Moral Blindness F Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBPR.indd 1 8/1/2012 9:02:49 AM F Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBPR.indd 2 8/1/2012 9:02:49 AM Moral Blindness The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis polity F Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBPR.indd 3 8/1/2012 9:02:49 AM 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 Polity Press 65 Bridge Street Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK Polity Press 350 Main Street Malden, MA 02148, USA All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6274-9 ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6275-6(pb) A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Typeset in 11 on 13 pt Sabon by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Group Limited, Bodmin, Cornwall The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate. Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition. For further information on Polity, visit our website: www.politybooks.com F Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBPR.indd 4 8/1/2012 9:02:49 AM Contents Introduction: Towards a Theory of Human Secrecy and Unfathomability, or Exposing Elusive Forms of Evil 1 1. From the Devil to Frighteningly Normal and Sane People 17 2. The Crisis of Politics and the Search for a Language of Sensitivity 50 3. Between Fear and Indifference: The Loss of Sensitivity 94 4. Consuming University: The New Sense of Meaninglessness and the Loss of Criteria 131 5. Rethinking The Decline of the West 168 Index 219 F Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBPR.indd 5 8/1/2012 9:02:49 AM BDBPR.indd 6 8/1/2012 9:02:49 AM 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 criti- cism – 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 motivation 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. F Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBIN.indd 1 8/1/2012 9:02:48 AM 2 Introduction 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 methodo- logical 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 com- mercials, 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 phi- losophy of life of the Germans – again, not so much Friedrich Nietzsche’s as Ludwig Klages’ 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 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 Leb- ensform (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 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 philo- sophical and sociological ideas of Gramsci and Simmel but also the ethical insights of his beloved philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, F born and raised in Kaunas and also, according to Bauman, the Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBIN.indd 2 8/1/2012 9:02:48 AM Introduction 3 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 expla- nation 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 envi- ronment, 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 asym- metry 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 won- dering: 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 F Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness Bauman_&_Donskis–Moral Blindness BDBIN.indd 3 8/1/2012 9:02:48 AM 4 Introduction boundless consuming, using, knowing, and aggressively indoctri- nating that we get back in the guise of an alleged dialogue.