Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - Alone Again - Ethics After Certainty
Fragmentation and Discontinuity
is recycling. Or again: if the favourite building material of modernity was steel and concrete, today it is rather the bio-degradable plastic.
With what consequences for morality? Quite obviously, enormous. As the greatest ethical philosopher of our century, Emmanuel Levinas, puts it morality means being-for (not merely being-aside or even beingwith) the Other. To take a moral stance means to assume responsibility for the Other; to act on the assumption that the well-being of the Other is a precious thing calling for my effort to preserve and enhance it, that whatever I do or do not do affects it, that if I have not done it, it might not have been done at all, and that even if others do or can do it this does not cancel my responsibility for doing it myself… And this beingfor is unconditional (that is, if it is to be moral, not merely contractual) – it does not depend on what the Other is, or does, whether s/he deserves my care or repays in kind. One cannot conceive of an argument that could justify the renouncing of moral responsibility – putting it in cold storage, lending or pawning. And one cannot imagine a point at which one could say with any sort of moral right: ‘I have done my share, and here my responsibility ends.’
If this is what morality is about, it certainly does not square well with the discontinuous, fragmentary, episodic, consequences avoiding life. Ours is the age of what Anthony Giddens perceptively described as ‘pure relationship’ which ‘is entered for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person’ and so ‘it can be terminated, more or less at will, by either partner at any particular point’; of ‘confluent love’ which jars with the ‘for-ever, one-and-only’ qualities of the romantic love complex so that ‘romance can no longer be equated with permanence’, of ‘plastic sexuality’, that is sexual enjoyment ‘severed from its age-old integration with reproduction, kinship and the generations’.We can see that to keep the options open, to be free to move is the guiding principle of all three. ‘I need more space’is the curt yet common excuse used by all those who do move away – meaning‘I do not wish others to intrude, such others as I wished yesterday to intrude; I wish to be concerned solely with myself, with what is good and desirable for me’. Whoever seeks more space, must be careful not to commit themselves, and particularly not to allow commitments to outlast the pleasure which can be derived from them.
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Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty
They must therefore cleanse acts of possible consequences, and if consequences do follow, then – and in advance – refuse all responsibility for them.
The life of modern man was frequently likened to the pilgrimage- through-time. The itinerary of pilgrims is drawn in advance by the destination they want to reach (which in the case of modern man’s life is the ideal image of a vocation, an identity) – and everything they do is calculated to bring them closer to the goal. The pilgrim is consistent in choosing every successive step, conscious that each step matters and the sequence cannot be reversed. Today’s men and women can hardly treat their life as a pilgrimage, even if they wished to. One can plan one’s life as a journey-to-a-destination only in a world in which one can sensibly hope that its chart will remain the same or little changed throughout the lifetime – and this is blatantly not the case today. Instead, the life of the men and women of our times is more like that of the tourists- through-time: they cannot and would not decide in advance what places they would visit and what the sequence of stations would be; what they know for sure is that they will keep on the move, never sure whether the place they reach is their final destination. Whoever knows that, is unlikely to strike deep roots anywhere and develop too strong an attachment to the locals. What they are likely to do is to treat each place as a temporary stay, significant only through the satisfactions one derives from it; but one must be ready to move again, whenever satisfaction diminishes or whenever greener pastures beckon elsewhere.
In other words, the‘I need space’ strategy militates against any moral stance. It denies the moral significance of even the most intimate interhuman action. As a result, it exempts core elements of human interrelationships from moral evaluation. It neutralizes the parts of human existence which the neutralizing mechanisms of bureaucracy and business could not (or did not need, or wish to) reach…
As in the case of the older forms of neutralizing moral evaluations and of the flotation of responsibility, this is not a situation that can be rectified by moral preachers (not by the preachers acting alone at any rate). Its roots lie deep in the life-context of contemporary men and women; it represents, one may say, a kind of ‘rational adaptation’ to the
16 Demos
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Fragmentation and Discontinuity
new conditions in which life is lived. These conditions favour some strategies while making other strategies terribly difficult to follow. The odds against taking a moral stance and sticking to it through thick and thin are formidable – all the socially generated pressures sap the emotional bonds between people, favouring free-floating agents. Nothing short of changing the odds will regain for morality the areas now ‘emancipated from moral constraints’.
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The Privatisation of
Common Fates
Michael Schluter and David Lee, two shrewd observers of the moral plight of contemporary men and women, caustically commented on the way we tend to live today:
We wear privacy like a pressure suit. Given half the chance we’ll stuff the seat next to ours in a café with raincoats and umbrellas, stare unremittingly at posters about measles in a doctor’s waiting room… Anything but invite encounter; anything but get involved… (T)he home itself has grown lean and mean, wider families being broken up into nuclear and single-parent units where the individual’s desires and interests characteristically take precedence over those of the group. Unable to stop treading on each other’s toes in the mega-community, we have stepped into our separate houses and closed the door, and then stepped into our separate rooms and closed the door. The home becomes a multipurpose leisure centre where household members can live, as it were, separately side by side. Not just the gas industry but life in general has been privatised.
Separately side by side. Privatised. Sharing space, but not thoughts or sentiments – and acutely aware that in all probability we no longer
18 Demos
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The Privatisation of Common Fates
share fates either. This awareness does not necessarily breed resentment or hatred, but it certainly propagates aloofness and indifference. ‘I do not want to get involved’ is what we say more often than not to silence inchoate emotions and nip in the bud the shoots of a deeper, intimate human relationship of the ‘for richer for poorer, till death us do part’ kind. Ever more ingenious locks, bolts and burglar alarms are one of the few growth industries – not just for their genuine or putative practical uses, but for their symbolic value. Inwardly, they mark the boundary of the hermitage where we won’t be disturbed, while outwardly they communicate our decision:‘for all I care, outside could be a wasteland’.
We have explored some of the causes of this deepening aloofness and indifference. Not all, though. The ‘privatisation of life in general’ has long tentacles and reaches far and wide. Privatised life, like any other life, is never an unremitting bliss. It has its measure of suffering, discontent and grievance. In a privatised life, however, misfortune is as private as everything else. The misfortunes of privatised singles do not add up, each one pointing as it seems in a different direction and each calling for different remedies. In the privatised society of ours, grievances seem to point in widely divergent directions and even clash with each other; they seldom cumulate and condense into a common cause. In a shifting, drifting world, what possible benefit may an individual derive from joining forces with another piece of flotsam?
The distinguished German-English sociologist Norbert Elias pondered on the lessons one might draw from Edgar Allan Poe’s famous story of the three seamen caught in the maelstrom. In the story, two of the seamen died – not so much sucked in by the raging sea, as pushed down by their own paralysis born of despair and fear – while the third, having cast an alert eye around and noticed that round objects tend to float rather than being drawn into the whirl, promptly jumped into a barrel and survived. Well, since the times of Diogenes, barrels have been notorious symbols of the ultimate withdrawal from the world, the ultimate individual retreat. Norbert Elias intended his commentary as a consolation: look, even in the midst of storm reason will point the way out… But note that the message reason whispers in this particular storm is: each one of you, look for a barrel to hide in.
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