Liquid Evil

Zygmunt Bauman, Leonidas Donskis

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781509508150
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

There is nothing new about evil; it has been with us since time immemorial. But there is something new about the kind of evil that characterizes our contemporary liquid-modern world. The evil that characterized earlier forms of solid modernity was concentrated in the hands of states claiming monopolies on the means of coercion and using the means at their disposal to pursue their ends ends that were at times horrifically brutal and barbaric. In our contemporary liquid-modern societies, by contrast, evil has become altogether more pervasive and at the same time less visible. Liquid evil hides in the seams of the canvass woven daily by the liquid-modern mode of human interaction and commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human cohabitation and in the course of its routine and day-to-day reproduction. Evil lurks in the countless black holes of a thoroughly deregulated and privatized social space in which cutthroat competition and mutual estrangement have replaced cooperation and solidarity, while forceful individualization erodes the adhesive power of inter-human bonds. In its present form evil is hard to spot, unmask and resist. It seduces us by its ordinariness and then jumps out without warning, striking seemingly at random. The result is a social world that is comparable to a minefield: we know it is full of explosives and that explosions will happen sooner or later but we have no idea when and where they will occur. In this new book, the sequel to their acclaimed work Moral Blindness Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis guide the reader through this new terrain in which evil has become both more ordinary and more insidious, threatening to strip humanity of its dreams, alternative projects and powers of dissent at the very time when they are needed most.

1
From a Person to a Nonperson?
Mapping Guilt, Adiaphora, Precariousness and Austerity

Leonidas Donskis The questions of guilt and repentance come to my mind immediately when I start thinking about this turbulent moment in our history. These questions were behind every piece of political change in the late 1980s that brought us the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR. Yet these questions, as we all know, date back to post-war Europe.

Immediately after the Second World War, Karl Jaspers wrote a landmark study, Die Schuldfrage (The Question of Guilt, 1947), in which he addressed and articulated philosophically the question of German guilt.¹ As Jaspers felt that his nation had not only sinned gravely and mortally but also committed unspeakable crimes against humanity, the question of whether the nation en masse could be blamed and held accountable for war crimes was far from decidedly detached or naïve. It was against this background that Jaspers worked out a pattern for such a philosophical debate defining four categories of guilt: criminal, political, moral and metaphysical.

These four categories of guilt were specified and analysed by Jaspers: criminal guilt covers direct involvement in crimes and violations of laws; political guilt is inherited from political leaders or institutions whose actions we endorse as citizens – or, worse, political operators and the voices of lies and organized hatred; moral guilt arises from crimes against people, from which we cannot be absolved on the grounds of our political loyalty and civic obedience; and metaphysical guilt comes from staying alive, or doing too little or nothing to save the lives of our fellow human beings, when war crimes and other felonies are committed.

Jaspers insisted that, whereas the criminal and political guilt of Germans were directly related to crimes committed or orchestrated by flesh-and-blood individuals in Nazi Germany, moral and metaphysical guilt could be avoided by the generations to come, even if only because of the fact that Germans will continue sharing their language, a collective spirit and a sense of common history. As long as people retain their attachment and commitment to their society, they will have no way out of the predicament of today's guilt for the past, other than through internalizing the traumas their parents underwent.

The sense of guilt seems to have become a watershed between the post-war European ethos and a non- or anti-European mind-set marked and permeated by blunt denial of any guilt due to one's nation's recent past. As the French philosopher Pascal Bruckner suggested in his provocative book The Tyranny of Guilt, an excess of guilt has become a characteristically European political commodity which is not necessarily linked to our genuine moral sensitivities – instead, it can be an ideological tool for silencing the opposing camp or stigmatizing the political elite we dislike.² This is especially seen in the case of Western Europe's colonial guilt, or in the case of American guilt for its racist past.

The strongest embodiment of the ethics of guilt in politics was German Chancellor Willy Brandt's moral tour de force when he knelt twice: first in the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland, and then at Yad Vashem (the World Centre for Holocaust Research, Documentation, Education and Commemoration, Israel) – a heroic and noble act of public repentance before the world for the crimes and sins of his nation. In fact, it was far from the gesture of a defeated foe, for there was no reason for Brandt to do this – the state is the state, and the individual, even if s/he happens to be its head, can hardly establish a public repentance or apology as a viable state policy.

Therefore, the state that kneels and apologizes, as in the case of Willy Brandt, violates the Hobbesian model of the modern state – the state that never admits its mistakes or regrets its faults, the state that never allows room for anything other than naked power. Power is truth, and truth is power – this is how the Hobbesian logic of power speaks. Evil is nothing but powerlessness. Whereas virtue lies solely in prowess and survival of the fittest, vice is all about weakness. International law and all norms and values are subject to change in accordance with a great power's top priorities and needs. We respect the sovereign whenever and wherever we see one, yet we despise any kind of No Man's Land (which we create, support and arm ourselves, to be able to disrupt any independent and dignified forms of life wherever they tend to appear), as human life there is nasty, brutish and short – this is the real message of the New Leviathan manufactured by Vladimir Putin's Russia.

Could we have possibly imagined the head of the former USSR issuing an apology for the heinous crimes and despicable conduct of its military, officials, the elite, and state machinery in general? Could we imagine any head of today's Russia ever offering an apology to the state whose existence they have undermined, if not ruined?

The answer is quite simple and clear – no. Germany and Russia are politically close only superficially. The pacifist society created in post-war Germany, coupled with their successful Ostpolitik in the twentieth century (which seems to have blinded the German political elite that lost its way in dealing with Putinism), poorly camouflages the fundamental difference between the two former aggressors, one of which has radically changed its paradigm in politics, while the other chose to stay the course in the ugliest way. For, whereas Germany chose to be the first truly non-Hobbesian state in the modern world, Russia has always been, and still continues to be, obsessed with how to revive and re-enact a predatory, unrepentant and profoundly immoral political world in the twenty-first century. Instead of Samuel Huntington's concept of the clash of civilizations, which underestimated the gulfs and moral abysses within Europe itself, we should try to understand the clash of two types of statehood, which is really what is at stake now. This is the clash of Thomas Hobbes and Willy Brandt in their new incarnations.

Another issue of utmost importance for our time is that of evil. This is something far more complex than the Devil in politics in terms of radical evil – we are able to tackle this sort of challenge. What lies underneath and is far more complex is what you, Zygmunt, would describe as liquid evil. I find this aspect of the problem crucial and central for the rest of our new dialogue, to be honest.

What does the Devil in politics signify? Does it make sense to switch to theology and demonology when discussing seemingly all-too-human aspects of modern life? History teaches us that it does make sense to do so. The twentieth century shows that the Devil in politics signifies the arrival of the forms of radical evil that openly devalue life, self-worth, dignity and humanity. They come to pave the way, instead, for fear, hatred and triumphing in someone else's destroyed freedom and self-fulfilment.

In his analysis of the emergence of the symbols of rebellion against / subversion of the established order, Vytautas Kavolis traced the symbolic designs of evil, understood as interpretive frameworks within which we seek answers to the questions raised by our time, in order to understand ourselves and the world around us.

Prometheus and Satan are taken here as core mythological figures and symbolic designs for revealing the concepts of evil that dominated the moral imaginations of pre-Christian and Christian thinkers and writers. Whereas Prometheus manifests himself as a trickster hero whose challenge to Zeus rests not only on his natural enmity to Olympic gods but on his compassion for humanity as well, Satan appears in the Bible as the one who subverts the universal order established by God, and, therefore, bears full responsibility for all manifestations of evil that result from this subversion.

Kavolis's work in cultural psychology provides a subtle and penetrating analysis of the models of evil as paradigms of secular morality, and of the models of rebellion as contrasting modes of cultural logic. In doing so, he offers his insights into the emergence of the myth of Prometheus and that of Satan. Prometheus emerges in Kavolis's theory of the rise of modernity as a metaphor for technological progress / technologically efficient civilization combined with a kind of sympathetic understanding of, and compassion for, the urges and sufferings of humankind. Satan is interpreted as a metaphor for the destruction of legitimate power, and for the subversion of the predominant social and moral orders.

In this way, Kavolis developed some of his most provocative and perceptive hints of how to analyse the symbolic logic of Marxism and all major social or political revolutions – aspects of which are at some points Promethean, and at others Satanic. Each modernity – for Kavolis spoke of numerous and multiple ‘modernities’, each of them as ancient as civilization itself – or civilization-shaping movement, if pushed to the limit, can betray its Promethean and/or Satanic beginnings.³

A valuable tool for literary theory and critique, this standpoint lay beneath Kavolis's insights into Herman Melville's Moby-Dick and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. With sound reason, Kavolis noted that even the title of Shelley's novel, Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, was deeply misleading – the obviously Satanic character, Frankenstein, who challenged the Creator of the universe and of the human being, was misrepresented there as a sort of modern Prometheus.

We employ, along with Prometheus and Satan, a gallery of literary personages and heroes who are the embodiments of our modern political and moral sensibilities: Don Juan, Don Quixote, Shylock, Othello or Macbeth. To these, I would add some historical persons, thinkers and writers, who came to shape our sensibilities, such as Niccolò Machiavelli, William Shakespeare or the Marquis de Sade. It is precisely within this interpretive context that Stendhal may well be credited for having deeply understood the philosophical meaning and cognitive value of the civilization-shaping characters, and their sensibilities, that are inseparable from the modern world.

Therefore, the Devil in politics is far from a fantasy. He comes into existence in many guises, one of them being the subversion and destruction of a universal – or at least a viable – social and moral order. Yet the Devil may appear as the loss of memory and sensitivity resulting in mass psychosis. Both aspects are richly represented and covered by modern Russia, the country whose writers strongly felt, and lucidly described, the touch of the radical evil whose essence lies in a deliberate rejection of human self-worth, dignity, memory and sensitivity, and our powers of association and compassion.

The Devil can strip a human being destined to become a non-person and non-entity of their memory. By losing their memory, people become incapable of any critical questioning of themselves and the world around them. By losing the powers of individuality and association, they lose their basic moral and political sensibilities. Ultimately, they lose their sensitivity to other human beings. The Devil, who safely lurks in the most destructive forms of modernity, deprives humanity of the sense of its place, home, memory and belonging.

Back when the movement for Lithuanian independence was just beginning, in the late 1980s, we encountered Georgian filmmaker Tengiz Abuladze's film Repentance and thought of it – this film about the invasion, by an almost Satanic totalitarian system, of the human soul, taking away its sensitivity and memory – as a sensation or even a miracle. The destruction of the ancient holy place in the city is synchronized with William Shakespeare's 66th sonnet, memorized by heart by the local murderer and dictator Varlam Aravidze and read by him to his future victims. It was a wonderful performance of an aria from Giuseppe Verdi's opera Il trovatore (the cabaletta Di quella pira).

After Aravidze's death, a woman appears whose family was murdered by the monster and who cannot come to terms with the idea that his remains should be peacefully returned to the land of Georgia. The film ends with the murderer's son, Abel, being convinced that something is not right and refusing ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• About This Book
• Introduction: On Liquid Evil and TINA
• 1: From a Person to a Nonperson?
• 2: From the Kafkaesque to the Orwellesque?
• 3: Where Are the Great Promises of Modernity to Be Found?
• 4: Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors?
• End User License Agreement