Liquid Fear

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745654492
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Modernity was supposed to be the period in human history when the fears that pervaded social life in the past could be left behind and human beings could at last take control of their lives and tame the uncontrolled forces of the social and natural worlds. And yet, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, we live again in a time of fear. Whether its the fear of natural disasters, the fear of environmental catastrophes or the fear of indiscriminate terrorist attacks, we live today in a state of constant anxiety about the dangers that could strike unannounced and at any moment. Fear is the name we give to our uncertainty in the face of the dangers that characterize our liquid modern age, to our ignorance of what the threat is and our incapacity to determine what can and can't be done to counter it.
This new book by Zygmunt Bauman one of the foremost social thinkers of our time is an inventory of liquid modern fears. It is also an attempt to uncover their common sources, to analyse the obstacles that pile up on the road to their discovery and to examine the ways of putting them out of action or rendering them harmless.

Through his brilliant account of the fears and anxieties that weigh on us today, Bauman alerts us to the scale of the task which we shall have to confront through most of the current century if we wish our fellow humans to emerge at its end feeling more secure and self-confident than we feel at its beginning.

1

Dread of Death

It’s 3 June 2005 today when I am sitting down to write; it would have been an ordinary day, hardly distinguishable from other days before and after, if not for one thing – it happens to be also Day Eight of the Sixth Edition of Big Brother, the very first of the long series of Eviction days. Such coincidence makes this day extraordinary: for many, this was a day of revelation, a day of liberation, or a day of absolution – depending on the side from which they look.

Revelation: what you suspected long ago, but hardly ever dared to think, and what you would have angrily denied all knowledge of if asked – now you watch on the screen, bathing in the glory of gigantic headlines splashed all over the tabloid front pages. And you do that in the company of millions of men and women like you. What you felt all along but would have been in trouble to put into words has now been spelled out for you, and for everybody else, in all its deliciously exciting and nauseatingly sinister clarity, and with an authority as irrepressible as only the stampeding millions could bestow. To cut a long story short: you now know, and know for sure, what you merely felt (suspected, guessed) before.

This how the story on the ‘official Big Brother site’ went:

As Craig prepared for what could potentially be his final night’s sleep in the Big Brother House, his thoughts were clearly on the impending eviction.

While his Housemates were divided between sleeping in the bedroom and talking in the seating area, Craig chose to sit alone in the kitchen with only himself for company.

Wearing his dressing gown, he cut a lonely figure as he sat alone in the kitchen slumped over the work surface. With his head in his hands a sad-looking Craig gazed around forlornly into space. He looked like a mere shadow of the bubbly boy who had dressed up as Britney to entertain his Housemates earlier in the evening. Obviously the idea that he could have just had his last full day in the House had got to him … After a few minutes of more aimless staring and appearing totally lost in thought he finally decided to call it a night and took himself off to bed.

Looking like a lost puppy, he was still unable to settle and sat up in bed looking into the darkness.

Poor Craig, the looming eviction has really got under his skin.

‘Impending eviction’ … ‘The last full day’ … Having ‘only himself for company’ … All that sounds so painfully familiar. Well, when you read that report, it seemed as if someone obligingly served you with a looking-glass. Or rather, if someone miraculously managed to plumb a TV camera, complete with mikes and spotlights, into the darkest corners of your mind where you’ve dreaded to visit … Didn’t you, like the rest of us, feel a Craig inside waiting to come out? Well, Craig did so, and we should all be grateful for the lesson his torments taught us. Never mind that the next day you’ll learn that Craig’s terrors were premature, and that it was Mary, not him, who got kicked out first.

‘Ladbrokes said Mary’s popularity had “plummeted” after she refused to wear a microphone,’ explains the official Big Brother website, quoting the experts who – being experts – must know best the things on which they are the experts; and the things about which the quoted experts knew best were the twists and turns of public sympathies and antipathies. It was his glib loquacity that was Craig’s original sin that threatened him with being consigned to waste, as the experts said (and as a viewer, signed ‘crash’, complained in the name of thousands of like-minded viewers: ‘He is an absolute disgrace: illiterate, insipid, fatuous, fat and stupid to boot. He adds nothing to the house. Get him out and then boot off his lapdog next’) – but obviously Mary’s refusal of public confession was found even more off-putting and condemnable than all Craig’s faults put together. And when Mary finally gave up and made herself audible, she fell into yet deeper trouble: she ‘kept criticising others’ … On Thursday, she said: ‘I want to leave. Everybody disgusts me. I’m not a wannabe. There is no intellectual conversation in here and I need it.’

So what is better? To keep your tongue, or to oblige the snoopers by spitting your inside out and laying your innermost thoughts on the table? There is evidently no good answer to that question. Heads you lose, tails they win. There is no foolproof way to stave off your eviction. Its threat won’t go away. There is little, if anything, that you can do to make sure that the blow is diverted (or even postponed). No rules, no recipes. Just keep trying – and erring. And just in case you missed Day Eight’s lesson: a mere seven days later, when on Day Fifteen it is Lesley’s lot to be evicted from the House (‘Lesley left the Big Brother House … to a tumultuous chorus of boos from the waiting crowd’), Craig’s turn comes to fulminate against the inscrutable shifts of fate: ‘It’s ridiculous,’ he sulks. ‘I can’t believe it. She has done nothing to deserve going.’

Well, the whole point is, isn’t it, that one does not need ‘to do something’ ‘to deserve’ the eviction. Eviction has nothing to do with justice. When it comes to the crowd’s choice between boos and cheers, the idea of ‘just desserts’ is neither here nor there (even if, when hunting with the hounds instead of running with the hare, you would rather deny that). You cannot be sure that the order to pack up and go is coming, and nothing you do will make it come or stop it coming.

What Reality TV reports is fate. For all you know, eviction is an unavoidable fate. Just like death, which you may try to keep at a distance for a while, but nothing you try can stop it when it finally strikes. This is how things are, and don’t ask why …

Liberation: now that you know, and also know that your knowledge is shared by millions and that it comes from a source you can trust (not for nothing was ‘audience opinion’ selected as the lifeline for those seeking truth in Who Wants to Be a Millionaire – another highly popular TV show), you can stop tormenting yourself. There was no need to feel ashamed either of your feelings, suspicions and premonitions, or of your struggle to chase them out of your mind and consign them to rot in the darkest cellars of your subconscious. Were they not given and taken in public, Big Brother’s commands, calculated to find out which of the House residents will fail first in their efforts to meet them, would be just like any other psychoanalytical session. Such sessions, after all, are meant to allow you to live happily ever after with thoughts which until yesterday seemed unendurable, and proudly parade today in what a mere few days ago would have looked like the garb of infamy. In that public psychoanalytical session called Big Brother, your cryptic premonitions have received resounding approval by no less an authority than Reality TV, and so you no longer need puzzle and torment yourself: this is indeed how the real world works. Today’s Big Brother, unlike George Orwell’s predecessor whose name he borrowed without asking, is not about keeping people in and making them stick to the line, but about kicking people out and making sure that once they are kicked out they will duly go and won’t come back …

That world, as ‘Reality TV’ has vividly shown and convincingly proved, is all about ‘who sends whom to the refuse tip’; or, rather, who’ll do it first, while there is still time to do to the others what they would dearly wish, given the chance, to do to you – and before they manage to act on their wishes. You saw Mary saying, when still carrying a microphone, about someone else who was later to vote for her eviction: ‘arrogant old man, he shouldn’t be here!’ Mary, about to be victimized, played the same game as the victimizers did, and did not play it differently; if allowed, she would not hesitate a second in joining in the hue and cry.

And, as you ought to have guessed, there is no way to repeal evictions altogether. The question is not whether, but who and when. People get being kicked out not because they are bad, but because it is in the rules of the game that someone must be evicted and because other people have proved to be more skilful in the art of out-manoeuvring others like them; that is, in outplaying other players in the game they all play, those who evict and those who are evicted alike. It is not that people keep being expelled because they are found to be unworthy of staying in the game. It is the other way round: people are declared unworthy of staying because there is a quota of evictions that needs to be met. One of the house residents must be expelled week in, week out – every week, whatever happens. These are house rules, obligatory for all house residents, however they might otherwise behave.

Big Brother is frank: there is nothing in the house rules about rewarding the virtuous and punishing the evildoers. It is all about the quota of weekly evictions that needs to be fulfilled come what may. You heard Davina McCall, the presenter, shouting: ‘The fate of Craig and Mary is in your hands!’ Meaning: there is a choice, and you are at liberty to choose your victim; you have a choice between expelling one or the other – but no choice of not expelling either or of letting both stay. So, from now on, once they have been resoundingly confirmed, feel free to follow your instincts and intuitions. You can’t go wrong voting for someone’s eviction. It’s only when hesitating and resisting playing that you take the chance of staying or being stood out of the game. And your distaste for playing the game of exclusion won’t stop the rest from blackballing you.

Finally – the absolution. A double, two-edged absolution, as a matter of fact: retrospective, and anticipatory. Indeed, old misdeeds and future craftiness are both now forgiven. The past gropings in the dark have been presently recycled into the wisdom of future rational choices. You have learned – but you’ve also been trained. With the revealed truth came useful skills, and with the liberation came the courage to put the skills into operation. For that official verdict of ‘not guilty’ you are grateful to the Big Brother producers. And it is out of that gratitude that you join the crowds glued to the screen – helping thereby to render the verdict authoritative, truly public and universally binding, and on the way raising sky-high TV ratings and profits …

Big Brother is a messy show, or at least, as the more benign critics would prefer to say, ‘multifaceted’ or ‘multi-tiered’. There is something in it for everyone, or at least for many, perhaps for most – whatever their gender, skin hue, class or school certificate. The desperate struggle of the housemates to escape eviction might draw to TV screens the lovers of filth or people anxious to know how far down and how varied are the hidden depth’s below those to which humans are commonly known to fall; it will pull in and keep enthralled the fans of bared flesh and of everything else saucy and sexy; it has quite a lot to offer to people in need of a richer vocabulary of foul language and of more object lessons in its usage. Indeed, the list of benefits is long and variegated. The devotees of Big Brother have been charged by their critics, each time with a sound reason, with any number of base motives. Occasionally some noble ones have even been imputed to them too.

And so different people may switch over to the Big Brother show for different reasons. The main message of the show seeps in surreptitiously, wrapped in too many other attractions to be immediately and unerringly spotted; it may come unexpectedly and unbargained for to many viewers seeking other diversions; it may even stay unnoticed by some. As for the critics primarily concerned with the defence of good manners (and particularly with protecting their own inalienable and indivisible right to single out good taste from vulgarity), that main message may escape totally unnoticed …

It can’t happen, though, in the case of The Weakest Link show – only thinly camouflaged as a knowledge-testing TV quiz and even more thinly as another prize-chase tournament, and offering the viewers no spiritual or carnal delights except the spectacle of human humiliation followed by eviction followed by self-immolation. Questions and answers, alas unavoidable in a show classified in the ‘quiz’ category, are proffered with a haste that betrays embarrassment and begs forgiveness: ‘I am so terribly sorry to waste precious time that ought to have been devoted to the thing that truly counts – but you know as I know that you and I must keep up appearances’; questions and answers that are regrettable, even if unavoidable, interruptions of the main plot, brief intervals separating the successive lengthy acts of the drama – for some, if not most viewers, just occasions to relax and have another sip of tea and another crisp.

The Weakest Link is the message of Big Brother undiluted – a message pressed into a pill. As far as possible, it is stripped to the bare essentials and goes straight to the heart of the matter, that is to the celebration of the eviction routine. The players, left in no doubt that this is indeed the name of the game they play, are one by one evicted not in a matter of many long weeks, but in thirty minutes. Contrary to what its official name suggests, the real purpose unravelled in the course of the show is not to discover who are the ‘weakest players’ in successive rounds, but to remind everyone that in every round someone must be declared ‘the weakest’ and to demonstrate that the turn of everyone, except the single winner, to be proclaimed the weakest will inevitably arrive since all but one are bound to be eliminated. All but one are redundant before the game starts; the game is played only to reveal who is the one exempted from the common fate.

At the start of The Weakest Link show there is a team of several players, all contributing their wins to the shared kitty. In the end, there is just one player, pocketing all the spoils. Survival is the chance of one; damnation is the destiny of all the rest. Before they themselves are voted out, all playmates will partake in the successive extradition rituals, with a satisfaction only offered by a duty diligently performed, a job well done, or a lesson firmly learned, with possible pangs of conscience quelled by the proof that the misdeeds of the evicted neighbour made their verdict a foregone conclusion. After all, an integral (perhaps the main) part of the players’ duty is to follow the voting-out ceremony with the admission of their own responsibility for defeat and a public confession of the shortcomings that invited ostracism and made the eviction both just and inevitable. The main deficiency confessed, and with monotonous regularity, is the sin of failing to outsmart the others …

Moral tales of yore were about the rewards awaiting the virtuous and the punishments prepared for the sinners. Big Brother, The Weakest Link and countless similar moral tales offered to, and avidly absorbed by the residents of our liquid modern world, hammer home other and different truths. First, punishment is the norm, reward is an exception: the winners are those who have been exempted from the universal sentence of eviction. Second, the links between virtue and sin on the one hand and rewards and punishments on the other are tenuous and haphazard. You may say: the Gospels reduced to the Book of Job …

What the moral tales of our times tell is that blows hit at random, needing no reason and commanding no explanation; that there is but the weakest (if any) link between what men and women do and what befalls them; and that there is little or nothing they can do to make sure that suffering will be avoided. ‘Moral tales’ of our times are about the iniquitous menace and the imminence of eviction, and about human near-impotence to stave off that fate.

All moral tales act through sowing fear. If, however, the fear sown by the moral tales of yore was redeeming (that fear came complete with an antidote: with a recipe for averting the fear-begetting threat, and so for a life free from fear), the ‘moral tales’ of our time tend to be unmerciful; they promise no redemption. The fears they sow are intractable and indeed ineradicable: they are here to stay – they can be suspended or forgotten (repressed) for a time, but not exorcised. For such fears no antidote has been found and none is likely to be invented. These fears penetrate and saturate the whole of life, reach every nook and cranny of body and mind and recast the life process into an uninterrupted and unfinishable ‘hide-and-seek’, ‘bo-peep, peek-a-boo’ game; a game in which a moment of inattention results in irredeemable defeat.

Those moral tales of our times are public rehearsals of death. Aldous Huxley imagined the Brave New World conditioning/inoculating children against fear of death through treating them to their favourite sweets while they were gathered around the deathbeds of their elders. Our moral tales try to inoculate us against fear of death by banalizing the sight of dying. They are the daily dress rehearsals of death dressed up as social exclusion, hoping that before it arrives in its naked form we will get used to its banality.

Irreparable … Irremediable … Irreversible … Irrevocable … Beyond recall or remedy … The point of no return … The final … The ultimate … The end of everything. There is one and only one event to which all such qualifiers can be ascribed in full and with no exception; one event that renders all the other applications of such concepts metaphorical; the event that accords them with their primal meaning – pristine, unadulterated and undiluted. That event is death.

Death is fearful because of that quality unlike any other qualities; a quality of rendering all other qualities no longer negotiable. Each event we know or know of – except death – has a past as well as a future. Each event – except death – has a promise written in indelible ink, even if in the smallest of prints, that the plot is ‘to be continued’. Death carrie...