Материал: Bauman Zygmunt - Alone Again - Ethics After Certainty

The Deficiencies of Community

tendencies’. During the age of the modern cultural crusades launched against regional, local or ethnic self-management, self-congratulating obituaries of communities filled social-scientific treatises. But powers eager to present their own particularity as human universality are today thin in the field, and there is naturally not much point in narrating their by now faded dreams. The new powers that took their place do not speak the language of universality. On the contrary, they appeal to what distinguishes one human collectively from another. To gain more grip on their own territories and without hope or urge to encroach on the territories of the others, they are ready to admit that the plurality of human forms is here to stay: no more a regrettable yet temporary flaw, but a permanent feature of human existence. And social thought, promptly and obligingly, changes the tune.

The argument about the supremacy of supposedly ‘natural’ community in the life of the individual runs as follows: each one of us is born into a certain tradition and language, which decides what to see before we begin to look, what to say before we learn to speak, what to consider important before we start weighing things against each other, and how to conduct ourselves before we start pondering the choices. Thus in order to know what we are, to understand ourselves, we must fathom and consciously embrace that tradition; and in order to be ourselves, to keep our identity intact and waterproof, we must support that tradition with all our heart. In fact, we owe it our complete loyalty; and we ought to offer its demands an unquestionable priority whenever loyalty calls in that society of multiple loyalties clash.

The argument, as it were, reverses the true order of things. Traditions do not‘exist’by themselves and independently of what we think and do; they are daily re-invented by our dedication, our selective memory and selective seeing, our way of behaving ‘as if’ they defined our conduct. The communities are postulated; and the meaning of their being ‘real’ is that many people, in unison, follow that postulate. The call to give the ‘community of belonging’our prime and undivided loyalty, the demand to consider ourselves the community member first, and all the rest later, is precisely the way to make community a ‘reality’, to split the larger society into little enclaves which eye each other with suspicion and

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Alone Again: Ethics After Certainty

keep at a distance from each other. And because these communities, unlike modern nations well entrenched in the coercive and educational institutions of the nation-state, do not have many legs to stand on except our individual loyalties, they require an unusually intense emotional dedication and shrill, vociferous and spectacular declarations of faith; and they sniff in the half-hearted, lukewarm and undecided fringes the most mortal of dangers.

So there is another contradiction between the ‘community narrative’ and the true state of affairs it narrates. The siren-song of community is all about the warmth of togetherness, mutual understanding and love; such a relief from the cold, harsh and lonely life of competition and continuous uncertainty. Community advertises itself as the cosy home amidst a hostile and dangerous city; it draws profusely, overtly or obliquely, on the very contemporary image of the sharp divide between the fortified and electronically protected homestead and the street full of knife-carrying strangers, the wasteland subjected to a chary ‘neighbourhood watch’. Community seduces its proselytes with the promise of freedom from fear and the tranquillity of chez soi. But again, the reality is all too often the opposite. Given the endemic brittleness of foundations, community can ill afford anything but full and militant dedication to the cause; its self-appointed guardians are day and night on the look-out, searching for real or putative traitors, turncoats or just the half-hearted and irresolute. Independence is frowned upon, dissent hounded down, disloyalty persecuted. Pressure to keep the intended flock in the fold is unrelenting; the craved-for cosiness of belonging is offered at the price of unfreedom.

The overall effect of all this is yet another case of the by now familiar tendency to expropriate the individual’s moral responsibility. It is now the community, or rather the self-proclaimed wardens of its purity, who draw the boundaries of moral obligations, divide good from evil, and for better or worse dictate the definition of moral conduct. The paramount concern of their moral legislation is to keep the division between ‘us’ and ‘them’ watertight; not so much to promote moral standards, as to install double standards (as the French say, deux poids, deux mésures) – one for‘us’, another reserved for the treatment of ‘them’. True,

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The Deficiencies of Community

unlike the depersonalised world of privatised individuals, the postulation of community neither promotes moral indifference nor suffers it lightly. But it does not cultivate moral selves either. It replaces the torments of moral responsibility with the certainty of discipline and submission. And the disciplined selves are in no way guaranteed to be moral. While the submissive selves can be easily deployed – and are deployed – in the service of the cruel, mindless inhumanity of the endless (and hopeless) inter-communal wars of attrition and boundary skirmishes.

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Risk and Limits

We have come a long way in our search for the sources of moral hope, but remain, so far, empty-handed. Our only gain is that we have learnt where such sources are unlikely to be found. Bureaucracy and business were never famous as shrines of ethics and schools of morality. But nor can much be expected from the entities meant to compensate for the harm they have done to the moral backbone of human selves. Back to the family? Processes of privatisation reach deep into the heart of family life. And even making parents unpaid policemen, as those who propose fining parents for their children’s misbehaviour want, would hardly stem the tide. Back into the community fold? Here, moral responsibilities are more likely to be put into deep freeze than resuscitated. More than two centuries after the Enlightenment promise to legislate for an ethical and humane society, we are left, each of us, with our own individual conscience and sentiment of responsibility as the only resource with which to struggle to make life more moral than it is.And yet we find this resource depleted and squeezed.

This is not just the matter of concern for moral philosophers and preachers. However worried they may be, there is every reason for their worry to be widely shared. The dilemma we confront now has been expressed poignantly by the great German/American ethical philosopher, Hans Jonas: ‘The very same movement which put us in possession of the powers that have now to be regulated by norms… has by a necessary complementarity eroded the foundations from

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Risk and Limits

which norms could be derived… Now we shiver in the nakedness of nihilism in which near-omnipotence is paired with near-emptiness, greatest capacity with knowing least what for’.

Indeed, the stakes are enormous. One of the most influential books published in the last decade was Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society. Beck’s message is that our society is becoming increasingly a risk-producing, risk-monitoring and risk-managing society. We do not so much move ‘forward’, as clear the mess and seek exit from the havoc perpetrated by the things we did yesterday. The risks are our own products, though unexpected and often impossible to predict or calculate. This is because whatever we do, we concentrate on the task at hand (this ability of close-focusing is in fact the secret of the astonishing achievements of science and technology), while the changes we introduce in the balance of nature and society in order to perform that task reverberate far and wide; their distant effects hit back as new dangers, new problems, and thus new tasks. What makes this already depressing plight near catastrophic, though, is that the scale of the changes we inadvertently provoke is so massive, that the line beyond which the risks become totally unmanageable and damages irreparable may be crossed at any moment. We are beginning now to attempt to calculate the dangers of climatic change caused by pollution, or of the depletion of soil and water supplies caused by ever more specialised fertilisers and insecticides. But we cannot easily count the dangers involved in releasing into nature artificially created viruses (each one, to be sure, with its specific, invariably praise-worthy, uses) or ever more rarified genetical engineering of the human species, aimed ultimately at introducing bespoketailor shops for human offspring? Besides, although very often we know the risks only too well, there is little we can do with our knowledge since the forces that push us deeper and deeper into increasingly risky territory are overwhelming. Think for instance of the relentless saturation of the conflict-ridden world with ever more refined and ever less resistible weapons, or of adding each year hundreds of thousands of new vehicles to the blight of congested roads and virtually stand-still traffic we all, at the moments of reflection, bemoan. Experience suggests that there is little ground to console ourselves that the same skills

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