Theorizing the Dark Side of Modernity

Theorizing the Dark Side of Modernity

Introductory Essay: Your Smart Phone Might Be an Evil Genius Let’s face it—smartphones are cool. With today’s mobile technologies, you no longer have to be satisfied with just making phone calls or sending text messages (how 2001!), you can also download and listen to music from your favorite bands, go online to purchase a new e-book, or download the exact GPS coordinates of that new coffee shop you keep hearing about. Your phone can even help you bargain shop these days, with platforms like ShopSavvy and PriceGrabber that allow you to scan barcodes to compare prices at nearby competitors and online retailers. While mobile technologies such as these may be the wave of the future, their allure is based on what seem like ageless human desires for greater choice, convenience, freedom, and individuality. And, in many ways, our technologically advanced world fits the bill (at least for those of us who can afford to pay for it). In the digital age, we can simultaneously download the entire Jay-Z discography, track down an espresso, and find the most affordable pair of stonewashed skinny jeans in town. How’s that for multitasking? But there’s a catch, one even more ironic than those skinny jeans you’re looking for. It turns out that while you’re using your phone to watch out for music, books, directions, and clothes, your phone is also watching you. A recent investigation by the Wall Street Journal found that 56 of the 101 most popular smartphone applications transmitted some form of their users’ personal information—the phone user’s age, gender, name, contacts, phone ID number, username and password, and even GPS coordinates of the user’s physical location—to other companies. Pandora, one of the most popular free music apps on the market, for example, sent information about users’ locations, demographic data, and phone IDs to eight separate companies. The point of all this data mining, critics point out, is for marketers to compile ever-more detailed information on the buying habits of consumers, transforming even their morning walks into sellable commodities. Karl Marx rolls in his grave. Want to read the full Wall Street Journal investigation? Go to the Supplementary Sources section of the website for more information. While these spy-phones may just be the latest in a long line of scandals concerning privacy in our wired world, the social theorists in this section would likely see them as another instance of a much more general and disturbing contradiction that has haunted modern societies since the age of the Enlightenment. With each new freedom the modern world offers up, these theorists argue, comes a new kind of control; with each new promise of emancipation, an insidious form of domination. As the thinkers in the following pages will demonstrate, modernity’s road to reason could just as well be a pathway to meltdown. The Enlightenment, so it seems, has its dark side.

Modernity and the Holocaust Zygmunt Bauman

‘WOULDN’T YOU BE HAPPIER IF I HAD been able to show you that all the perpetrators were crazy?’ asks the great historian of the Holocaust, Raul Hilberg. Yet this is precisely what he is unable to show. The truth he does show brings no comfort. It is unlikely to make anybody happy. ‘They were educated men of their time. That is the crux of the question whenever we ponder the meaning of Western Civilization after Auschwitz. Our evolution has outpaced our understanding; we can no longer assume that we have a full grasp of the workings of our social institutions, bureaucratic structures, or technology.’1 This is certainly bad news for philosophers, sociologists, theologians and all the other learned men and women who are professionally concerned with understanding and explaining. Hilberg’s conclusions mean that they have not done their job well; they cannot explain what has happened and why, and they cannot help us to understand it. This charge is bad enough as far as the scientists go (it is bound to make the scholars restless, and may even send them, as they say, back to the drawing board), but in itself it is not a cause for public alarm. There have been, after all, many other important events in the past that we feel we do not fully understand. Sometimes this makes us angry; most of the time, however, we do not feel particularly perturbed. After all – so we console ourselves – these past events are matters of academic interest. But are they? It is not the Holocaust which we find difficult to grasp in all its monstrosity. It is our Western Civilization which the occurrence of the Holocaust has made all but incomprehensible – and this at a time when we thought we had come to terms with it and seen through its innermost drives and even through its prospects, and at a time of its world-wide, unprecedented cultural expansion. If Hilberg is right, and our most crucial social institutions elude our mental and practical grasp, then it is not just the professional academics who ought to be worried. True, the Holocaust occurred almost half a century ago. True, its immediate results are fast receding into the past. The generation that experienced it at first hand has almost died out. But – and this is an awesome, sinister ‘but’ – these once-familiar features of our civilization, which the Holocaust had made mysterious again, are still very much part of our life. They have not gone away. Neither has, therefore, the possibility of the Holocaust. We shrug off such a possibility. We pooh-pooh the few obsessed people riled by our balance of mind. We have a special, derisive name for them – ‘prophets of doom’. It comes easy to dismiss their anguished warnings. Are we not vigilant already? Do we not condemn violence, immorality, cruelty? Do we not muster all our ingenuity and considerable, constantly growing resources to fight them? And besides, is there anything at all in our life that points to the sheer possibility of a catastrophe? Life is getting better and more comfortable. On the whole, our institutions seem to cope. Against the enemy, we are well protected, and our friends surely won’t do anything nasty. Granted, we hear from time to time of atrocities that some not particularly civilized, and for this reason spiritually far-away people, visit upon their equally barbaric neighbours. Ewe massacre a million Ibos, having first called them vermin, criminals, money-grabbers and subhumans without culture;2 Iraqis poison-gas their Kurdish citizens without even bothering to call them names; Tamils massacre Singhalese; Ethiopians exterminate Eritreans; Ugandans exterminate themselves (or was it the other way round?). It is all sad, of course, but what can it possibly have to do with us? If it proves anything at all, it certainly proves how bad it is to be unlike us, and how good it is to be safe and sound behind the shield of our superior civilization. Just how untoward our complacency may prove in the end becomes apparent once we recall that still in 1941 the Holocaust was not expected; that, given the extant knowledge of the ‘facts of the case’, it was not expectable; and that, when it finally came to pass one year later, it met with universal incredulity. People refused to believe the facts they stared at. Not that they were obtuse or ill-willed. It was just that nothing they had known before had prepared them to believe. For all they had known and believed, the mass murder for which they did not even have a name yet was, purely and simply, unimaginable. In 1988, it is unimaginable again. In 1988, however, we know what we did not know in 1941; that also the unimaginable ought to be imagined. THE PROBLEM There are two reasons for which the Holocaust, unlike many other topics of academic study, cannot be seen as a matter of solely academic interest; and for which the problem of the Holocaust cannot be reduced to the subject-matter of historical research and philosophical contemplation. The first reason is that the Holocaust, even if it is plausible that, ‘as a central historical event – not unlike the French Revolution, the discovery of America, or the discovery of the wheel – it has changed the course of subsequent history,’3 has most certainly changed little, if anything, in the course of the subsequent history of our collective consciousness and self-understanding. It made little visible impact on our image of the meaning and historical tendency of modern civilization. It left the social sciences in general, and sociology in particular, virtually unmoved and intact, except for the still marginal regions of specialist research, and some dark and ominous warnings of the morbid proclivities of modernity. Both exceptions are consistently kept at a distance from the canon of sociological practice. For these reasons, our understanding of the factors and mechanisms that once made the Holocaust possible has not significantly advanced. And with the understanding not much improved over that of half a century ago, we could be once more unprepared to notice and decode the warning signs – were they now, as they had been then, blatantly displayed all around. The second reason is that whatever happened to the ‘course of history’, nothing much happened to those products of history which in all probability contained the potentiality of the Holocaust – or at least we cannot be sure that it did. For all we know (or, rather, for all we do not know) they may still be with us, waiting for their chance. We can only suspect that the conditions that once before gave birth to the Holocaust have not been radically transformed. If there was something in our social order which made the Holocaust possible in 1941, we cannot be sure that it has been eliminated since then. A growing number of renowned and respected scholars warns us that we had better not be complacent: The ideology and system which gave rise to [Auschwitz] remains intact. This means that the nation-state itself is out of control and capable of triggering acts of social cannibalism on an undreamed-of scale. If not checked, it can consume an entire civilization in fire. It cannot carry a humanitarian mission; its trespasses cannot be checked by legal and moral codes, it has no conscience. (Henry L. Feingold)4 Many features of contemporary ‘civilized’ society encourage the easy resort to genocidal holocausts … The sovereign territorial state claims, as an integral part of its sovereignty, the right to commit genocide, or engage in genocidal massacres, against people under its rule, and … the UN, for all practical purposes, defends this right. (Leo Kuper)5 Within certain limits set by political and military power considerations, the modern state may do anything it wishes to those under its control. There is no moral-ethical limit which the state cannot transcend if it wishes to do so, because there is no moral-ethical power higher than the state. In matters of ethics and morality, the situation of the individual in the modern state is in principle roughly equivalent to the situation of the prisoner in Auschwitz: either act in accord with the prevailing standards of conduct enforced by those in authority, or risk whatever consequences they may wish to impose … Existence now is more and more recognizably in accord with the principles that governed life and death in Auschwitz. (George M. Kren and Leon Rappoport)6 Overwhelmed by the emotions which even a perfunctory reading of the Holocaust records cannot but arouse, some of the quoted authors are prone to exaggerate. Some of their statements sound incredible – and certainly unduly alarmist. They may be even counterproductive; if everything we know is like Auschwitz, then one can live with Auschwitz, and in many a case live reasonably well. If the principles that ruled over life and death of Auschwitz inmates were like these that rule our own, then what has all this outcry and lamentation been about? Truly, one would be well advised to avoid the temptation to deploy the inhuman imagery of the Holocaust in the service of a partisan stance towards larger or smaller, but on the whole, routine and daily human conflicts. Mass destruction was the extreme form of antagonism and oppression, yet not all cases of oppression, communal hatred and injustice are ‘like’ the Holocaust. Overt, and hence superficial similarity is a poor guide to causal analysis. Contrary to what Kren and Rappoport suggest, having to choose between conformity and bearing the consequences of disobedience does not necessarily mean living in Auschwitz, and the principles preached and practised by most contemporary states do not suffice to make their citizens into Holocaust victims. The real cause for concern, one that cannot be easily argued away, nor dismissed as a natural yet misleading outcome of post-Holocaust trauma, lies elsewhere. It can be gleaned from two related facts. First, ideational processes that by their own inner logic may lead to genocidal projects, and the technical resources that permit implementation of such projects, not only have been proved fully compatible with modern civilization, but have been conditioned, created and supplied by it. The Holocaust did not just, mysteriously, avoid clash with the social norms and institutions of modernity. It was these norms and institutions that made the Holocaust feasible. Without modern civilization and its most central essential achievements, there would be no Holocaust. Second, all those intricate networks of checks and balances, barriers and hurdles which the civilizing process has erected and which, as we hope and trust, would defend us from violence and constrain all over ambitious and unscrupulous powers, have been proven ineffective. When it came to mass murder, the victims found themselves alone. Not only had they been fooled by an apparently peaceful and humane, legalistic and orderly society – their sense of security became a most powerful factor of their downfall. To put it bluntly, there are reasons to be worried because we know now that we live in a type of society that made the Holocaust possible, and that contained nothing which could stop the Holocaust from happening. For these reasons alone it is necessary to study the lessons of the Holocaust. Much more is involved in such a study than the tribute to the memory of murdered millions, settling the account with the murderers and healing the still-festering moral wounds of the passive and silent witnesses. Obviously, the study itself, even a most diligent study, is not a sufficient guarantee against the return of mass murderers and numb bystanders. Yet without such a study, we would not even know how likely or improbable such a return may be. GENOCIDE EXTRAORDINARY Mass murder is not a modern invention. History is fraught with communal and sectarian enmities, always mutually damaging and potentially destructive, often erupting into overt violence, sometimes leading to massacre, and in some cases resulting in extermination of whole populations and cultures. On the face of it, this fact denies the uniqueness of the Holocaust. In particular, it seems to deny the intimate link between the Holocaust and modernity, the ‘elective affinity’ between the Holocaust and modern civilization. It suggests instead that murderous communal hatred has always been with us and will probably never go away; and that the only significance of modernity in this respect is that, contrary to its promise and to the widespread expectations, it did not file smooth the admittedly rough edges of human coexistence and thus has not put a definite end to man’s inhumanity to man. Modernity has not delivered on its promise. Modernity has failed. But modernity bears no responsibility for the episode of the Holocaust – as genocide accompanied human history from the start. This is not, however, the lesson contained in the experience of the Holocaust. No doubt the Holocaust was another episode in the long series of attempted mass murders and the not much shorter series of accomplished ones. It also bore features that it did not share with any of the past cases of genocide. It is these features which deserve special attention. They had a distinct modern flavour. Their presence suggests that modernity contributed to the Holocaust more directly than through its own weakness and ineptitude. It suggests that the role of modern civilization in the incidence and the perpetration of the Holocaust was active, not passive. It suggests that the Holocaust was as much a product, as it was a failure, of modern civilization. Like everything else done in the modern – rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, co-ordinated – way, the Holocaust left behind and put to shame all its alleged pre-modern equivalents, exposing them as primitive, wasteful and ineffective by comparison. Like everything else in our modern society, the Holocaust was an accomplishment in every respect superior, if measured by the standards that this society has preached and institutionalized.