes for the sciences, literature and peace work. Nobel was in fact a committed supporter of the peace movement of the late nineteenth century, and the humanitarian impulse behind the founding of the prizes was genuinely felt. As English (2005: 55) notes, Nobel was also not particularly innovative by the standards of his time and place – to set up prizes and cash awards for explicitly humanitarian purposes was a relatively obvious idea in the late nineteenth century, with such mechanisms often being used to make vast industrialist fortunes seem more respectable. What Nobel seems to have had in mind – a matter of some controversy, given the notoriously vague specifications in his will – was a project that was both ambitious and modest at the same time. The former, because of the size of the financial endowment underpinning the prizes (about US$9 million in 1896, or about a quarter of a billion dollars now); and the latter, because in the case of the Peace Prize, he likely saw it as a straightforward form of recognition of a relatively small number of his fellow Europeans who were prominent in the peace movement, of which he was a supporter. The Literature Prize was also initially understood in a narrow way, as rewarding authors who wrote edifying humanist prose, especially those who actively contributed to the peace movement. The scope of both prizes seems to have been initially relatively circumscribed.

The broader – and ultimately global – significance of Nobel and the prizes set up in his will instead came more from a series of later innovations than from the explicit intentions of the founder. Nobel’s will provided for five prizes to be awarded annually to those who had served mankind ‘the best’ in the previous year. The first three were to go to researchers in physics, chemistry, and medicine, and the fourth was for idealistic literary accomplishment – a criterion associated with ‘peace-making’, albeit in ways open to interpretation. These were to be awarded by Swedish institutions. The fifth prize, to be awarded by a committee elected by the lower house of the Norwegian parliament, was for ‘the one who had worked the most or the best for the fraternity among peoples and the abolition or reduction of permanent armies, as well as the establishment and promotion of peace congresses’ (Abrams, 1962: 226). The sheer size of the financial bequest made this original vague scheme workable, in that it gave sufficient scope to those on the committees that administered the awards after Nobel’s death to innovate in ways that went beyond the terms of the will and to extend greatly the scope and ambition of the prizes and their mechanisms of consecration. This is not surprising, given the habitus of the Swedes and Norwegians who ran the Nobel apparatus in its earliest days. They hailed from a regional context where there was strong support for entities such as the International Red Cross. Such entities were the expressions of an earlier burst of institutionalization of global moral culture undertaken by bourgeois Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century, stimulated by the experience of the horrors of European wars of the time. This period of institutionalization created the conditions of possibility for the broader and more systematic projects of the end of the century, of which the Nobel Prizes are just the most widely remembered example today (Arnason and Wittrock, 2012).

The Norwegian administrators of the Peace Prize began to innovate soon after Nobel’s death. Nobel’s will indicated that a prize awarded in a given year was to reward a person’s good works in the previous year only, but the administrators rejected this as impractical, and so the scope of the prize was widened to include their total past performance, enormously opening up the field of who could be considered worthy. Nobel had also intended the very generous cash sum attendant upon receiving a prize to free up the time of individuals so honoured, so that they could do more good works in the immediate future. But over time the prize criteria shifted more in the direction of ‘lifetime achievement’ awards, rewarding more elderly candidates towards the end of their careers rather than those in the middle of them (English, 2005).

Here, then, was a shift towards recognizing more ‘elder statesmen’ types rather than those in mid-career, equating globally recognizable virtue with the wisdom that supposedly goes with age. The quasi-anthropological themes here – that the most globally virtuous persons are like the ‘tribal’ elders of the putative ‘global village’ – have proven remarkably resilient over time. A group made up of former Peace Prize winners, and other worthies consecrated in similar ways, with leadership by (mostly) undisputed global moral icon Nelson Mandela, was founded in the 1990s under the self-conscious title of ‘Global Village Elders’ and given the task of sorting out some of the world’s greatest problems. ³ The somewhat ersatz nomenclature points back to the sorts of aboriginal symbolism and nomenclature examined by Durkheim, but with a slick media-friendly gloss added. Once the Nobel Prizes had moved towards a retroactive form of recognition, often recognizing grand old men (and later on, sometimes women) rather than those at the forefront of contemporary activities, it set up the possibility, subsequently actualized, of creating global moral icons out of the relatively elderly rather than the younger, and creating a kind of ancestor worship, where iconicity seems synonymous with grey hair and other conventional and cross-culturally recognizable features of ageing. This is one underlying reason why attempts to present someone like the 40-something Angelina Jolie as being worthy of being mentioned in the exalted company of the likes of Mandela, are often met with such derision.

The manner in which the scope of the Nobel Prizes was expanded by their early administrators had other curious, unintentional, but long-lasting consequences. Nobel seems to have expected the Peace Prize to go to a quite narrow cadre of peace workers drawn from Euro-American social elites, with whom, in the early days of the prize, he would have often been personally acquainted. But the Prize committees early on widened the remit of nominees to include statesmen and politicians, the very type of person thought by peace activists of the time to be the war-mongering antitheses of the codes of global moral culture. One consequence of this was that it became common for politicians to nominate each other for the Peace Prize, creating loud protests of denunciation from other actors in the field (Abrams, 1962). ⁴ Each such expansion of the scope of the Peace Prize has fuelled controversy, indicating the very antagonistic nature of the global moral culture field. This is rather ironic, given that this is a field which is otherwise awash with sentiments praising peace between nations and international harmony.

While Nobel’s will indicated that only individuals could be nominated, the committees specified that institutions could be nominees too, and early awards indeed went to bodies such as the International Red Cross – itself an agent of the institutionalization of world moral culture a generation before the instantiation of the Nobel Prizes – and the Institute of International Law. This was an important shift in scope. By allowing for the possibility that collective entities could be invested with a halo of virtuousness that was presented as world-spanning in reach, it also meant that those institutions which upheld, elaborated and in certain senses ‘ran’ global moral culture, could be consecrated, recognized and praised for doing just that. The Nobel Foundation started to work as an institution of global moral culture with the power to pick out and recognize other institutions concerned with that culture, legitimating them and extending their prestige accordingly. As their prestige and moral charisma were expanded, so too could their pragmatic operations become more wide-ranging, in terms of what they did and in which parts of the world they did it. Their codifications of what global moral culture’s codes, precepts and principles were, could become more elaborated and more potentially influential on modes of action in the world. This is part of the process of massive expansion of putatively global rules and regulations that contemporary theorists of ‘world culture’ depict as occurring in and from centres in Europe and North America from the end of the nineteenth century onwards (Elliott, 2007). The institutionalization of global moral culture was given a tremendous boost both by the existence of the Nobel Prizes, and by the prizes’ capacity to confer positive attention and legitimacy onto institutions engaged in formulating universalizing codes of conduct as to how the world was to be run.

The Nobel Prizes, like all awards and prize-givings, are performative phenomena (English, 2005). They have significantly assisted in bringing into existence that which they claim merely to recognize, i.e. global morality and the persons who are taken to be icons of that morality. The elements of their performativity are various. First, over time they have, in terms of the prestige they can bestow, gone well beyond the level enjoyed by national academies of arts and sciences, the major consecrating institutions of the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries in the Euro-American cultural area (Inhaber and Przednowek, 1976). They have transcended what have become seen as ‘merely’ national honours, precisely because of their perceived global reach – and in that way of thinking, prestige which is truly global must perforce be of greater value than a form which is ‘only’ national in scope.

Here a curious form of social alchemy has taken place. Despite being administered within the nation-states of Sweden and Norway, apparatchiks from these countries have been able to take on the mantle of global consecrators, their national origins being effaced by the globe-spanning charisma of the prizes themselves and of the virtuous icons the prizes themselves have helped to create. The national administrative basis of the global morality that the prizes embody and claim to reward, only comes forcibly into view when criticisms are sometimes made of the alleged Nordic or European bias of the judges and of the administrative procedures and apparatuses in the decision-making and awarding process. It has been a long-time complaint of African and Chinese critics that the judging processes are far from being truly universal, but instead rooted in all sorts of regional prejudices. But such critique in turn has stimulated those awarding the prizes, since at least the 1970s, to be ever more self-consciously ‘globalist’ in their thinking, awarding ever more prizes to individuals from hitherto under-represented or ignored regions and countries. In this way, the administrators have sought to make the prizes approximate ever more in actuality the promise that they contain truly global modes of recognition, which in turn brings into being more forcefully than before the idea that there is a global moral cultural realm that the prizes are simply responses to. Belief in the global moral level of human affairs is stimulated each time it is alleged that the Nobel Prizes fail to live up to it, for it is assumed that there is indeed such a thing to live up to (Best, 2008).

At another level, the Nobel Prizes are performative in that they can be transformative. Awarding of a Nobel Prize can ‘generate a worldwide reputation’ for those who do not yet enjoy one, as well as confirm and extend such reputations for those who already have them (Heinich, 2009: 86). Both recipients and prize-givers usually benefit from the awarding process. At the ceremonies, the award-givers stress the global significance of the awardee and their doings, thus framing both person and actions as global in stature. But in turn, the speeches and subsequent public declarations of the recipients use terminology that is in a global register. ‘This is the highest honour that could be conferred on me’ and suchlike statements reproduce the idea that the Nobel Prizes recognize the pinnacle of achievements globally and so are themselves of global significance. So how the reward is received is as important as how it is given in terms of constantly evoking the global status of the prizes, above which there apparently can be nothing else, for this is apparently the most truly universal recognition that the whole planet itself can muster (Mulkay, 1984). In turn, the award-givers win prestige of their own, being associated not only with the world’s most prestigious prizes, but also the prestige of the winners whose globally recognized value is now confirmed by the very winning of the prize (Best, 2008). As with all prizes, the award-givers implicitly but forcefully claim the right to endow persons with virtue, and in so doing win virtue for themselves (Strauss, 1982). With the Nobel Prizes, and then with the advent of their scores of imitators, this process took on planetary dimensions, which involves a kind of performativity of the global. This involves the reconfirmation of global moral culture, which is already assumed to exist, as well as an invoking of it which simultaneously reproduces and perpetuates it while projecting its continuing existence into the future.

Nobel imitation and proliferation

The Nobel Prizes sit at the apex of a global hierarchy of prestige in terms of awards given to the virtuous (Heinich, 2009). Since their inception, there has been a notable ‘Nobel effect’, involving the creation of ever greater numbers of prizes made in the image of the Nobel awards, and this proliferation has been at the root of the further deepening and extension of the institutionalization of world moral culture.

Within three years of the first Nobel ceremony, a range of prestigious prizes were invented in Europe and America, such as the Goncourt and Femina prizes in France, and the Pulitzer in the USA, in more or less explicit imitation of the Nobel model. Such prizes often fused together two separable categories of virtue – artistic and/or professional excellence, on the one hand, and the humanitarian contribution of the artist and her works, on the other (Heinich, 2009). This was a fusion of categories already pioneered by the Nobel Prize for Literature, where artistic quality was rewarded only if the works, and thus the author’s persona, exhibited a high level of moral edification ‘for the good of humanity’. In this way, the realms of world moral culture and the arts were conjoined and to a certain extent fused, taking the former into the social system of art and thus extending the former’s social reach still further (cf. Luhmann, 2000). This mingling of aesthetic and world moral cultural considerations and principles has continued into more recent times, for example, in the inauguration of awards such as the Lennon-Ono Grant for Peace, the Princess of Asturias prizes for humanistic achievements, and in multiple humanitarian awards for globally recognized artistic luminaries like Wole Soyinka, Toni Morrison and Günther Grass (English, 2005: 28, 59, 60).

Actors intent on imitating the Nobel Prizes have been driven by various motives. ‘Nobel envy’ has been a powerful motivation, for the global reputation of the prizes has seemed to indicate how as seemingly an unpalatable figure as ‘a dynamite and munitions manufacturer…[could make] his name a virtual synonym for cultural prestige’ and moral edification (English, 2005: 64). Sometimes the Nobels have been copied positively, and at other times more negatively. When a particular group feels that the cultural or political domain it is especially concerned with needs to be legitimated through the means of giving prizes to particularly laudable persons or institutions within that domain, it can depict the new award as the equivalent of the Nobel Prize for that realm (Best, 2008). Conversely, as the world moral culture field is an antagonistic one, criticism of the Nobels by particular interested parties has driven the creation of alternative prizes, which present themselves as more genuinely virtuous and more truly global than the Nobels.

The criticism is not of the assumptions underpinning the Nobels as such. The idea of prizes with global scope is rarely, if ever, challenged, which is why Nobel and Nobel-like prizes continue to enjoy prestige and moral force over time. Instead, criticism focuses on two levels. First, and more specifically, the awarding committee in a given year is alleged to have made an erroneous judgement and given the prize to an unworthy candidate, i.e. someone who is not truly globally recognizable as a moral icon. This sort of criticism leaves untouched, and indeed confirms, the category of global worthiness itself. Second, and more generally, such shortcomings are said to be indicative of biases in the Nobel administration itself, driven by the Nordic, or European, or Global Northern, habitus of the Nobel personnel (Best, 2008). Judging panels and the Nobel bureaucracy can be challenged on the grounds of failing to live up to both their own globalist rhetoric, and the world moral cultural precepts that they are supposed to abide by and embody, but allegedly do not. Criticism of the alleged failings of how the Nobels actually operate has taken on various different objects of grievance. Some critics have pointed out a severe gender imbalance (Misztal, 2009). Others have taken to task the Nobel authorities for historically favouring persons drawn from high social elites and narrow national and ethnic backgrounds (Berry, 1981; Volz and Lee, 2012; Zuckerman, 1977). Such critiques can be used by interested parties as justificatory rhetorical tools to demand alternative prizes which reward the hitherto excluded types of person, awarding them for their putatively global virtues too, replicating the Nobel consecration process in social domains it hitherto had not penetrated.

Particularly striking are claims made by aggrieved governments that the Nobel apparatus is biased against persons from their country. For example, there is widespread dissatisfaction among scientific groups and governments around the world that the science prize committees are biased towards those born or resident in the USA, and that unfair lobbying goes on to the benefit of US candidates and the detriment of people from other regions (Heinich, 2009). Such grievances can lead to strenuous government-sponsored attempts to win prizes. This can be seen in the case of recent Chinese government actions. The intention has not just been to win a global reputation for Chinese science. It has also been to take domestic and global attention away from the Nobel Committee’s tendency to reward Chinese dissidents and in so doing to highlight offences against human rights in China that such dissidents want to bring to world-level attention (Cao, 2004). On this logic, a Chinese citizen and resident winning a globally recognized science prize would diminish the challenge of the opprobrium potentially heaped upon the Chinese government when someone it persecutes is honoured by the Nobel Peace or Literature Prizes or similar awards. The global honour for the winning individual produces an equally global form of dishonour that is experienced by the state officials who are seen to persecute that person. But the winning of a science prize by a state-approved scientist may compensate for or neutralize the problems attendant upon a dissident winning a Nobel Literature or Peace Prize or other such award.

Governments have sometimes rejected the whole Nobel paraphernalia as hopelessly corrupt and launched their own alternative gauge of global moral worth. The USSR’s post-war Stalin Prize for Peace is a particularly striking expression of this tendency (Abrams, 1962). But in the more densely and complexly globalized world of the early twenty-first century, such a strategy of Nobel-withdrawal seems plausible only for North Korea and any states strongly defined as ‘rogue’ by the institutions of world moral culture or by more powerful and vocal national governments. Today the awarding of a Nobel Prize to a dissident may well lead to some sort of settlement between a government and external institutions. The honouring of the imprisoned Aung San Suu Kyi with a Nobel Peace Prize undoubtedly conferred upon her an enhanced level of moral authority that was important in the process leading to her release by the Burmese military regime. Her elevation from national-level dissident to global icon of political probity certainly played an important role in the (so far limited) transformation of political conditions in her country, in the direction of becoming more acceptable to the standards of world moral culture (or at least some powerful governments’ interpretations of these standards).

The Nobel Prizes have spawned large numbers of imitators, and they stand at the top of a prestige hierarchy of prizes and awards that, in a certain sense, they themselves have brought about. This growth in the number of Nobel-like prizes has had at least two major facets. First, the institutionalization and ceremonialization of world moral culture have been extended and deepened tremendously over the last century, precisely through the means of post-Nobel Prize proliferation. Second, with a vast increase in the number of awards seeking to reward virtue, there are now a huge number of mechanisms of consecration, enjoying greater or lesser levels of prestige and recognition themselves. As the media profile and perceived praiseworthiness of a recipient increase, and the more such prizes are accrued by them, then it is likely that they will attain even more awards, as other groups of consecrators seek to be associated with the charismatic glow derived from previous rounds of consecration. This is a phenomenon of reputational spiralling famously analysed by Robert Merton (1968). The pluralization of means of consecration paradoxically tends towards a sort of narrowing of the range of those who get honoured. A small number of certain particularly privileged recipients tend to pick up large numbers of awards. A clutch of smaller awards for a person may pique the attention of nominators for bigger awards like the Nobel Prizes. Conversely, the awarding of a Nobel Prize will almost certainly lead to the conferment of other, lesser awards, and in the case of the most high-profile moral icons, probably very many prizes and other honours indeed.

For example, the list of awards conferred upon Nelson Mandela runs to over 250, and ranges in the pre-Nobel period from the Nehru Prize for International Understanding, and the Bruno Kreisky Award for human rights, to UNESCO’s Simon Bolivar prize. After his winning of the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993, there was a very significant upward swing in awards and honours, an indicative sample being prizes such as the Anne Frank medal for human rights and tolerance, the Sheikh Yusuf Peace Award of the Muslim Women’s Federation, the Indira Gandhi Award for International Justice and Harmony – all national or regional imitators of the Nobel Prizes – as well as a dizzying array of honorary doctorates, freedoms of cities, and suchlike. ⁵

Both newly inaugurated prizes, or established ones for which the current organizers are seeking to raise the global profile, require the presence of prestigious judges to seem sufficiently prestigious, and thus to warrant respect and attention beyond relatively narrow audiences. Those who have already been consecrated by other mechanisms are invited to be the public faces of further consecrating devices. Nobel Prize-winners are a particularly sought-after commodity, and their participation keeps the global prize-giving apparatus of world moral culture operating over time (English, 2005). The charismatic power to consecrate that a particular person enjoys, which is afforded by receiving a Nobel Prize and/or its derivatives, exists in a historical chain. S/he who has been consecrated by an earlier cohort of prestigious consecrators will subsequently consecrate others in turn, contributing to the ongoing collective production of global moral icons.

Gandhi: Iconicity without Nobel recognition

Some important issues concerning the production of global moral icons are well dramatized in the case of Mahatma Gandhi. Gandhi’s status as a – perhaps the quintessential – global moral icon seems today almost unimpeachable. He is a figure who has certainly operated as a template for later persons who would seek to achieve, or have been given, that mantle. But this reputation seems, at least on the surface, to have developed ex nihilo. This is not least because he never won a Nobel Prize, although it was widely thought towards the end of his life that he should receive one. Consideration of his case illustrates some of the mechanisms whereby global moral iconicity can be achieved without the direct intervention of Nobel consecration.

Standard Western accounts of Gandhi’s global recognition understand his rise to pre-eminence as simply a straightforward function of his innate moral virtues being recognised by world-wide publics. On such a view, Gandhi’s innate qualities encompassed a form of great a moral worthiness which fundamentally drove, and was embodied in, an ultimately successful campaign of non-violence to win Indian independence from British colonial control. This account was monumentalized in Richard Attenborough’s 1982 biopic Gandhi, which peddled many of the simplifying accounts of Gandhi’s life offered by Western intellectuals since the 1920s, brought them to the attention of a much wider global audience than hitherto, and gained a clutch of Oscars, awards which are in some senses the Nobel prizes of the field of cinematic production. The film won prestige through association with Gandhi’s apparently unquestionable global iconicity, while further extending, cementing and mythologizing that iconicity.

Yet such accounts inevitably occlude many important factors, presenting a kind of non-denominational secular saint, deprived of the complex relation to Hindu religious beliefs that some Indian perspectives on his life highlight (Markovits, 2004). Generally glossed over too is the large-scale and media-savvy organizational entity Gandhi created around himself in seeking to realize his explicit aim of drawing the whole world’s attention to the abuses of British colonial rule and the humiliation meted out to Indians as a subject people. ‘I want world sympathy in this battle of Right against Might’, wrote Gandhi at the time of the famous Salt March protests in the 1920s (cited in Losurdo: 2015: 80; emphasis added). This is exactly the sort of strategy to appeal to the court of global moral opinion that Kant had foreseen 150 years before.

Yet Gandhi’s global moral iconicity did not arise out of a vacuum, however much a Western liberal interpretation of his activities may believe that. Gandhi achieved such a status in significant part through the work of various well-placed reputational entrepreneurs (Fine, 2001), including one of the most significant, the recipient of a Nobel Prize. At exactly the same time as Durkheim (1916) was excoriating the German state for reneging on its commitments to world moral culture, the French pacifist author Romain Rolland received the Nobel Prize for Literature, in part because of the lofty humanist prose favoured by the Nobel Committee of the time, and partly because he was one of the few major intellectuals in the combatant countries publicly to condemn the war throughout the period of hostilities. Such was the moral prestige enjoyed by Rolland in the immediate post-war period, burnished and amplified by the Nobel honour, that praise from him regarding the virtuous qualities of a particular person carried a great deal of weight in Europe and North America, for at the time it seemed he truly was a prophet, sage and moral beacon of global standing (Desai, 2010).

When in the 1920s Rolland allegedly praised a novel by the Chinese author Lu Xun, he endowed it, and Chinese writing more generally, both with global rather than merely national significance, and with a claim to be counted as truly part of the exalted realm of ‘world literature’, a domain closely connected to world moral culture. His reported remarks also excited many members of the Chinese intelligentsia into believing that Lu Xun was truly worthy of receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, the same honour that Rolland himself had received (Foster, 2001). Rolland’s prestige and global status and reach were so great in the 1920s that a few words of praise by him were sufficient to create a Nobel-seeking trend within Chinese literary circles, and apparently to confer on Lu Xun a significant level of Nobel-standard literary/moral charisma by association.

When Rolland began to take a great interest in Gandhi’s political activities, and published a brief biographical account of the Indian campaigner’s activities in 1924, this gave a huge boost to Gandhi’s profile outside of India, and helped to turn the tide of British propaganda against him among foreign audiences. This contribution in large part gave ‘the Gandhian legend its truly global dimension’ (Markovits, 2004: 17), with Rolland claiming that only Gandhi’s conception of non-violence ‘could bring salvation to a crime-ridden world, its past crimes, its future crimes’ (cited in Markovits, 2004: 18). Rolland presented Gandhism as a variant of Christianity, and Gandhi himself as more genuinely Christian than Tolstoy, another figure who earlier had been a contender for Nobel recognition, but had proved too controversial for the Nordic prize-awarding bureaucracy. Rolland was one of the first to connect Gandhi’s teachings about the means to Indian independence, which were at this period very specific to the Indian political context, to the Western intelligentsia’s concerns for world peace after the horrors of the Great War. This was not a self-evident link by any means (Losurdo, 2015).

In this way, Rolland significantly participated in taking the figure of Gandhi beyond the confines of a national liberation movement, towards becoming a global icon of peace and brotherly love. In so doing, Gandhi’s persona was freed from the realm of mundane and profane national politics, ensuring that his name and image could float free – like one of Durkheim’s international gods – in global moral space, even decades after the socio-political context in which he had operated had dissolved and mostly been forgotten by people outside of India (Markovits, 2004: 20). It is that free-floating nature which may be the essence of a global moral icon whose reputation as an embodiment of virtue seems to later generations almost completely beyond question, just as the holiness of a particularly venerated ‘international god’ is thought to be beyond dispute by believers. ⁶ The passing-on of moral charisma from the Nobel-winning Rolland to Gandhi is the occluded link between the Mahatma and the Nobel Prizes. Both are important components of institutionalized global moral culture: Gandhi as a prototype of what counts as world-level and world-changing virtue, and the prizes as the consecrating mechanism which claims simply to recognize such virtue but in fact partly brings it into existence, then globally circulates and justifies it.

Thus the Gandhian charisma was in part created by the Nobel mechanism even though he was never awarded a Nobel Prize. Moreover, the failure of the Nobel Committee to award Gandhi the Peace Prize has been one of the major criticisms offered by Developing World intellectuals of the Nobel institution, and a driving justification for the creation of new awards by groups in parts of the globe that have felt deeply under-represented by the Western-based consecration institutions (Abrams, 1962: 241). In this way, the memory of the alleged insult to Gandhi has stimulated prize proliferation, creating some of the forms of prestige conferment that were so voluminously given to Nelson Mandela in the years after his Nobel win. In that sense, world moral culture is strongly informed by the passing of batons and the transference of moral charisma, either more directly or more indirectly, between earlier and later global moral icons. This is exemplified in the case of the Rolland-Gandhi-Mandela chain set out here. Within such a cultural complex, comparisons of earlier to later icons or would-be icons is endemic. Aung San Suu Kyi is frequently compared in public discourses to Gandhi and Mandela. The best hope for Angelina Jolie, Bono and others like them to reach the status of global moral icon is to receive awards from panels that have the likes of Kyi on them, so that sufficient moral charisma is passed onto them, that will in turn attract the attention of other such panels which boast the involvement of other such worthies.

Conclusion

This article has considered various elements of how prize-giving works within the field of global moral culture, and how global moral iconicity is constructed and reproduced, a factor which in turn helps to reproduce the field itself over time. Various issues have become apparent.

The influential innovator in the field of global moral culture was not Alfred Nobel but the early Nobel committees made up of Nordic apparatchiks. They reshaped the terms of Nobel’s will such that (1) the recognition of extraordinary merit was extended to organizations rather than to individuals alone; (2) particularly meritorious individuals were assumed to be relatively elderly; and (3) politicians were admissible as Nobel candidates. In the case of (1), the Nobel mechanism could consecrate and bestow with moral charisma organizations like the International Red Cross, which, like the Nobel Foundation, also helped create and institutionalize global moral culture. Such awards brought mutually reinforcing benefits for both awarders and awardees, as well as the further institutionalization of global moral culture and a strengthening of its depth and scope. In the case of (2), the notion of global moral iconicity being associated with relatively advanced age was established, leading to the eventual development of bodies like the Global Village Elders, and to a situation where younger candidates might well struggle to attain iconic status. ⁷

In terms of both (1) and (3), the redefinition of who or what was eligible for consecration created grounds for controversy and contestation, with allegedly unworthy organizations and individuals being recognized – the Peace Prizes for Barack Obama and the European Union being recent examples. But controversy is often productive, for it stimulates new prizes in response to perceived failures by established prizes to award the allegedly truly virtuous. More prizes mean more potential candidates for icon status, drawn from hitherto under-represented groups. Ever more types of people are drawn into the orbit of global moral culture and its institutions, and there is a proliferation of those institutions themselves, as ever more bodies award prizes. Controversies seem to reinforce and extend global moral culture more than they undermine it.

Finally, someone like Aung San Suu Kyi is today almost never compared to Romain Rolland or other ‘forgotten’ Nobel winners. ⁸ The mechanisms of collective memory have failed to keep his iconicity alive, raising the interesting question of why twilight comes to envelop some icons of global virtue but not others. This has been a question posed by analysts of reputations in general (Fine, 2001). It now needs to be pursued further, as we seek to understand more about the often peculiar operations of global moral iconicity and culture – a culture which was significantly if mostly unintentionally shaped by the deliberations more than 100 years ago of some now very obscure Nordic functionaries.