Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - Alone Again - Ethics After Certainty

Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

needs; knowing too much of them may – who knows? – lead to a personal, emotional relationship, which will inevitably confuse and cloud judgement. Like the esprit de corps of corporative bureaucracy, the spirit of business militates against sentiments, the moral sentiments most prominent among them. It cannot be easily squared with the sense of responsibility for the welfare and well-being of those who may find themselves affected by the business pursuit of greatest effects. In business language, ‘rationalization’ means more often than not laying off people who used to derive their livelihood from serving business tasks before. They are now‘redundant’, because a more effective way to use the assets has been found – and their past services do not count for much. Each business transaction, to be truly rational, must start from scratch, forgetting past merits and debts of gratitude. Business rationality shirks responsibility for its own consequences, and this is another mortal blow to the influence of moral considerations. The horrors of inner cities, mean streets, once thriving and now dying communities orphaned by business ventures which used to keep them alive, but now – for the soundest and most rational of reasons – moved to greener pastures, are not victims of exploitation, but of abandonment resulting from moral indifference.

Bureaucracy strangles or criminalises moral impulses, while business merely pushes them aside. Horrified by the totalitarian tendencies ingrained in every bureaucracy, Orwell sounded an alarm against the prospect of ‘the boot eternally trampling a human face’. An apt metaphor for the business variety of morality-bashing would be perhaps‘the blinkers eternally preventing the human face from being seen’. The short-term consequences for people exposed to one or the other of the two strategies may be starkly different, yet the long-term results are quite similar: taking moral issues off the agenda, sapping the moral autonomy of the acting subject, undermining the principle of moral responsibility for the effects, however distant and indirect, of one’s deeds. Neither modern organization nor modern business promotes morality; if anything, they make the life of a stubbornly moral person tough and unrewarding.

Reflecting on the perpetrators’ inability not just to admit, but to comprehend their responsibility for the Holocaust crimes (these people

10 Demos

This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved.

Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess

The Rise of Reason: Bureaucracy and Business

were following orders… There was that task to be fulfilled, that job to be done… They could not let their mates down…), Hannah Arendt, a most acute interrogator of the ethical accomplishments and neglects of the modern era, demanded that ‘human beings be capable of telling right from wrong even if all they have to guide them is their own judgement, which, moreover, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of all around them…’

However nebulous such a demand may seem in a world dominated by bureaucracy and business,Arendt saw in it the last hope of morality, and in all probability the only realistic, however tenuous, strategy to recover for morality the ground from which it has been exiled. In the effort to meet that demand, she wrote,‘there are no rules to abide by … as there are no rules for the unprecedented’. In other words, no one else but the moral person themselves must take responsibility for their own moral responsibility.

Demos 11

This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved.

Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess

Fragmentation and

Discontinuity

The story so far has not been just about the distant past. The bureaucratic spirit of large corporations and ‘business ethics’ remain very much salient marks of our times and any obituaries to moral dangers they portend would be premature. They are no longer, however, the sole sources of the twin processes of ‘moral neutralization’ and ‘flotation of responsibility’ – both of which are still going strong, though taking somewhat new forms. There are quite a few new elements in the emerging human situation, which in all probability carry far-reaching moral consequences.

These new elements stem from the overall tendency to dismantle, deregulate and dissipate the once solid and relatively lasting frames in which the concerns and efforts of most individuals were inscribed. Jobs, once seen as ‘for life’, are more often that not now temporary and may disappear virtually without notice, together with the factories or offices or bank branches which offered them. Even the skills which the jobs required are ageing fast, turning overnight from assets into liabilities. Being prudent and provident, thinking of the future, becomes ever more difficult, as there is little sense in accumulating skills for which tomorrow there may be no demand, or saving money which tomorrow may lose much of its purchasing power. At the moment young men and women enter the game of life, none can tell what the rules of the game will be like in the future. Their only certainty is that the rules will change many times over before the game is finished.

12 Demos

This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved.

Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess

Fragmentation and Discontinuity

The world, in other words, seems less solid than it used to be (or than we thought it to be). It has lost its apparent unity and continuity – when various aspects of life could be tied together into a meaningful whole, and what happened today could be traced back to its roots and forward to its consequences. What most of us learn from our experience now, is that all forms in the world around us, however solid they may seem, are not immune to change; that things burst into attention without warning and then disappear or sink into oblivion without trace; that what is all the rage today becomes the butt of ridicule tomorrow; that what is vaunted and recommended and hammered home today is treated with disdain tomorrow (if it’s still remembered); that, on the whole, time is cut into episodes – each with a beginning and an end but without pre-history or future; that there is little or no logical connection between the episodes, even their succession looking suspiciously as if purely coincidental, contingent and random; and that since they come from nowhere, episodes go by and away without leaving lasting consequences. In other words, the world we live in (and help to bring about through our life pursuits) appears to be marked by fragmentation, discontinuity, and inconsequentiality.

In such a world, it is wise and prudent not to make long-term plans or invest into the distant future (one can never guess what the attractiveness of the present seductive goals or the value of today’s assets will then be); not to get tied down too firmly to any particular place, group of people, cause, even an image of oneself, because one might find oneself not just un-anchored and drifting but without an anchor altogether; to be guided in today’s choices not by the wish to control the future, but by the reluctance to mortgage it. In other words, ‘to be provident’ means now more often than not to avoid commitment. To be free to move when opportunity knocks. To be free to leave when it stops knocking.

Today’s culture reiterates what each of us learns, joyfully or grudgingly, from our own experience. It presents the world as a collection of fragments and episodes, with one image chasing away and replacing the one before, only to be replaced itself moments later. Celebrities emerge and vanish daily, and only very few leave footprints. Problems commanding attention are born by the hour and slip away as soon as

Demos 13

This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved.

Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess

Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

they are born – together with the popular concern they gave birth to. Attention has become the scarcest of resources. In the words of George Steiner, our culture has turned into a sort of ‘cosmic casino’, where everything is calculated ‘for maximal impact and instant obsolescence’; maximal impact, since the constantly shocked imagination has become blasé, needing ever more powerful shocks to spur it, each one more shattering than the last; and instant obsolescence, since attention has limited capacity and room must be made to absorb new celebrities, fashions, foibles, or ‘problems’.

Marshall McLuhan is remembered for coining the phrase ‘the medium is the message’ – meaning that whatever is the content of the message, the qualities of the media which conveyed it are themselves a message (though hidden and surreptitious), and as a rule more seminal than the content of the overt communication. One may say that if the medium which was the message of modern times was photographic paper, its equivalent for the new times is video-tape. Photographic paper can be used once only – there is no second chance. But when used, it retains the trace for a long time to come – in practical terms, forever. Think of the family album, filled with yellowing portraits of grandand great-grandfathers and mothers, innumerable aunts and uncles, all with a name attached, all counting and to be reckoned with, all adding their stones to the castle of the slowly accumulating family tradition, in which no part can be taken away or eradicated, in which everything is, for better or worse, forever… And think now of the video-tape, made in such a way as to be erased, and re-used, and re-used again: to record whatever may seem interesting or amusing at the moment,but to keep it no longer than the interest lasts – after all, it is bound to wane. If the photographic paper oozed the message that deeds and things matter, tend to last and have consequences, that they tend to tie together and affect each other – the video-tape exudes the message that all things exist by themselves and count only until further notice, that each episode starts from scratch, and whatever its consequences may be erased without trace, leaving the tape virgin-clean. Or, to use a different metaphor for the difference between the two ‘spirit of the time’ messages, one may say that if the catchword of modern times was creation, the catchword of our times

14 Demos

This page is covered by the Demos open access licence. Some rights reserved.

Full details of licence conditions are available at www.demos.co.uk/openaccess