Liquid Times

Living in an Age of Uncertainty

Zygmunt Bauman

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745639604
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

The passage from 'solid' to 'liquid' modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long-term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. They have to splice together an unending series of short-term projects and episodes that don't add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like 'career' and 'progress' could meaningfully be applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable – to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty.

Zygmunt Bauman's brilliant writings on liquid modernity have altered the way we think about the contemporary world. In this short book he explores the sources of the endemic uncertainty which shapes our lives today and, in so doing, he provides the reader with a brief and accessible introduction to his highly original account, developed at greater length in his previous books, of life in our liquid modern times.

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Liquid Modern Life and its Fears

‘If you wish peace, care for justice,’ averred ancient wisdom; and unlike knowledge, wisdom does not age. Absence of justice is barring the road to peace today as it did two millennia ago. This has not changed. What has changed is that ‘justice’ is now, unlike in ancient times, a planetary issue, measured and assessed by planetary comparisons – and this for two reasons.

First, on a planet criss-crossed by ‘information highways’, nothing that happens in any part of the planet can actually, or at least potentially, stay in an intellectual ‘outside’. No terra nulla, no blank spots on the mental map, no unknown, let alone unknowable lands and peoples. The human misery of distant places and remote ways of life, as well as the human profligacy of other distant places and remote ways of life, are displayed by electronic images and brought home as vividly and harrowingly, shamingly or humiliatingly, as is the distress or ostentatious prodigality of the human beings close to home during daily strolls through the town’s streets. The injustices out of which models of justice are moulded are no longer confined to immediate neighbourhoods and gleaned out of the ‘relative deprivation’ or ‘wage differentials’ by comparison with the neighbours next door, or with the mates next in the social ranking.

Second, on a planet open to the free circulation of capital and commodities, whatever happens in one place has a bearing on how people in all other places live, hope or expect to live. Nothing can be credibly assumed to stay in a material ‘outside’. Nothing is truly, or can remain for long, indifferent to anything else – untouched and untouching. No well-being of one place is innocent of the misery of another. In Milan Kundera’s succinct summary, such ‘unity of mankind’ as has been brought about by globalization means mainly that ‘there is nowhere one can escape to’.¹

As Jacques Attali pointed out in La Voie humaine,² half of world trade and more than half of global investment benefit just twenty-two countries accommodating a mere 14 per cent of the world’s population, whereas the forty-nine poorest countries inhabited by 11 per cent of the world’s population receive between them only a 0.5 per cent share of the global product – just about the same as the combined income of the three wealthiest men of the planet. Ninety per cent of the total wealth of the planet remains in the hands of just 1 per cent of the planet’s inhabitants. And there are no breakwaters in sight capable of stemming the global tide of income polarization – still ominously rising.

The pressures aimed at the piercing and dismantling of boundaries, commonly called ‘globalization’, have done their job; with few, and fast disappearing exceptions; all societies lie now fully and truly wide open, materially and intellectually. Add together both kinds of ‘openness’ – intellectual and material – and you’ll see why any injury, relative deprivation or contrived indolence anywhere comes topped up with the insult of injustice: of the feeling of wrong having been done, a wrong crying out to be repaired, but first of all obliging the victims to avenge their ills . . .

The ‘openness’ of the open society has acquired a new gloss, undreamt of by Karl Popper who coined the term. As before, it means a society frankly admitting its own incompleteness and therefore anxious to attend to its own as yet un-intuited, let alone explored, possibilities; but in addition it means a society impotent, as never before, to decide its own course with any degree of certainty, and to protect the chosen itinerary once it has been selected. Once a precious yet frail product of brave though stressful self-assertion, the attribute of ‘openness’ is mostly associated these days with an irresistible fate; with the unplanned and unanticipated side-effects of ‘negative globalization’ – that is, a selective globalization of trade and capital, surveillance and information, violence and weapons, crime and terrorism, all unanimous in their disdain of the principle of territorial sovereignty and their lack of respect for any state boundary. A society that is ‘open’ is a society exposed to the blows of ‘fate’.

If the idea of an ‘open society’ originally stood for the self-determination of a free society cherishing its openness, it now brings to most minds the terrifying experience of a heteronomous, hapless and vulnerable population confronted with, and possibly overwhelmed by forces it neither controls nor fully understands; a population horrified by its own undefendability and obsessed with the tightness of its frontiers and the security of the individuals living inside them – while it is precisely that impermeability of its borders and security of life inside those borders that elude its grasp and seem bound to remain elusive as long as the planet is subjected to solely negative globalization. On a negatively globalized planet, security cannot be obtained, let alone assured, within just one country or in a selected group of countries: not by their own means alone, and not independently of what happens in the rest of the world.

Neither can justice, that preliminary condition of lasting peace, be so attained, let alone guaranteed. The perverted ‘openness’ of societies enforced by negative globalization is itself the prime cause of injustice and so, obliquely, of conflict and violence. As Arundhati Roy puts it, ‘when the elite, somewhere at the top of the world, pursue their travels to imagined destinations, the poor stay caught in a spiral of crime and chaos.’³ The actions of the United States government, says Roy, together with its various satellites barely disguised as ‘international institutions’, like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, have brought about, as their ‘dangerous side-products’, ‘nationalism, religious fanaticism, fascism and, of course, terrorism – which advance hand in hand with the progress of liberal globalization’.

‘Markets without frontiers’ is a recipe for injustice, and for the new world disorder in which the famed formula of Clausewitz has been reversed so that it is the turn of politics to become a continuation of war by other means. Deregulation, resulting in planetary lawlessness, and armed violence feed each other, mutually reinforce and reinvigorate one another; as another ancient wisdom warns, inter arma silent leges (when arms speak, laws keep silent).

Before sending troops to Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld declared that the ‘war will be won when Americans feel secure again’.⁴ That message has been repeated ever since – day in, day out – by George W. Bush. But sending troops to Iraq lifted and continues to lift the fear of insecurity, in the United States and elsewhere, to new heights.

As might have been expected, the feeling of security was not the sole collateral casualty of war. Personal freedoms and democracy soon shared its lot. To quote Alexander Hamilton’s prophetic warning,

The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant on a state of continual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights. To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free.⁵

That prophecy is now coming true.

Once visited upon the human world, fear acquires its own momentum and developmental logic and needs little attention and hardly any additional investment to grow and spread – unstoppably. In David L. Altheide’s words, it is not fear of danger that is most critical, but rather what this fear can expand into, what it can become.⁶ Social life changes when people live behind walls, hire guards, drive armoured vehicles, carry mace and handguns, and take martial arts classes. The problem is that these activities reaffirm and help produce the sense of disorder that our actions are aimed at preventing.

Fears prompt us to take defensive action. When it is taken, defensive action gives immediacy and tangibility to fear. It is our responses that recast the sombre premonitions as daily reality, making the word flesh. Fear has now settled inside, saturating our daily routines; it hardly needs further stimuli from outside, since the actions it prompts day in, day out supply all the motivation and all the energy it needs to reproduce itself. Among the mechanisms vying to approximate to the dream model of perpetuum mobile, the self-reproduction of the tangle of fear and fear-inspired actions comes closest to claiming pride of place.

It looks as if our fears have become self-perpetuating and self-reinforcing; as if they have acquired a momentum of their own – and can go on growing by drawing exclusively on their own resources. That ostensible self-sufficiency is of course only an illusion, just as it was in the case of numerous other mechanisms claiming the miracle of self-propelling and self-nourishing perpetual motion. Obviously, the cycle of fear and of actions dictated by fear would not roll on so smoothly and go on gathering speed were it not continuing to draw its energy from existential tremors.

The presence of such tremors is not exactly news; existential quakes have accompanied humans through the whole of their history, because none of the social settings within which human life pursuits have been conducted have ever offered foolproof insurance against the blows of ‘fate’ (so called in order to set blows of such a kind apart from the adversities human beings could avert, and to convey not so much the peculiar nature of these blows as such, as the recognition of humans’ inability to predict them, let alone to prevent or tame them). By definition, ‘fate’ strikes without warning and is indifferent to what its victims might do or might abstain from doing in order to escape its blows. ‘Fate’ stands for human ignorance and helplessness, and owes its awesome, frightening power to those very weaknesses of its victims. And, as the editors of the Hedgehog Review wrote in their introduction to the special issue dedicated to fear, ‘in the absence of existential comfort’ people tend to settle ‘for safety, or the pretence of safety’.⁷

The ground on which our life prospects are presumed to rest is admittedly shaky – as are our jobs and the companies that offer them, our partners and networks of friends, the standing we enjoy in wider society and the self-esteem and self-confidence that come with it. ‘Progress’, once the most extreme manifestation of radical optimism and a promise of universally shared and lasting happiness, has moved all the way to the opposite, dystopian and fatalistic pole of anticipation: it now stands for the threat of a relentless and inescapable change that instead of auguring peace and respite portends nothing but continuous crisis and strain and forbids a moment of rest. Progress has turned into a sort of endless and uninterrupted game of musical chairs in which a moment of inattention results in irreversible defeat and irrevocable exclusion. Instead of great expectations and sweet dreams, ‘progress’ evokes an insomnia full of nightmares of ‘being left behind’ – of missing the train, or falling out of the window of a fast accelerating vehicle.

Unable to slow the mind-boggling pace of change, let alone to predict and control its direction, we focus on things we can, or believe we can, or are assured that we can influence: we try to calculate and minimize the risk that we personally, or those nearest and dearest to us at that moment, might fall victim to the uncounted and uncountable dangers which the opaque world and its uncertain future are suspected to hold in store for us. We are engrossed in spying out ‘the seven signs of cancer’ or ‘the five symptoms of depression’, or in exorcising the spectre of high blood pressure, a high cholesterol level, stress or obesity. In other words, we seek substitute targets on which to unload the surplus existential fear that has been barred from its natural outlets, and we find such makeshift targets in taking elaborate precautions against inhaling someone else’s cigarette smoke, ingesting fatty food or ‘bad’ bacteria (while avidly swilling the liquids which promise to contain the ‘good’ ones), exposure to sun, or unprotected sex. Those of us who can afford it fortify ourselves against all visible and invisible, present or anticipated, known or as yet unfamiliar, diffuse but ubiquitous dangers through locking ourselves behind walls, stuffing the approaches to our living quarters with TV cameras, hiring armed guards, driving armoured vehicles (like the notorious SUVs), wearing armoured clothing (like ‘big-soled shoes’) or taking martial arts classes. ‘The problem’, to quote David L. Altheide once more, ‘is that these activities reaffirm and help produce a sense of disorder that our actions precipitate.’ Each extra lock on the entry door in response to successive rumours of foreign-looking criminals in cloaks full of daggers and each next revision of the diet in response to a successive ‘food panic’ makes the world look more treacherous and fearsome, and prompts more defensive actions – that will, alas, add more vigour to the self-propagating capacity of fear.

A lot of commercial capital can be garnered from insecurity and fear; and it is. ‘Advertisers’, comments Stephen Graham, ‘have been deliberately exploiting widespread fears of catastrophic terrorism, to further increase sales of highly profitable SUVs.’⁸ The gas-guzzling military monsters grossly misnamed ‘sport utility vehicles’ that have already reached 45 per cent of all car sales in the US are being enrolled into urban daily life as ‘defensive capsules’. The SUV is

a signifier of safety that, like the gated communities into which they so often drive, is portrayed in advertisements as being immune to the risky and unpredictable urban life outside . . . Such vehicles seem to assuage the fear that the urban middle classes feel when moving – or queuing in traffic – in their ‘homeland’ city.

Like liquid cash ready for any kind of investment, the capital of fear can be turned to any kind of profit, commercial or political. And it is. And so it is personal safety that has become a major, perhaps even the major selling point in all sorts of marketing strategies. ‘Law and order’, increasingly reduced to the promise of personal (more to the point, bodily) safety, has become a major, perhaps the major selling point in political manifestos and electoral campaigns; while the display of threats to personal safety has become a major, perhaps the major asset in the ratings war of the mass media, constantly replenishing the capital of fear and adding still more to the success of both its marketing and political uses. As Ray Surette puts it, the world as seen on TV resembles ‘citizen-sheep’ being protected from ‘wolves-criminals’ by ‘sheep dogs – police’.⁹

The most seminal distinction of the present-day avatars of the fears that were otherwise familiar in all previously lived varieties of human existence is perhaps the decoupling of fear-inspired actions from the existential tremors that generate the fear which inspired them. In other words: the displacement of fear – from the cracks and fissures in the human condition where ‘fate’ is hatched and incubated, to areas of life largely unconnected to the genuine source of anxiety. No amount of effort invested in those areas is likely to neutralize or block the source, and so it proves impotent to placate the anxiety, however earnest and ingenious that effort might be. It is for this reason that the vicious circle of fear and fear-inspired actions rolls on, losing none of its impetus – yet coming no nearer to its ostensible objective.

Let us state explicitly what has been implied before: the vicious circle in question has been displaced/shifted from the area of security (that is, of self-confidence and self-assurance, or their absence) to that of safety (that is, of being sheltered from, or exposed to, threats to one’s own person and its extensions).

The first area, progressively stripped of institutionalized, state-endorsed and state-supported protection, has been exposed to the vagaries of the market; it has been turned by the same token into a playground of global forces beyond the reach of political control, and so also beyond the ability of the affected to respond adequately, let alone to effectively resist the blows. Communally endorsed insurance policies against individual misfortunes, which in the course of the last century came to be known collectively under the name of the social (‘welfare’) state, are now being wholly or partly withdrawn and cut back below the threshold at which their level is capable of validating and sustaining the sentiment of security, and so also the actors’ self-confidence. Whatever remains of the extant institutions embodying the original promise moreover no longer offers the hope, let alone the trust, that it will survive further, and imminent, rounds of reductions.

With the state-built and state-serviced defences against existential tremors progressively dismantled, and the arrangements for collective self-defence, such as trade unions and other instruments for collective bargaining, increasingly disempowered by the pressures of market competition that erode the solidarities of the weak – it is now left to individuals to seek, find and practise individual solutions to socially produced troubles, and to try all that through individual, solitary actions, while being equipped with tools and resources that are blatantly inadequate to the task.

The messages addressed from the sites of political power to the resourceful and the hapless alike present ‘more flexibility’ as the sole cure for an already unbearable insecurity – and so paint the prospect of yet more uncertainty, yet more privatization of troubles, yet more loneliness and impotence, and indeed more uncertainty still. They preclude the possibility of existential security which rests on collective foundations and so offer no inducement to solidary actions; instead, they encourage their listeners to focus on their individual survival in the style of ‘everyone for himself, and the devil take the hindmost’ – in an incurably fragmented and atomized, and so increasingly uncertain and unpredictable world.

The retreat of the state from the function on which its claims to legitimation were founded for the better part of the past century throws the issue of legitimation wide open again. A new citizenship consensus (‘constitutional patriotism’, to deploy Jürgen Habermas’s term) cannot be presently built in the way it used to be built not so long ago: through the assurance of constitutional protection against the vagaries of t...