Moral Blindness

The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity

Zygmunt Bauman, Leonidas Donskis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780745669625
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

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 …

At the moment when Anatole France put aside his pen and took one last look at the finished novel, words like ‘bolshevism’, ‘fascism’, or indeed ‘totalitarianism’ were not listed in dictionaries, French ones or any others; and names like Stalin or Hitler did not appear in any of the history books. Anatole France’s sight was focused, as you say, on Évariste Gamelin, a juvenile beginner in the world of the fine arts, a youngster of great talent and promise, and a still greater ability to disgust Watteau, Boucher, Fragonard and other dictators of popular taste – whose ‘bad taste, bad drawings, bad designs’, ‘complete absence of clear style and clear line’, ‘complete unawareness of nature and truth’, and fondness for ‘masks, dolls, fripperies, childish nonsense’ he explained by their readiness to ‘work for tyrants and slaves’. Gamelin was sure that ‘a hundred years hence all Watteau’s paintings will have rotted away in attics’ and predicted that ‘by 1893 art students will be covering the canvases of Boucher with their own rough sketches’. The French Republic, still a tender, unsound and frail child of the Revolution, would grow to cut off, one after another, the many heads of the hydra of tyranny and slavery, including this one. There was no mercy for the conspirators against the Republic, as there was neither liberty for the enemies of liberty, nor tolerance for the enemies of tolerance. To the doubts voiced by his incredulous mother, Gamelin would respond without hesitation: ‘We must put our trust in Robespierre; he is incorruptible. Above all, we must trust in Marat. He is the one who really loves the people, who realizes their true interests and serves them. He was always the first to unmask the traitors and frustrate plots.’ In one of his authorial interventions, few and far between, France explains and brands the thoughts and deeds of his hero and his hero’s likes as the ‘serene fanaticism’ of the ‘little men, who had demolished the throne itself and turned upside down the old order of things’. In his recording of his own path from the youth of a Romanian fascist to the adulthood of a French philosopher, Émile Cioran summed up the lot of youngsters in the era of Robespierre and Marat, and Stalin and Hitler alike: ‘Bad luck is their lot. It is they who voice the doctrine of intolerance and it is they who put that doctrine into practice. It is they who are thirsty – for blood, tumult, barbarity.’⁵ Well, all the youngsters? And only the youngsters? And only in the eras of Robespierre or Stalin? All three suppositions sound obviously wrong.

How safe and comfortable, cosy and friendly the world would feel if it were monsters and only monsters who perpetrated monstrous deeds. Against monsters we are fairly well protected, and so we can rest assured that we are insured against the evil deeds that monsters are capable of and threaten to perpetrate. We have psychologists to spot psychopaths and sociopaths, we have sociologists to tell us where they are likely to propagate and congregate, we have judges to condemn them to confinement and isolation, and police or psychiatrists to make sure they stay there. Alas, good, ordinary, likeable American lads and lasses were neither monsters nor perverts. Had they not been assigned to lord over the inmates of Abu Ghraib, we would never have known (or as much as surmised, guessed, imagined, fantasized) about the horrifying things they were capable of contriving. It wouldn’t have occurred to any of us that the smiling girl at the counter, once on an overseas assignment, might excel at devising ever more clever and fanciful, as well as wicked and perverse tricks – to harass, molest, torture and humiliate her wards. In their hometowns, their neighbours refuse to believe to this very day that those charming lads and lasses they have known since their childhood are the same folks as the monsters in the snapshots of the Abu Ghraib torture chambers. But they are.

In the conclusion of his psychological study of Chip Frederick, the suspected leader and guide of the torturers’ pack, Philip Zimbardo had to say that

there is absolutely nothing in his record that I was able to uncover that would predict that Chip Frederick would engage in any form of abusive, sadistic behaviour. On the contrary, there is much in his record to suggest that had he not been forced to work and live in such an abnormal situation, he might have been the military’s All-American poster soldier on its recruitment ads.

Sharply and uncompromisingly opposing the reduction of social phenomena to the level of the individual psyche, Hannah Arendt observed that the true genius among the Nazi seducers was Himmler, who – neither descending from the bohème as Goebbels did, nor being a sexual pervert like Streicher, an adventurer like Goering, a fanatic like Hitler or a madman like Alfred Rosenberg – ‘organized the masses into a system of total domination’, thanks to his (correct!) assumption that in their decisive majority men are not vampires or sadists, but job holders and family providers.⁶ Reading The Kindly Ones, published by Jonathan Littell in 2009, one can unpack a covert critique of the common interpretation, endorsed by Arendt herself, of the ‘banality of evil’ thesis: namely, the supposition that the evildoer Eichmann was an ‘unthinking man’. From Littell’s portrait, Eichmann emerges as anything but an unthinking follower of orders or a slave to his own base passions. ‘He was certainly not the enemy of mankind described in Nuremberg’, ‘nor was he an incarnation of banal evil’; he was, on the contrary, ‘a very talented bureaucrat, extremely competent at his functions, with a certain stature and a considerable sense of personal initiative’.⁷ As a manager, Eichmann would most certainly be the pride of any reputable European firm (one could add, including the companies with Jewish owners or top executives). Littell’s narrator, Dr Aue, insists that in the many personal encounters he had with Eichmann he never noticed any trace of a personal prejudice, let alone a passionate hatred of the Jews, whom he saw as no more, though no less either, than the objects his office demanded to be duly processed. Whether at home or in his job, Eichmann was consistently the same person. The kind of person he was, for instance, when together with his SS mates he performed two Brahms quartets: ‘Eichmann played calmly, methodically, his eyes riveted to the score; he didn’t make any mistakes.’⁸

LD From William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe onwards, that is to say, from these two brilliant men of letters who depicted Niccolò Machiavelli as an embodiment of evil, the Devil in politics has assumed a number of interpretations some of which are surprisingly close to what we take as important traits of modernity. For example, a total abolition of privacy leading to manipulation of people’s secrets and abuses of their intimacy, which appears as a nightmarish vision of the future in such dystopias as Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We and George Orwell’s 1984, was foreseen, anticipated and wittily depicted in early modern European literature.

Suffice it to recall Luis Vélez de Guevara’s El Diablo cojuelo, a seventeenth-century text where the Devil has the power to reveal the insides of the houses, or a variation of this theme in Alain-René Le Sage’s novel Le Diable boiteux. What early modern writers took as a devilish force aimed at depriving human beings of their privacy and secrets has now become inseparable from the reality shows and other actions of wilful and joyful self-exposure in our self-revealing age. The interplay of religion, politics and literary imagination, this notion of the Devil is manifest behind modern European art: for instance, recall Asmodea from The Book of Tobias, a female version of the Devil, depicted in Francisco de Goya’s painting Asmodea.

In your Liquid Modernity you analyse the loss of privacy in our liquid times. In Liquid Surveillance, written together with David Lyon, you clearly distinguish between the early anticipati...