Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - Alone Again - Ethics After Certainty

Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

Recent years have been marked by a slow yet relentless dismantling or weakening of agencies which used to institutionalize the commonality of fate, and their replacement with institutions expressing and promoting the diversity of fate. The intended or unintended effect of the process is to re-cast the community (and communal action in general) from being the source of individual security into the individual’s burden and bane; an extra load to carry, adding little to the individual’s personal well-being, yet something one cannot, regrettably, easily shake off though one would dearly like to. Increasingly, we confront the community’s common needs and causes solely in the capacity of taxpayers; it is no more the question of our shared responsibility for, and collective insurance against, everyone’s mishap and misfortune – but the question of how much it will cost me to provide for those who cannot provide for themselves. Their claims testify to the fact that they are spongers, though my demands to pay less into the kitty most emphatically do not. It is only natural that the taxpayer wants to pay fewer taxes (just as the beast of burden wants the burden to be smaller). The outcome is, of course, that the quality of services collectively provided slides down a steep slope. And then everyone who can afford the price of a barrel buys one and jumps into it. When possible, we buy ourselves individually out of the under-provided shabby schools, overcrowded, under-nourished hospitals or miserly old-age pensions – as we have already bought ourselves, with the consequences which most of us belatedly bewail, out of shrinking and wilting public transport systems. The more we do so, the more reasons we have for doing it, as the schools grow shabbier, hospital queues longer, and old-age provisions more miserly still; and the fewer reasons we see to make sacrifices for the sake of those who failed to follow suit.Were Marie Antoinette miraculously transported into the present, she would probably say: ‘they complain that the common boat has got rusty and unseaworthy? Why do they not buy barrels?’

There is a point somewhere down the slope, now perhaps passed, at which people find it very hard to conceive of any benefit they could derive from joining forces: of any improvement which could come from managing a part of their resources jointly, rather than individually. (For many years now the burden of taxation, though showing no signs of

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The Privatisation of Common Fates

lessening, has been shifted steadily from taxing income to taxing consumption. The trend is widely applauded and welcomed. Many people seem to enjoy the brief interlude of freedom between cashing a cheque and signing another one). The weaker and less reliable are the guarantees of individual security communally offered, the less justified and more burdensome seem the communal claims for joint effort and sacrifice. It is now more often than not a‘your value for my money’situation.And as the numbers of those who give money overtake the numbers of those deprived of value, the fate of the spongers is sealed. Their claims and grievances have every chance of being voted off the agenda democratically, by the majority of the beneficiaries of our universal right to vote.

But neglect of the less fortunate is not the only result. It can only come, as it does, together with the general fading and demise of the community spirit. If politics (things that are discussed and decided in the agora, where all those interested may congregate and speak) is about things of common interest and significance, who needs politics when interests and meanings keep steering apart? Interest in politics always had its ups and downs, but now we seem to be witnessing a totally new incarnation of electoral apathy. Today’s disenchantment seems to reach deeper than the traditional frustration with unkept promises or programmes without vision. It hits politics as such. It shows that the majority of the electors can no longer see why they should be bothered because so little seems to depend on what ‘they’ say or even do out there.

The ‘citizens’ charters’, one of the few recent attempts to find a new connection between citizens and their shared services, confirm the trend. Their remarkable characteristic is that they construe citizens not as people eager to assume responsibility for issues larger than their private needs and desires, but as consumers of services provided by agencies they have little right and no interest to examine, let alone supervise. Citizens’ charters promote that image of the citizen by defining citizen rights as first and foremost, perhaps even solely, the right of the customer to be satisfied. This includes the right to complain and to compensation. This does not include, conspicuously, the right to look into the inner workings of the agencies complained about and expected to pay the compensation – much less the right to tell them what to do.

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Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

There is a sort of a vicious circle. An increasingly privatised life feeds disinterest in politics. And politics, freed from constraints, deepens the extent of privatisation, thus breeding more indifference. Or perhaps this is a case of a gordian knot so twisted that one can no more say where the string of determinations starts and where it leads to. The chances, therefore, that moral responsibilities eroded at the grassroots level will be resuscitated by a moral vision promoted by the eroded institutions of the common wealth, are slim. The odds against are enormous.

Few if any grievances or hopes are nowadays addressed to the government of the country – not with much realistic expectation that they will be acted on, anyway. Even grievances and hopes have generally been redefined as private concerns. In this country, the tendency has been exacerbated by the far-reaching weakening of many of the ‘middle-range’ institutions particularly in local government. So much power has been taken away from the town halls, so little depends on what they do, so toothless have trade unions become, that a reasonable person seeking redress or improvement would rather look elsewhere. All in all, the new spirit is sceptical about the possible uses and benefits of acting together and joining forces, and is resigned to the idea that whatever you want to achieve, you had better look to your own cunning and ingenuity as the principal resources. Lady Thatcher might have committed a grave factual error when she said that there is no such thing as ‘society’; but she certainly allowed no mistake as to the objectives her legislative efforts pursued. What the ill-famed proposition reported were the speaker’s intentions, and the subsequent years went far towards making the word flesh.

But do we not act in solidarity – at least on occasion? Time and again we hear of people gathering or defend a cause they seem to consider to be shared by them all. Without that ‘sharing of feelings’, there would be no public meetings, marches or collecting of signatures. True enough. And yet more often than not common actions do not live long enough to create new institutions that can command the stable loyalty of their participants. Like other events, they briefly burst into attention and fade away to give room for other preoccupations. They are on the whole ‘single issue’ actions, gathering around one demand people of

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The Privatisation of Common Fates

varied persuasions, who often make very strange bedfellows and who have little else in common. Only rarely do such single issues manifest or enhance the sentiment of moral responsibility for common welfare. Much more often they mobilize sentiments against, not for: against a bypass or a rail link, against a Romany camp or travellers’ convoy, against a dumping ground for toxic waste. Sometimes it seems that their main goal is not to make the shared world better and more habitable, but rather to redistribute its less prepossessing aspects: dumping the awkward and unpleasant parts of it in the neighbours’ backyard. They divide more than they unite. Obliquely, they promote the idea that different people have different moral entitlements, and that the rights of some entail the right to deny rights some others.

A privatised existence has its many joys: freedom of choice, the opportunity to try many ways of life, the chance to make oneself to the measure of one’s self-image. But it has its sorrows as well – loneliness and incurable uncertainly as to the choices made and still to be made being foremost among them. It is not an easy matter to build one’s own identity relying on one’s own guesses and hunches alone. And there is little reassurance to be drawn from the self-made identity if it has not been recognized and confirmed by a power stronger and longer-lasting than the solitary builder. Identity must be seen as such; the dividing line between a socially accepted and an individually imagined identity is one between self-assertion and madness. This is why we all feel time and again an overwhelming ‘need of belonging’ – a need to identify ourselves not just as individual human beings, but as members of a larger entity. That identification-through-membership is hoped to provide a firm foundation on which to erect a smaller and feebler personal identity. As some of the old, once solid, entities underwriting and endorsing individual identities lie in ruins, while others are fast losing their holding power, there is a demand for new ones, able to pronounce authoritative and binding judgments.

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The Deficiencies of

Community

We are being told repeatedly by many on both left and right that the community is the most likely candidate to fill the gap. Yet modernity spent most of it; time and a lot of it energy on fighting communities – those larger than life groupings into which people are born, only to be held inside them for the rest of their lives by the dead hand of tradition strengthened by collective surveillance and blackmail. From the Enlightenment on, it has been seen as a commonsensical truth that human emancipation, the releasing of genuine human potential, required that the bounds of communities should be broken and individuals set free from the circumstances of their birth. We seem to have come full circle now. The idea of community has been recovered from the cold storage where modernity bent on boundless humanity confined it, and restored to a genuine or imaginary past glory. It is on the community that many hopes bereaved by bankrupt or discredited institutions now focus. What had been once rejected as a constraint is now hailed as the ‘enabling capacity’. What was once seen as an obstacle on the road to full humanity, is now praised as its necessary condition. Humanity, we are told, comes in many forms and shapes, and thanks to communities, traditions and cultures, the inherited forms of life are here to see to it that this is the case.

Social thought was always keen to repeat the stories told or merely thought of by the power-holders, and to disguise their intentions and ambitions as descriptions of social reality, of its laws or its ‘historical

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