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Zygmunt Bauman - Born Poznan 1925. Bio.
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Bio • 1939 his family escaped eastwards into the Soviet Union. Bauman went on to serve in the Soviet-controlled Polish First Army, working as a political education instructor and taking part in the battles of Kolberg (now Kołobrzeg) and Berlin. In May 1945 he was awarded the Military Cross of Valour.
Bio • 1945-48 worked for Corps for Domestic Security (KBW), a military unit formed to combat the remnants of the Polish resistance, and for Military Intelligence. • Bauman first studied sociology and philosophy at the University of Warsaw. Sociology had temporarily been cancelled from the Polish curriculum as a "bourgeois" discipline. His teachers included Stanisław Ossowski • In the KBW Bauman rose to the rank of major until he was dishonourably discharged in 1953, after his father approached the Israeli embassy in Warsaw with a view to emigrating to Israel. As Bauman did not share his father's Zionist tendencies and was indeed strongly anti-Zionist, his dismissal caused a severe, though temporary estrangement from his father. • 1954 he became a lecturer at the University of Warsaw where he remained until 1968.
Bio • 1968 Faced with an antisemitic campaign Bauman renounced his membership in the governing Polish United Workers' Party. The antisemitic campaign culminated in a purge which drove most remaining Polish Jews out of the country, including many intellectuals. Bauman lost his chair at the University of Warsaw, had to give up Polish citizenship to be allowed to leave the country, went to Israel to teach at Tel Aviv University, before accepting a chair in sociology at the University of Leeds.
Bio • Bauman is married to writer Janina Bauman, who is a Holocaust survivor (see her Winter in the Morning: Young Girl's Life in the Warsaw Ghetto and Beyond, 1939-45 and Beyond These Walls: Escaping the Warsaw Ghetto - A Young Girl's Story.,
Modernity and the Holocaust 1990 • “the Holocaust should not simply be considered to be an event in Jewish history nor a regression to pre-modern barbarism. Rather… the Holocaust should be seen as deeply connected to modernity and its order-making efforts. Procedural rationality, the division of labour into smaller and smaller tasks, the taxonomic categorisation of different species, and the tendency to view rule-following as morally good … played their role … The Final Solution was pictured by him as an extreme example of the attempts made by societies to excise the uncomfortable and indeterminate elements existing within them… the same processes of exclusion that were at work in the Holocaust could, and to an extent do, still come into play today.” (Wikipedia!)
Sociology and the Holocaust • Bauman notes the exclusion of the study of the Holocaust from Sociology. • Even in areas where you would expect to find its presence, e.g. sociology of ‘race’ or modern state, it usually does not appear. It is a non-event, passed over in favour of other concerns.
Re-thinking modernity • This exclusion not accidental omission or incidental amnesia but symptomatic of something about contemporary sociology • Insofar as Holocaust is admitted into sociological discourse, its significance is neutered by treating it as an ‘interruption in the normal flow of history’ or ‘cancerous growth on the body of civilised society’ (p. vii). • Holocaust should not be understood as a failure of modernity, or deviation from an otherwise straight line of progress, or breakdown in otherwise successful civilising process. • His suspicion is that the Holocaust was in some sense a product of modernity and must make us re-think our notion of modernity.
Sociology • The source of sociology's exclusion of the Holocaust lies in its 'mimetic relationship with its object' (p. 29) • Sociology promotes as its own criteria of propriety the same principles of rational action as are to be found in modern society itself. In both society and sociology ethical phrases like `moral duty' and `human life' sound out of place. • This mimetic rather than critical relation between sociology and modernity is source of its inability to come to terms with the Holocaust. Sociology mimics the society it purports to understand. • The absence of the concept of moral responsibility in sociology is evident in Durkheim's identification of morality with conformity to social norms or in Weber's rationalisation of bureaucracy.
Rationality and Ethics • What is the connection between the Holocaust and modernity? • For Bauman the connection was formulated by Weber: it lies in the `rational' character of modern society and especially in the institutional expression of rationality in the state bureaucracy. • They represent for Bauman the alienation of action, organisation, rules, modes of domination, even ways of thinking, from morality and ethics. The triumph of modern rationality appears as the `demoralisation of social life'.
Normality • Holocaust as the European industrial system gone awry: `a massive scheme of social engineering' (p.8). • Connection between the `applied technology of the mass production line' and the `applied technology of the concentration camp' (p.9). • Holocaust as the organisational achievement of a bureaucratic society made possible by the `sure-footed planning and bureaucratic thoroughness' of the German civil service. • The `normality' of those who perpetrated the Holocaust: ‘most SS men would easily have passed all the psychiatric tests ordinarily given to ... Kansas City policemen' • The Holocaust accomplished `with whatever personnel were at hand' most of whom never had to pour gas into the gas chambers, but composed normal bureaucratic memoranda, drew up normal blueprints and attended conferences on how best to get the work done.
Routine bureaucratic procedure • Every ingredient of the Holocaust may be found as a `normal' part of our modern, industrial civilisation. • The rational form of bureaucratic administration was formulated by Weber in terms of efficiency • Modern forms of bureaucracy express nothing short of the release of thought and action from ethical norms or moral inhibitions. Its effect is `the silencing of morality'. • `none of the societal conditions which made Auschwitz possible has truly disappeared' (p.11); • ‘The most shattering of lessons deriving from the analysis of the "twisted road to Auschwitz" is that ... the choice of physical extermination as the right means to the task of Entfernung was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures' (p. 17). • Holocaust arose out of genuinely rational concerns and was generated by bureaucracy `true to its form and purpose' (p.17). • The civilising process is 'a process of divesting the use and deployment of violence from moral calculus' (p. 28). Speaks of ‘ethical blindness’.
Technical division of labour • Technical responsibility triumphant over moral responsibility • Each individual performs a task in a technical division of labour which results in no one being responsible for the end product or even knowing what it is. • Dehumanisation of the objects of bureaucratic operation (p. 102). Soldiers hit `targets'; employees beat `competition'; welfare officers deal with `benefit recipients'. • Distancing of victims.
Bureaucracy and the Holocaust • “Hitler's imagination ... would have accomplished little if it had not been taken over and translated into routine process of problem-solving by a huge and rational bureaucratic apparatus... The bureaucratic mode of action left its indelible impression of (sic) the Holocaust process... True, the bureaucracy did not hatch the fear of racial contamination and the obsession with racial hygiene. For that it needed visionaries... But bureaucracy made the Holocaust. And it made it in its own image.” (p. 105)
Bureaucracy • The bureaucratic form of administration that prevails in modern society has a machine-like quality in which each bureaucrat follows detailed written rules unthinkingly and without responsibility for what the machine is doing as a whole.
Science • “racism is unthinkable without the advancement of modern science, modern technology and modern forms of state power. As such racism is strictly a modern product. Modernity made racism possible. It also created the demand for racism...” (p.61) • Science allowed for the `rational' conclusion to be drawn that certain categories of people could `not be incorporated into the rational order , whatever the effort' (p.65) and that such people possess certain blemishes which `cannot be removed or rectified'. • Bauman treats phrenology and physiognomy (the art of reading character from the skull and facial features) as capturing `most fully the confidence, strategy and ambition of the new scientific age' (p. 69).
Science • Science as social engineering: `an instrument of awesome power, allowing its holder to improve on reality, to re-shape it according to human plans and designs and assist in its drive to self-perfection' (p.70). • Genocide of Jews had little to do with emotional violence or antisemitism of the mob but with appliance of science according to the designs and ambitions of a modern state. • Not exemplified by Kristallnacht but by the `rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, co-ordinated' mechanisms of modern technological rationality.” (p.98). • “In pursuit of scientific truth German scientists boarded the train drawn by the Nazi locomotive toward the brave, new, racially purified and German dominated world. Research projects grew more ambitious by the day, and research institutes grew more populous and resourceful by the hour. Little else mattered.” (p. 109)
Gardening and the spirit of modernity • Bauman portrays modernity as a 'garden culture' in which the extermination of weeds is the destructive aspect of the gardener's productive vision. • A gardener has an image of how he wants his garden to be. He wants it to be well ordered and to conform to his own dreams of beauty and serenity. He breeds certain plants to fit in with his plan. He designates other plants as weeds and poisons them. He sees the elements of nature instrumentally, in terms of how they affect him and may be affected by him, rather than as things endowed with an intrinsic value of which he is guardian. • Human beings too are stripped of intrinsic value: some defined as weeds, others selectively bred. Genocide is a kind of social weeding and Hitler and Stalin were but 'the most uninhibited expressions of the spirit of modernity'.
The victims • The same mechanism governed the behaviour of the victims: ”The Jews could... play into the hands of their oppressors, facilitate their task, bring closer their own perdition, while guided in their action by the rationally interpreted purpose of survival.” • Jewish administrators and police in the Ghettos were enticed to co-operate with the Nazis in the deportation of Jews on the ground that, however many Jews they produced, they were saving or delaying the transport of the rest. • The Nazis were able to rely on the Jews to act 'rationally' and collaborate in their own extermination: 'In [the world of Auschwitz], obedience was rational; rationality was obedience... Rational people will go quietly, meekly, joyously into a gas chamber, if only they are allowed to believe it is a bathroom....'.(p.12)
Criticism 1: the Weberian model • In Weber's conception of bureaucracy individual officials are morally responsible for their actions> Part of the power of bureaucracy is based on responsibility for decision-making and rule interpretation which is distributed throughout the hierarchy. • If the Nazi organisation of terror and extermination constituted a typical modern bureaucracy, as Bauman says, then individuals would have been expected to take moral responsibility for the tasks assigned to them and the leadership could not have relied on its employees to perpetrate murder simply as 'cogs in a machine'. • Weber recognised that the process of following a rule is always mediated through mind and consciousness and the ethos of public service is the oil that allows the machine to run.
Criticism 2: the organisation of the Holocaust • The power that conceived and executed the Holocaust was different from the Weberian model of bureaucracy. It inherited elements of bureaucratic authority but reconfigured them in a way that cannot be understood in terms of Weber's analysis of rationality. • Arendt paints a different picture. Totalitarian rule was organised on the basis of the intermeshing of various state and party institutions and the proliferation of organisations within the party. Duplication was apparent within the many police apparatuses which all did similar work, spying on the population and on each other • The only law was that of the Führerprinkip: 'Act in such a way as the Führer, if he knew your action, would approve it'. This is the opposite of clear, rational, written rules. It is not that of a structured hierarchy, for the allegiance of the official is not owed to his or her immediate superior but to the leader himself. • The perpetrators were not generally forced into the formations that implemented the Holocaust. Eichmann was keen to win promotion on his 'front line' and members of murderous police battalions (Einsatzgruppen) were given the opportunity to withdraw from the killing actions.
Criticism 3: Industrialisation of death? • the Nazis devised three strategies for the annihilation of Jews: mass shooting, mass gassing, ghettoes. • Einsatzgruppen were assigned to each of the German armies invading the Soviet Union and given the task of rounding up Jews and killing them through crude and primitive methods of shooting. These methods were the antithesis of Bauman's image of clean and dispassionate white-coated technicians introducing gas into gas-chambers. 2 million Jews were murdered in this way. • To murder the rest of European Jewry the Nazis built 'camps' with large scale gassing and sometimes crematorium facilities (Auschwitz, Belzec, Chelmo, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka). 3.5 million Jews were murdered in this way. • Half a million Jews were killed through hunger, disease and exhaustion in the ghettos or victims of random terror and reprisal. • Some elements of bureaucracy existed in Auschwitz: people were numbered, processed, placed under surveillance; there were papers, form filling, official stamps and files. But was this simulacrum rather than real thing?
Criticism 4: reason and ethics • Bauman declares: 'most scientists would be prepared in exchange [for research grants] ... to make do with the sudden disappearance of some of their colleagues with the wrong shape of nose or biographical entry'. • He says that rational individuals would play their part in gassing millions, if it meant holding on to a good job, or look the other way in affairs that were not in his job description. • But are morality and reason as opposed as declares?
Reason and ethics (the victims) • The 'rationality' of the Jewish response which looked to make an accommodation with the Nazis is contrasted with the 'irrationality' of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising. But was the choice between reason and unreason? We may prefer the heroism of the Warsaw Ghetto uprising to the conformity of the Jewish councils but in both cases Jews were faced with an impossible choice.
Reason and Ethics • Bauman’s basic proposition is that it is the dominance of ‘rational choice’ over moral response in the modern age that is the key to understanding how ordinary men and women commit such extraordinary crimes. • Conversely, the key to overcoming this potentiality is seen to lie in the development of a postmodern ethics which subordinates the imperatives of ‘rational choice’ to a reconfigured ‘moral point of view’.
Reason and Ethics • Rationality appears as an instrumental form of human decision making which arises in the modern epoch and has as its consequence the exclusion of ethical concerns. But is this so?
Is Bauman’s conception of rationality too narrow? • In Zygmunt Bauman's conception of the modern world every aspect of social life impels individuals to act in accordance with short-term, narrow, selfish interests. We do that which we find rational in terms of immediate self-interest. • This includes search for means, obedience to orders and conformity with social norms, regardless of their moral content. • We become a new type of bourgeois: not the Kantian who thinks and judges for herself, but the 'mass man' who can kill without passion or enmity, simply as a job or in service to the state, because it is an efficient means to a given end or because he is commanded so to do or because that is what everyone else is doing.
Conclusion • Two interpretations of Bauman's thesis: • weak one that 'modern civilisation was not the Holocaust's sufficient condition’ but it was ‘most certainly its necessary condition'. (p.13) • strong one that the dynamics of modernity push towards genocide. • Bauman vacillates between them. • The weak thesis reminds us that the Holocaust happened in a 'civilised' European country • The strong thesis that modernity brings us the uncoupling of human beings from moral choice and that people are made into unthinking cogs in the all-powerful structures of modernity. • Final question: is either thesis sustainable?
