Moral Blindness E-Book

Zygmunt Bauman

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Seitenzahl: 431

Beschreibung

Evil is not confined to war or to circumstances in which people are acting under extreme duress. Today it more frequently reveals itself in the everyday insensitivity to the suffering of others, in the inability or refusal to understand them and in the casual turning away of one's ethical gaze. Evil and Moral Blindness lurk in what we take as normality and in the triviality and banality of everyday life, and not just in the abnormal and exceptional cases. The distinctive kind of Moral Blindness that characterizes our societies is brilliantly analysed by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis through the concept of adiaphora: the placing of certain acts or categories of human beings outside of the universe of moral obligations and evaluations. Adiaphora implies an attitude of indifference to what is happening in the world - a moral numbness. In a life where rhythms are dictated by ratings wars and box-office returns, where people are preoccupied with the latest gadgets and forms of gossip, in our 'hurried life' where attention rarely has time to settle on any issue of importance, we are at serious risk of losing our sensitivity to the plight of the other. Only celebrities or media stars can expect to be noticed in a society stuffed with sensational, valueless information. This probing inquiry into the fate of our moral sensibilities will be of great interest to anyone concerned with the most profound changes that are silently shaping the lives of everyone in our contemporary liquid-modern world.

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Cover

Title page

Copyright page

Introduction: Towards a Theory of Human Secrecy and Unfathomability, or Exposing Elusive Forms of Evil

1 From the Devil to Frighteningly Normal and Sane People

2 The Crisis of Politics and the Search for a Language of Sensitivity

3 Between Fear and Indifference: The Loss of Sensitivity

4 Consuming University: The New Sense of Meaninglessness and the Loss of Criteria

5 Rethinking The Decline of the West

Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West Revisited

Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island: A Novel Warning

Loyalty, Treachery, Situational Conscience and the Loss of Sensitivity

Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis 2013

The right of Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis to be identified as Authors of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2013 by Polity Press

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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6274-9

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6275-6(pb)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6962-5 (Multi-user ebook)

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6963-2 (Single-user ebook)

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Introduction

Towards a Theory of Human Secrecy and Unfathomability, or Exposing Elusive Forms of Evil

Leonidas Donskis Zygmunt Bauman is not a typical sociologist. He is a philosopher of everyday life. His fabric of thought and language weaves together a diversity of strands: high theory; dreams and political visions; the anxiety and torments of that statistical unit of humanity, the little man or woman; astute criticism – sharp as a razor and merciless to boot – of the world’s powerful; and a sociological analysis of their tiresome ideas, their vanity, their unbridled quest for attention and popularity, and their insensitivity and self-deception.

Little wonder: Bauman’s sociology is above all a sociology of the imagination, of feelings, of human relations – love, friendship, despair, indifference, insensitivity – and of intimate experience. Moving easily from one discourse to another has become a signal feature of his thinking.

He is perhaps the world’s only sociologist (and Bauman is one of that field’s living greats, along with Anthony Giddens and Ulrich Beck) and one of the world’s great thinkers simpliciter (along with Umberto Eco, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Serres, Jürgen Habermas) who not only actively uses the language of high theory but agilely jumps from this language to that of advertising, commercials, SMS messages, the mantras of motivational speakers and business gurus, clichés, and Facebook comments; then comes back again to the language (and themes) of social theory, modern literature, and classics of philosophy.

His is a sociology aiming to reconstruct all layers of reality and to make its universal language accessible to all types of reader, not just the academic specialist. Its discursive power and ability to decipher reality performs that function of philosophy that André Glucksmann likens to the title cards in silent movies, cards that help both to construct and to reveal the reality depicted.

Bauman is an admitted methodological eclecticist: empathy and sensitivity are much more important to him than methodological or theoretical purity. Determined to walk the tightrope across the abyss separating high theory and TV reality shows, philosophy and political speeches, and religious thought and commercials, he understands well how comically isolated and one-sided he would appear if he tried to explain our world in the words of its political and financial elite or using only hermetical and esoteric academic texts.

He learned his theory and was most influenced, first, by Antonio Gramsci and later largely by Georg Simmel – not so much by his theory of conflict as his conception of the mental life (Geistesleben) and his Lebensphilosophie. It was this philosophy of life of the Germans – again, not so much Friedrich Nietzsche’s as Ludwig Klages’s and Eduard Spranger’s (particularly his conception of the Lebensformen) – that supplied Bauman with many of his theoretical themes and forms of theorizing.

It is enough to recall Simmel’s essay Die Grosstädte und das Geistesleben (The metropolis and mental life, 1903): this later found an echo in Thomas Mann’s essay Lübeck als geistige Lebensform (Lübeck as a spiritual way of life, 1926); still later, in Lithuanian letters, it turned into Tomas Venclova and Czesław Miłosz’s epistolary dialogue Vilnius kaip dvasinio gyvenimo forma (Vilnius as a spiritual way of life, 1978). A city becomes a form of life and thought, something in which history, architecture, music, the plastic arts, power, memory, exchanges, encounters between people and ideas, dissonances, finances, politics, books, and creeds all speak out – a space where the modern world is born and also acquires its forms for its future. This motif permeates many of Bauman’s later works.

On the map of Bauman’s thought we find not only the philosophical and sociological ideas of Gramsci and Simmel but also the ethical insights of his beloved philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, born and raised in Kaunas and also, according to Bauman, the greatest ethicist of the twentieth century. Levinas’s insights concern the miracle of recognizing the Other’s personality and dignity even to the point of saving his life – without at the same time being able to explain the cause of this recognition, since such an explanation would destroy this miracle of morality and of the ethical tie. Bauman’s books refer not only to these and other modern thinkers but to theologians, religious thinkers, and works of fiction as well, with the latter especially playing an important role in his creativity.

Just like the Polish sociologist Jerzy Szacki, Bauman was heavily if not decisively influenced by Stanisław Ossowski, his professor at the University of Warsaw. In receiving, from the king of Spain, the Prince of Asturias Award for notable achievements in the humanities, Bauman in his speech recalled what Ossowski had taught him first and foremost: namely, that sociology belongs to the humanities. Bauman then went on to say that sociology is an account of human experience – just as a novel is. And the greatest novel of all time is, he acknowledged, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote.

If Vytautas Kavolis held sociology and the social sciences in general to be ‘a field bereft of melody’, then Bauman is a counter-example to this: his sociology not only emits sounds but also looks you straight in the eye. This gaze is an ethical one: you can’t turn away your eyes and fail to reply, because unlike a psychologically exploring look or one that absorbs (consumes) objects in its environment, the Baumanian look incorporates the principle of an ethical mirror. What comes back to you are all your activities, your language, and everything you said or did without thinking but only safely imitating: all your unreflected upon but silently endorsed evil.

Bauman’s theoretical sensitivity and empathy may be likened to a way of speaking, an attitude that eliminates the prior asymmetry between the looker and the looked at. It’s like Jan Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring, overwhelming us by unexpectedly giving back to us our own gaze and leaving us voicelessly wondering: who is looking at whom? We at her, hanging along with many other immortal masterpieces of Dutch art at the Mauritshuis gallery in The Hague, or she at us? The gazed-at gazes at the gazer, thereby returning to the world all the forgotten dialogue. It is a dignified and silent gaze between equals – instead of that boundless consuming, using, knowing, and aggressively indoctrinating that we get back in the guise of an alleged dialogue.

Bauman views the viewer, conceives the conceiver, and talks to the talker, for the audience of his readers and his partners in dialogue are not just theoreticians worthy of him, and not some fantasized personalities. He presents his ideas to the little man or woman – the persons whom globalization and the second (liquid) modernity has displaced. He continues the labours that Stephen Greenblatt, Carlo Ginzburg and Catherine Gallaher, the representatives of the new historicism and contrahistory (microhistory, small history) have begun, consciously rejecting history as a grand narrative. Instead of un grand récit they construct the historical anecdote, a detailed and meaningful narrative about actual people: une petite histoire.

The historical time of Bauman’s theorizing is not linear but pointillist. The form of his history is constituted not by the greats of the world but by its little persons. It is the history not of the great thinkers but of the banishment of the small man to the margins. Bauman’s sympathy is manifestly on the side of the losers in modernity, not its heroes. We will never know their names. They are like the non-professional actors with their amazingly individual and expressive faces (untouched by commercials, self-promotion, mass consumption, self-adulation, and conversion to a commodity) in the films of Pier Paolo Pasolini, such as The Gospel According to St Matthew and Decameron.

These are the biographies not of the pioneers of modern economic structure (capitalism, if you will), les entrepreneurs, the geniuses of early modern art, but of such people as the heretic Menocchio, burned at the stake and featured in Carlo Ginzburg’s The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth Century Miller (first published in Italian as Il formaggio e i vermi in 1976). These minor and tacit actors of history’s drama give substance and shape to our own forms of anxiety, ambiguity, uncertainty and insecurity.

We live in a world in which contrasts of wealth and power are constantly increasing while differences in environmental security are steadily diminishing: today Western and Eastern Europe, the United States and Africa are equally (un)safe. Millionaires experience personal dramas and shocks that through social networks become instantly known to people having absolutely nothing in common with them other than the capacity at any moment to experience such upheavals themselves. Politicians, thanks to mass democracy and mass education, possess unlimited opportunities to manipulate public opinion, although they themselves directly depend on attitudinal changes in mass society and can be destroyed by them.

Everything is permeated by ambivalence; there is no longer any unambiguous social situation, just as there are no more uncompromised actors on the stage of world history. To attempt to interpret such a world in terms of the categories of good and evil; the social and political optics of black and white; and almost Manichean separations, is today both impossible and grotesque. It is a world that has long ceased controlling itself (although it obsessively seeks to control individual people), a world that cannot respond to its own dilemmas and lessen the tensions it has sowed.

Happy are those epochs that had clear dramas, dreams, and doers of good or evil. Today technology has surpassed politics, the latter having in part become a supplement to technology and threatening to bring the creation of a technological society to completion. This society with its determinist consciousness regards a refusal to participate in the technological innovations and social networks (so indispensable for the exercise of social and political control) as sufficient grounds to remove all those who lag behind in the globalization process (or have disavowed its sanctified idea) to the margins of society.

If you’re a politician and don’t appear on TV, you don’t exist. But that’s old news. The fresh news is this: if you’re not available in the social networks, you’re nowhere. The world of technology will not forgive you this treachery. By refusing to join Facebook you lose friends (the grotesque thing is that on Facebook you may have thousands of friends even though, as classical literature has it, finding just one friend for life is a miracle and blessing). But it’s not just a matter of losing relationships; it’s social separation par excellence. If you don’t declare and pay your taxes electronically you become socially isolated. Technology will not allow you to remain aloof. I can transmutes into I must. I can, therefore I am obliged to. No dilemmas allowed. We live in a reality of possibilities, not one of dilemmas.

In Voltaire’s famous philosophical tale Candide: or, Optimism there is a worthwhile thought expressed in the utopian kingdom of Eldorado. When Candide asks the people of Eldorado whether they have priests and nuns (none are to be seen), after moments of light confusion he hears the answer that all the inhabitants here are priests unto themselves – being thankful and wise they continuously praise God; hence they need no intermediaries. In Anatole France’s novel Les Dieux ont soif (The Gods Are Athirst) a young revolutionary fanatic believes that sooner or later the Revolution will turn all Patriots and Citizens into Judges.

That’s why the statement that in the age of Facebook, Twitter, and the blogosphere, everyone who is on the network and writes is by that very fact a journalist is neither artificial nor strange. If we can create the net of social relationships ourselves and participate in the global drama of human consciousness and sensitivity, what is left for journalism as a distinct and separate avocation? Doesn’t it end up in the situation of King Lear, who divided all his wealth between his two elder daughters (communication and the political debates forming the public sphere) and was left with just his Fool?

We are taking part in the new human narrative, which in earlier times took on the forms of epic, saga, or novel, and now displays itself on TV screens and PC monitors. The new narrative is created in virtual space. That’s why unifying thought and action, pragmatic openness and ethics, and reason and imagination becomes a challenge for journalism, which requires not only a constantly self-renewing strategy of representing and actualizing the world, of grasping and talking about problems, and of fostering dialogue, but also a kind of writing that does not create barriers where they have already ceased to exist a long time ago. It is a search for sensitivity, for new forms of acting in a manner appropriate to humans, a search that in close cooperation with the human and social sciences creates a new field of global mutual understanding, social critique, and self-interpretation. Without the emergence of such a field it’s just unclear what is in store for philosophy, literature, and journalism. If they move closer together, they will survive and become more important than ever before. But if they grow further apart, we will all become barbarians.

Technology will not allow you to remain on the sidelines. I can transmutes into I must. I can, therefore I must. No dilemmas permitted. We live in a reality of possibilities, not one of dilemmas. This is something akin to the ethics of WikiLeaks, where there is no morality left. It is obligatory to spy and to leak, though it’s unclear for what reason and to what end. It’s something that has to be done just because it’s technologically feasible. There’s a moral vacuum here created by a technology that has overtaken politics. The problem for such a consciousness is not the form or legitimacy of power but its quantity. For evil (by the way, secretly adored) is where there is more financial and political power. Therefore, for such a consciousness evil lurks in the West. It still has both a name and a geography, even though we have long ago arrived in a world in which evil is weak and powerless, hence dissipated and covering its tracks. Two of the manifestations of the new evil: insensitivity to human suffering, and the desire to colonize privacy by taking away a person’s secret, the something that should never be talked about and made public. The global use of others’ biographies, intimacies, lives and experiences is a symptom of insensitivity and meaninglessness.

To us it seems that evil lives somewhere else. We think it’s not in us but lurks in certain places, certain fixed territories in the world that are hostile to us or in which things endangering all humankind take place. This naive illusion and type of self-deception is present in the world today no less than two or three hundred years ago. To represent evil as an objectively existing factor was long encouraged by religious stories and mythologies of evil. But even today we refuse to look for evil within ourselves. Why? Because it’s unbearably difficult and completely overturns the logic of an ordinary person’s everyday life.

For reasons of emotional and psychological security people generally try to overcome the continuous doubt and state of uncertainty they find in themselves – and with it the sense of insecurity which becomes particularly strong when we don’t have clear and quick answers to the questions that agitate or even torment us. That’s why stereotypes and conjectures are so prevalent in our popular culture and media: human beings need them as a safeguard for their emotional security. As Leszek Kołakowski has aptly observed, clichés and stereotypes, rather than testifying to human backwardness or stupidity, indicate human weakness and the fear that it is unbearably difficult to live beset by continuous doubts.

Believing or disbelieving conspiracy theories (which philosophically speaking are no more than guesses, frequently unable to be confirmed and supported but at the same time not easily disprovable) has nothing to do with the real condition of science and knowledge. Conspiracy theories are believed in by intellectuals, scientists, and even sceptics. This is a topic deserving of an old Jewish joke: at the end of a post-mortem conversation between God and an atheist, the latter, when asked how he, disbelieving in God and generally not believing in anything and doubting everything, nevertheless believes that God doesn’t exist, replies that, well, you have to believe in something …

Still, however that may be, the localization of evil in a specific nation or country is a much more complex phenomenon than just living in a world of stereotypes and guesses. Modern moral imagination constructs a phenomenon I would call the symbolic geography of evil. This is the conviction that possibilities of evil inhere not so much in each of us taken individually as in societies, political communities, and countries. Maybe Martin Luther had a hand in this by virtue of his belief that evil inheres in society and social relations, and that therefore one should be concerned with saving one’s soul rather than getting involved in society’s affairs.

Of course, it would be silly to deny that totalitarian and authoritarian systems distort the thinking, sensitivity and social relationships of entire countries, their societies, and individuals. But if everything were limited to Manichean separations between democracy and authoritarianism (oh sancta simplicitas, as if evil did not exist in democratic countries, in persons who value liberty and equality, and in their moral choices … ) that would just be part of the problem. The symbolic geography of evil does not stop at the borders of political systems, it penetrates mentalities, cultures, national spirits, patterns of thought, and tendencies of consciousness.

The world analysed by Bauman ceases to be a cave inhabited by demons and monsters from which arise dangers to the good and bright part of humanity. Sadly and with a soft irony characteristic of him, Bauman writes about the hell that a totally normal and seemingly kind human being, fine neighbour and family man creates for the Other by refusing to grant him his individuality, mystery, dignity and a sensitive language.

In this respect Bauman is not far from Hannah Arendt’s thought – especially when by her polemical study about Eichmann in Jerusalem and the banality of evil she revealed disappointment with the evil of the new world. Everyone expects to see a monster or a creature of hell, but actually sees a banal bureaucrat of death whose entire personality and activity testifies to an extraordinary normality and even a high morality of duty. It’s not surprising that Bauman interpreted the Holocaust not as an orgy of monsters and demons but as a set of horrible conditions under which the members of any nation would do the same things the Germans and other nations did – nations that were given the opportunity to interpret quickly and simply their own sufferings and events that had happened to them. The escape from unbearable human dilemmas to a sonorously formulated goal of struggle and to a program of annihilating one’s ideological foe is the road to confirming the Holocaust. If you do not have the strength to look into the eyes of an innocent child but you know you are fighting your enemy, something happens that might be called a turning away of your gaze from a human being and directing it onto the sphere of a world-altering language and of instrumental reason.

These are circumstances and situations not experienced by those who have clear views on them. As Bauman has said during his lecture at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania,1 there’s nothing harder than writing about situations that you not only have not experienced but even wouldn’t want to experience. For instance, what do you say about a human being who, one night during the Second World War, hears a knock at the door from a Jewish child who asks for shelter in the hope of being saved? The human being has to decide on the spot, knowing very well that he is risking his own life and that of his family. Such situations cannot be wished on anyone, including oneself.

Evil is not confined to war or totalitarian ideologies. Today it more frequently reveals itself in failing to react to someone else’s suffering, in refusing to understand others, in insensitivity and in eyes turned away from a silent ethical gaze. It also inhabits secret services when they, motivated by love of country or sense of duty (whose depth and authenticity would not be questioned by experts on Immanuel Kant’s ethics nor by Kant himself), unflinchingly destroy a little man or woman’s life just because there was perhaps no other way; or he or she was in the wrong place at the wrong time; or because the prevailing model of international relations changed; or the secret service of a friendly nation asked for this favour; or one just had to prove one’s loyalty and dedication to the system, that is, the state and its controlling structures.

The destruction of a stranger’s life without the slightest doubt that you are doing your duty and being a moral person – this is the new form of evil, the invisible shape of wickedness in liquid modernity, going along with a state that lends or surrenders itself completely to these evils, a state that fears only incompetence and falling behind its competitors but not doubting for a moment that people are nothing but statistical units. Statistics are more important than real human life; and a country’s size and its economic and political power are much more important than the value of one of its inhabitants, even if he speaks on behalf of humanity. Nothing personal, it’s just business: this is the new Satan of liquid modernity. But in contrast to Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel The Master and Margarita and its protagonist, Woland, who reveals the secret belief of Eastern Europeans that Christianity cannot explain evil, that the twentieth century makes it indubitable that evil exists as an independent and parallel reality and not as an insufficiency of good (as taught by St Augustine and believed for centuries), this liquid modernity turns into banality not toothless good, but evil itself.

The most displeasing and shocking truth of today is that evil is weak and invisible; therefore, it’s much more dangerous than those demons and evil spirits we knew from the works of philosophers and literary writers. Evil is toothless and widely dispersed. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that it lurks in every normal and healthy human being. The worst is not the potential for evil present in each of us but the situations and circumstances that our faith, culture and human relationships cannot stop. Evil takes on the mask of weakness, and at the same time it is weakness.

Lucky were those times that had clear forms of evil. Today we no longer know what they are and where they are. It all becomes clear when somebody loses their memory and their capacity to see and feel. Here’s a list of our new mental blocks. It includes our deliberate forgetting of the Other, our purposeful refusal to recognize and acknowledge a human being of another kind while casting aside someone who is alive, real, and doing and saying something right beside us – all for the purpose of manufacturing a Facebook ‘friend’ distant from you and perhaps even living in another semiotic reality. On that list we also have alienation while simultaneously simulating friendship; not talking to and not seeing someone who is with us; and using the words ‘Faithfully yours’ in ending letters to someone we don’t know and have never met – the more insensitive the content, the more courtly the address. There’s also wishing to communicate, not with those who are next to you and who suffer in silence, but with someone imagined and fabricated, our own ideological or communicational projection – this wish goes hand in hand with an inflation of handy concepts and words. New forms of censorship coexist – most oddly – with the sadistic and cannibalistic language found on the internet and let loose in verbal orgies of faceless hatred, virtual cloacas of defecation on others, and unparalleled displays of human insensitivity (especially in anonymous commentaries).

This is moral blindness – self-chosen, self-imposed, or fatalistically accepted – in an epoch that more than anything needs quickness and acuteness of apprehension and feeling. In order that we regain our perceptiveness in dark times, it is necessary to give back dignity as well as the idea of the essential unfathomability of human beings, not only to the world’s greats but also to the crowd extras, the statistical individual, the statistical units, the crowd, the electorate, the man in the street, and the dear people, that is, all those self-deluding conceits constructed by technocrats parading as democrats and peddling the notion that we know all there is to know about people and their needs and that all these data are pinned down exactly and fully explained by the market, the state, sociological surveys, ratings, and everything else that turns people into the Global Anonymous.

Robbing humans of their faces and individuality is no less a form of evil than diminishing their dignity or looking for threats primarily among those who have immigrated or harbour different religious beliefs. This evil is overcome neither by political correctness nor by a bureaucratized, compulsory ‘tolerance’ (often turned into a caricature of the real thing), nor, finally, by multiculturalism, which is nothing other than just leaving humanity alone with all its injustices and degradations taking the form of new caste systems, contrasts of wealth and prestige, modern slavery, social apartheid and hierarchies – all justified by appealing to cultural diversity and cultural ‘uniqueness’. This is cynical deceit; or naive self-deception and a palliative, at best.

Sometimes we are helped to see the light by texts that look us straight in the eye and ask questions. We cannot but answer them. We don’t have the right to ignore them if we want to stay in the zone of modern theoretical, political and ethical sensibility. They are texts such as those that Zygmunt Bauman is writing today.

Needless to say, this book conjointly written with one of the greatest thinkers of our times is a high point of my life. Such an opportunity can occur only once in a lifetime. For this, I am immensely grateful to Zygmunt Bauman – a major influence, a great inspiration, and a beloved friend.

This book is a dialogue on the possibility of a rediscovery of the sense of belonging as a viable alternative to fragmentation, atomization, and the resulting loss of sensitivity. It is also a dialogue on the new ethical perspective as the only way out of the trap and multiple threats posed by the adiaphorization of present humanity and its moral imagination. This book of warning also serves as a reminder of the art of life and the life of art, as it is shaped as an epistolary theoretical dialogue between friends. Elaborating on my thoughts, wrapping up and summing up my hints and questions into a coherent form of discourse, Zygmunt Bauman, in this book, sounds as intimate and friendly as a Renaissance humanist addressing his fellow humanist elsewhere – be this an allusion to Thomas More and Erasmus or Thomas More and Peter Giles or Thomas More and Raphael Hythloday.

Such a form allows us to work out a sociological and philosophical dialogue on the sad piece of news contrary to More’s Utopia – namely that, as I put it in one of my aphorisms penned as a variation on Milan Kundera: globalization is the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land where one can escape and find happiness. Or the last failed hope that, somewhere, there still exists a land different from yours in terms of being able to oppose the sense of meaninglessness, the loss of criteria and, ultimately, moral blindness and the loss of sensitivity.

Zygmunt Bauman Politics is not the only segment of multifaceted human activity-in-the-world afflicted by moral insensitivity. It may even be viewed as a collateral casualty of an all-embracing and omnivorous pestilence, rather than its source and engine. Politics being an art of the possible, each kind of socio-cultural setting brings forth its own kind of politics while making all other types of political practices hard to come by and still harder to make effective. Our liquid modern setting is no exception to that rule.

When we deploy the concept of ‘moral insensitivity’ to denote a callous, compassionless and heartless kind of behaviour, or just an equanimous and indifferent posture taken and manifested towards other people’s trials and tribulations (the kind of posture epitomized by Pontius Pilate’s ‘hand-washing’ gesture), we use ‘insensitivity’ as a metaphor; its primary location lies in the sphere of the anatomical and physiological phenomena from which it is drawn – its primary meaning being the malfunction of some sense organs, whether optical, audial, olfactory or tactile, resulting in an inability to perceive stimuli which under ‘normal’ conditions would evoke images, sounds or other impressions.

Sometimes this organic, bodily insensitivity is desired, artificially induced or self-administered with the help of painkillers, and welcomed as a temporary measure for the duration of surgery or of a transient, or terminal, attack of a particularly painful organic disorder; it is never meant to render the organism perpetually immune to pain. Medical professionals would consider such a condition tantamount to inviting trouble: pain, after all, is a crucial weapon in the organism’s defence against potentially morbid threats; it signals the urgency of undertaking a remedial action before it is too late to intervene. If pain did not send a warning in time that something was wrong and called for intervention, the patient would postpone the search for a remedy until their condition might well be beyond treatment and repair (the organic disorders held to be the most awesome, because so difficult to cure, are the diseases that cause no pain in their initial stages, when they are still treatable and possibly curable). All the same, the thought of a permanently painless condition (that is, being anaesthetized and made insensitive to pain in the long term) does not strike us right away as evidently and unambiguously unwelcome, let alone threatening. The promise of being free of pain perpetually, insured against all its future appearances, is, let’s admit it, a temptation few people would be able to resist. But freedom from pain is a mixed, to say the least, blessing … It prevents discomfort, and for a short time cuts down potentially severe suffering, but it may well prove a trap, while simultaneously rendering its ‘satisfied customers’ prone to fall into traps.

The function of pain to be an alert, a warning, and a prophylactic tends to be all but forgotten, however, when the notion of ‘insensitivity’ is transferred from organic and bodily phenomena to the universe of interhuman relations, and so attached to the qualifier ‘moral’. The non-perception of early signals that something threatens to be or is already wrong with human togetherness and the viability of human community, and that if nothing is done things will get still worse, means the danger is lost from sight or played down for long enough to disable human interactions as potential factors of communal self-defence – by rendering them superficial, perfunctory, frail and fissiparous. This is, in the final account, what the process branded ‘individualization’ (epitomized in turn by the currently fashionable catch-phrase ‘I need more space’, translated as the demand to do away with the proximity and interference of others) indeed boils down to. Not necessarily ‘immoral’ in its intention, the process of individualization leads to a condition which has no need, and more importantly no place, for moral evaluation and regulation.

The relations individuals enter into with other individuals nowadays have been described as ‘pure’ – meaning ‘no strings attached’, no unconditional obligations assumed and so no predetermination, and therefore no mortgaging, of the future. The sole foundation and only reason for the relationship to continue is, it has been said, the amount of mutual satisfaction drawn from it. The advent and prevalence of ‘pure relations’ have been widely interpreted as a huge step on the road to individual ‘liberation’ (the latter having been, willy-nilly, reinterpreted as being free from the constraints which all obligations to others are bound to set on one’s own choices). What makes such an interpretation questionable, however, is the notion of ‘mutuality’, which in this case is a gross, and unfounded, exaggeration. A coincidence of both sides of a relationship being simultaneously satisfied does not necessarily create mutuality: after all, it means no more than that each of the individuals in a relationship are satisfied at the same time. What makes the relationship stop short of genuine mutuality is the sometimes consoling, but at other times haunting and harrowing, awareness that the termination of the relationship is bound to be a one-sided, unilateral decision: also a constraint on individual freedom not to be played down. The essential distinction of ‘networks’ – the name selected these days to replace the old-fashioned ideas, believed to be out-dated, of ‘community’ or ‘communion’ – is precisely this right to unilateral termination. Unlike communities, networks are individually put together and individually reshuffled or dismantled, and rely on the individual will to persist as their sole, however volatile, foundation. In a relationship, however, two individuals meet … An individual made morally ‘insensitive’ (that is, one who has been enabled and is willing to cast out of account the welfare of an-other) is, like it or not, simultaneously situated at the receiving end of the moral insensitivity of the objects of his or her own moral insensitivity. ‘Pure relations’ augur not so much a mutuality of liberation, as a mutuality of moral insensitivity. The Levinasian ‘party of two’ stops being a seedbed of morality. It turns instead into a factor of the adiaphorization (that is, exemption from the realm of moral evaluation) of the specifically liquid modern variety, complementing while also all too often supplanting the solid modern, bureaucratic variety.

The liquid modern variety of adiaphorization is cut after the pattern of the consumer–commodity relation, and its effectiveness relies on the transplantation of that pattern to interhuman relations. As consumers, we do not swear interminable loyalty to the commodity we seek and purchase in order to satisfy our needs or desires, and we continue to use its services as long as but no longer than it delivers on our expectations – or until we come across another commodity that promises to gratify the same desires more thoroughly than the one we purchased before. All consumer goods, including those described as ‘durable’, are eminently exchangeable and expendable; in consumerist – that is consumption inspired and consumption servicing – culture, the time between purchase and disposal tends to shrink to the degree to which the delights derived from the objects of consumption shift from their use to their appropriation. Longevity of use tends to be shortened and the incidents of rejection and disposal tend to become ever more frequent the faster the objects’ capacity to satisfy (and thus to remain desired) is used up. A consumerist attitude may lubricate the wheels of the economy; it sprinkles sand into the bearings of morality.

This is not, though, the sole calamity that affects morally saturated actions in a liquid modern setting. As a calculation of gains can never fully subdue and stifle the tacit yet admittedly refractory and stubbornly insubordinate pressures of moral impulse, the neglect of moral commands and disregard of responsibility evoked, in Levinas’s terms, by the Face of an-Other leaves behind a bitter aftertaste, known as ‘pangs of conscience’ or ‘moral scruples’. Here again consumerist offers come to the rescue: the sin of moral negligence can be repented and absolved with gifts supplied by shops, as the act of shopping, however selfish and self-referential its true motives and the temptations that made it happen, is represented as a moral deed. Capitalizing on the moral urges instigated by the misdemeanour it itself generated, encouraged and intensified, the consumerist culture thereby transforms every shop and service agency into a pharmacy purveying tranquillizers and anaesthetic drugs: in this case drugs intended to mitigate or altogether placate moral, rather than physical pains. As moral negligence grows in its reach and intensity, the demand for painkillers rises unstoppably and the consumption of moral tranquillizers turns into an addiction. As a result, induced and contrived moral insensitivity tends to turn into a compulsion, or ‘second nature’: into a permanent and quasi-universal condition – with moral pain being stripped in consequence of its salutary warning, alerting and activating role. With moral pain smothered before it becomes truly vexing and worrying, the web of human bonds woven of moral yarn becomes increasingly frail and fragile falling apart at the seams. With citizens trained to search for salvation from their troubles and a solution to their problems in consumer markets, politics may (or is prompted, pushed and ultimately coerced to) interpellate its subjects as consumers first and citizens a distant second; and redefine consumer zeal as citizen virtue, and consumer activity as the fulfilment of a citizen’s primary duty …

Note

1 For more on the lecture that Zygmunt Bauman gave on 1 Oct. 2010 at Vytautas Magnus University, see http://www.vdu.lt/lt/naujienos/prof-zygmuntas-baumanas-naturali-blogio-istorija-1 (accessed June 2012).

1

From the Devil to Frighteningly Normal and Sane People

Leonidas Donskis After the twentieth century, we, especially Eastern Europeans like me, are inclined to demonize the manifestations of evil. In Western Europe and North America, humanists and social scientists are inclined to analyse the anxiety of influence, whereas Eastern Europeans are preoccupied with the anxiety of destruction. Central Europe’s conception of modernity is akin to the Eastern European apocalyptical vision of modernity only in sharing the same anxiety of (physical) destruction.1 But if in Eastern Europe the dark side of modernity asserts itself as an absolutely irrational force, annihilating the fragile cover of rationality and civilization, in twentieth-century Western European literature a totally different type of modernity manifests itself – one that is rational, subjugating all to itself, anonymous, depersonalized, safely splitting man’s responsibility and rationality into separate spheres, fragmenting society into atoms, and through its hyperrationality making itself incomprehensible to any ordinary person. In short, if the apocalyptic prophet of modernity in Eastern Europe is Mikhail Bulgakov, then the latter’s equivalent in Central Europe would undoubtedly be Franz Kafka and Robert Musil.

Yet during a public lecture on the natural history of evil you gave in September 2010 at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas, Lithuania, you shed new light on the ‘demons and fiends’ of evil: you recalled the case of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem aptly described by Hannah Arendt in her provocative book.2 Everybody expected to see a senseless and pathological monster, yet they had to be discouraged and bitterly disappointed by psychiatrists hired by the court who reassured them that Eichmann was perfectly normal – the man might have made a good neighbour, a sweet and loyal husband, and a model family and community member. I believe that the hint you dropped there was extremely timely and relevant, keeping in mind our widespread propensity to explain away our traumatizing experiences by clinicalizing and demonizing anybody involved in a large-scale crime. In a way, it stands close to the point Milan Kundera makes in his Une Rencontre, writing about the protagonist of Anatole France’s novel Les Dieux ont soif: the young painter Gamelin becomes a fanatic of the French Revolution, yet he is far from a monster in situations and exchanges that are distant from the Revolution and from their founding father Jacobins. And whereas Kundera elegantly links this quality of Gamelin’s soul to le désert du sérieux or le désert sans humour (the desert of seriousness, the humourless desert), contrasting him to his neighbour Brotteaux, l’homme qui refuse de croire (a man who refuses to believe), whom Gamelin sends to the guillotine, the idea is quite clear: a decent man can harbour a monster inside him. What happens to that monster in peaceful times, and whether we can always contain him inside us, is another question.

What happens to this monster inside us during our liquid times, or dark times when we more often refuse to grant existence to the Other or to see and hear him or her, instead of offering a cannibal ideology? We tend to replace an eye-to-eye and face-to-face existential situation with an all-embracing classificatory system which consumes human lives and personalities as empirical data and evidence or statistics.

Zygmunt Bauman I wouldn’t have ascribed the phenomenon of the ‘demonization of evil’ to the peculiarities of being ‘Eastern European’ – condemned to live for a few recent centuries at the ‘limen’ separating and attaching a ‘civilizing centre’, formed by the west of Europe with the ‘modern breakthrough’, from and to a vast hinterland, viewed and experienced by juxtaposition as ‘uncivilized’ and ‘in need of civilizing’ (undeveloped, backward, lagging behind). Evil needs to be demonized as long as the origins of goodness (grace, redemption, salvation) continue to be deified, as they were in all monotheistic faiths: the figure of the ‘Devil’ stands for the irreconcilability of the presence of evil in the world as it is lived in and through, with the figure of a loving God: a benevolent and merciful father and guardian of humanity, the fount of all that is good – the fundamental premise of all monotheism. The perennial question unde malum, of where evil comes from, complete with the temptation to pinpoint, disclose and depict a source of malevolence code-named ‘Devil’, has tormented the minds of theologians, philosophers and a large part of their clientele, yearning for a meaningful and veridical Weltanschauung, for more than two millennia.

Casting all-too-visible ‘modernity’ (an eminently human product and acknowledged as a human choice, as well as a mode of thinking and acting selected and practised by humans) in the role hitherto reserved for Satan – invisible to most and seen only by a selected few – was just one of the numerous aspects and consequences or side-effects of the ‘modern project’: to take the management of world affairs under human management. Given the strictly monotheistic stance of the ‘modernity project’, inherited lock, stock and barrel from centuries of church rule, the shift boiled down to a substitution of new (profane) entities with different names for the old (sacred) entities – inside an otherwise unchanged age-old matrix. From now on, the query unde malum led to this-worldly, earthly addresses. One of them was the not yet fully civilized (purified, reformed, converted) plebeian ‘mass’ of commoners – residues of a premodern upbringing by ‘priests, old women and proverbs’ (as the Enlightenment philosophers dubbed religious instruction, family lore and communal tradition); and at the other resided the ancient tyrants, now reincarnated in the shape of modern dictators, despots deploying coercion and violence to promote peace and freedom (at least according to what they said and – possibly – to what they thought). Residents at both addresses, whether caught in action or supposed to be there yet sought in vain, were thoroughly examined, turned over, X-rayed, psychoanalyzed and medically tested, and all sorts of deformities suspected of gestating and incubating evil inclinations have been recorded. Nothing much followed, however, in a pragmatic sense. Therapies prescribed and put into operation might have removed or mitigated this or that suspect deformity, yet the question unde malum went on being asked since none of the recommended cures proved definitive and obviously there were more sources of evil than met the eye, many of them, perhaps the majority, staying stubbornly undisclosed. They were, moreover, shifting; each successive status quo seemed to possess its own specific sources of evil – and every focus on diverting and/or trying to plug and stop the sources already known, or believed to be known, brought forth a new state of affairs better insured against the notorious evils of the past but unprotected from the toxic effluvia of sources hitherto underestimated and disregarded or believed to be insignificant.

In the post-demonic chapter of the long (and still far from finished) story of the unde malum query, much attention was also devoted – aside from the ‘where from’ question but still in tune with the modern spirit – to the question of ‘how’: to the technology of evildoing. Answers suggested to that question fell roughly under two rubrics: coercion and seduction. Arguably the most extreme expression was found for the first in George Orwell’s 1984; for the second, in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Both types of answer were articulated in the West; in Orwell’s vision, however, painted as it was in direct response to the Russian communist experiment, an intimate kinship can easily be traced with Eastern European discourse, going back to Fyodor Dostoevsky and beyond – to the three centuries of schism between the Christian Church in the West and the Eastern Orthodox. It was there, after all, that distrust of and resistance to the principle of personal freedoms and individual autonomy – two of the defining attributes of ‘Western civilization’ – were at their strongest. Orwell’s vision could be seen as inspired by the Eastern rather than the Western historic experience; that vision was, after all, an anticipation of the shape of the West after it was flooded, conquered, subdued and enslaved by Eastern-type despotism; its core image was that of a soldier’s jackboot trampling a human face into the ground. Huxley’s vision, by contrast, was a pre-emptive response to the impending arrival of a consumerist society, an eminently Western creation; its major theme was also the serfdom of disempowered humans, but in this case a ‘voluntary servitude’ (a term coined three centuries earlier by, if we believe Michel de Montaigne, Étienne de la Boétie), that is using more carrot than stick and deploying temptation and seduction as its major way of proceeding, instead of violence, overt command and brutal coercion. It has to be remembered, however, that both these utopias were preceded by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, in which a blending and simultaneous as well as complementary deployment of both ‘methodologies of enslavement’, later to be elaborated separately by Orwell and Huxley, had already been envisaged.

You are so right when you draw into the forefront another motif in the seemingly everlasting and unfinishable debate of unde malum, conducted in our modern post-Devil era with the same, and growing, vigour as in the times of a scheming Devil, exorcisms, witch-hunting and pyres. It concerns the motives of evildoing, the ‘evildoer’s personality’, and most crucially in my view the mystery of monstrous deeds without monsters, and of evil deeds committed in the name of noble purposes (Albert Camus suggested that the most atrocious of human crimes were perpetrated in the name of the greater good … ). Particularly apt and timely is the way you recall, invoking Kundera, Anatole France’s genuinely prophetic vision, which can be construed retrospectively as the original matrix for all the subsequent permutations, turns and twists of explanations advanced in subsequent social-scientific debates.

It is highly unlikely that readers in the twenty-first century of Anatole France’s novel Les Dieux ont soif, originally published in 1912,3 won’t be simultaneously bewildered and enraptured. In all likelihood, they will be overwhelmed, as I have been, with admiration for an author who, as Milan Kundera would say, not only managed to ‘tear through the curtain of preinterpretations’, the ‘curtain hanging in front of the world’, in order to free ‘the great human conflicts from naïve interpretation as a struggle between good and evil, understanding them in the light of tragedy’,4 which in Kundera’s opinion is the novelist’s calling and the vocation of all novel-writing – but in addition to design and test, for the benefit of readers as yet unborn, the tools to be used to cut and tear curtains not yet woven, but ones that were bound to start being eagerly woven and hung ‘in front of the world’ well after his novel was finished, and particularly eagerly well after his death …