Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - Alone Again - Ethics After Certainty

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Contents

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Foreword

Throughout Demos’ work, a continuing theme has been that as old ideologies wane, ethics necessarily become more important. But whereas in the past we could rest our ethics on solid foundations – such as the Church, tradition or faith in a utopia – today ethics have become far less certain and far more complex.

Zygmunt Bauman has now written for us a compelling account both of why the old arguments won’t do and of how we should think about the new ethical landscape in which we live. Part of his argument concerns the changing nature of modern life: the spread of instrumental organisations, and the fragmentary and episodic character of the times. Its most notable feature, he argues, is that life has become privatised in far-reaching ways. For him privatisation is not primarily about the sale of old state industries. Instead he means a much more sweeping shift in the character of everyday lives and concerns that has made people more concerned with their own space and less willing to make commitments. Privatisation has brought many liberations. But it has eroded our capacity to think in terms of common interests and fates, contributing to the decay of an active culture of political argument and action.

Unfortunately, most of the conventional responses to this situation do not stand up to scrutiny. One is the sometimes sophisticated, sometimes naive, attempt to resurrect the community as a foundation for certainty and morality. As Bauman points out, the escape from the constraints and impositions of community has been the dominant

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Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

story of the last 200 years: reversing it is more likely to put morality into a deep freeze than to resuscitate it. Much the same is true of the attempt to make the family a home for pure morality in an unfriendly world. Meanwhile the neutralization of morality by business and bureaucracy, with their emphasis on rules rather than judgement, necessarily makes them unlikely candidates for any rebirth of ethics. Instead ours is an era in which morality rests with the individual, alone again with his or her choices, and no longer able to depend on old certainties. Whether we like it or not there are no longer any convincing external props or anchors.

Bauman’s argument suggests that rather than returning to old beliefs we need to transcend the antimonies of traditional thought: of state versus market, individual versus community, which have so distorted much of our political culture. Only then can we better understand the connection, rather than contradiction, between the health of common institutions concerned for common fates and the active engagement of millions of questioning, self-directed and often awkward individuals.

Zygmunt Bauman is one of the world’s foremost philosophers, who has written brilliantly on themes ranging from the Holocaust to mortality, post-modernity to politics. He does not offer a simple blueprint. Rather he offers a starting point for talking sense about an ethics fit for our times.

Geoff Mulgan

viii Demos

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