Moral blindness : the loss of sensitivity in liquid modernity

226 Pages·2013·0.669 MB·English

by  Bauman, Zygmunt, Donskis, Leonidas

Moral Blindness

Moral Blindness
The Loss of Sensitivity in
Liquid Modernity
Zygmunt Bauman and
Leonidas Donskis
polity
Copyright © Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis 2013
The right of Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis to be identifi ed 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
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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
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ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6274-9
ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6275-6(pb)
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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

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 fi eld’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.
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 fi nancial elite or using only hermetical
and esoteric academic texts.
He learned his theory and was most infl uenced, fi rst, by
Antonio Gramsci and later largely by Georg Simmel – not so
much by his theory of confl ict 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’s and Eduard Spranger’s (particu-
larly 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 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 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, fi nances, 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 fi nd not only the philo-
sophical 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