|
|
It was Herbert Marcuse who
propounded the thesis that the modern man has reconciled to
the unfreedom under the spell of new affluence. There has been
"embourgeoisement" of the underdog. Humanity seems
to have suffered a collective brain damage caused by the
culture industry. All hope of totality, future as well as
past, has been abandoned, bringing out the end of "human
being as a social animal". There is no hope of salvation.
No re-rooting of the uprooted is possible and the unfulfilled
task of liberation is no more on the agenda. Society has
stopped questioning itself. If at all there is any critique,
it is directionless.
Humanity
which entered the 21st century is afflicted with a double
curse. First is the end of illusion of a just and
conflict-free society and, second, the deregulation and
privatisation of the modernising tasks and duties. It is an
age of the assertion of the individual. This explains the
shift in the political discourse from a "just
society" to "human rights". "No more
salvation by society", affirms Peter Drucker, an apostle
of the new business spirit."There is no such thing as
society," declared Margret Thatcher, the champion of
individual enterprise.
Solidarity
and brotherhood are outdated. Everyone has to work out his own
salvation. Survival in one’s loneliness is the paramount
task. This has put the "citizen" in direct conflict
with the "individual". While the citizen worked for
his uplift through the welfare of the city, the individual is
sceptical, rather derisive, of the "common cause" or
"just society", "Networking" is the sole
preoccupation of the individual, leading to what Ulrich Beck
has called. "solitary confinement of the ego".There
is a wide gap between the condition of individuals de jure and
their possibility of becoming individuals de facto. One can
realise one’s true potential by bridging this gap. This is
not possible through individual efforts alone.
Bauman is
emphatic that politics with a capital P is the only remedy. An
individual must first become a citizen, as there can be no
autonomous individuals without autonomous society. Capital, in
its most powerful stage, was irrevocably tied to labour. Now
it travels light, with a briefcase, a laptop, and a cell
phone. Labour, on the other hand, is as tied and immobilised
as in the past. Max Waber’s value rationality - pursuit of
value as an end in itself - is of no use now. The present-day
society is organised by making its members primarily consumers
rather than producers. It is a world of seduction where sky is
the limit. This breeds a sense of uncertainty and insecurity,
giving rise to the feeling as put by Albert Camus, of not
being able to possess the world completely enough.The search
of identity in such a situation becomes elusive, involving a
lot of fantasy and day-dreaming. This loose form of identity,
the ability to "shop around", to "be on the
move" constantly, is often construed as freedom.
However, it
is no emancipation. It pits one individual against the other,
promoting cutthroat competition, rather than cooperation and
solidarity.The relation between time and space is now dynamic,
not stagnant. Faster machines have led to the conquest of
space. The "fordist factory" earlier was in tune
with the heavy modernity. It was a face-to-face world of
workers and supervisors. It also involved "till death do
us part" type of marriage between capital and labour. It
has all changed with the advent of software capitalism and
liquid modernity. Capital and labour were tightly tied
together earlier in the phase of heavy modernity. The light
modernity has provided unbounded freedom to capital. Now
capital can travel fast and travel light. This has created a
deep sense of uncertainty for all the rest.
With this has
ensued a cultural upheaval, the most decisive point in
cultural history. The passage from heavy to light capitalism,
from solid to fluid modernity, may prove, so thinks Bauman, to
be a departure more radical and seminal than the advent of
capitalism and modernity itself. Work occupied a central place
in the phase of heavy capitalism and solid modernity. It is no
more so. It is no more an axis around which identities and
life projects can be wraped. It has no long-term ties. A young
American with moderate education changes job on an average 11
times during his or her career. This has bred a deep sense of
uncertainty and this is the most individualising force. In an
era of "downsizing", "rationalising", etc.
anybody’s turn may come any time.
This
situation divides, instead of uniting, people. The idea of
"common interests" has lost its rationale. Everybody
suffers alone; everyone has to fend for himself . This breeds
a passive and docile populace, making organised resistance a
meaningless exercise. This explains the disarray in the ranks
of labour in advanced countries. Community in place of society
is the focus of attention in the present phase.
Communitarianism is an outcome of "liquefaction" of
modern life.
The emergence
of nation-state involved suppression of self-asserting
communities, parochialism, local customs and dialects,
promoting a unified language and historical memory. Now it is
a phase of "we" and "they" -
"we" the people like us and "they" who are
different. There is always a desperate attempt to pit
"us" against "them", leaving no scope for
reconciliation. However, pluralism is the essence of a
civilised society. negotiation and conciliation of different
interests is the logic of living together.Community is an
island that provides peace and tranquility in a sea of
turbulence and strife. The vision of ruling the sea and taming
the waves is no more on the agenda.
The idea of making society
more humane, hospitable and conflictfree no longer moves the
people. The idea is to provide security, not happiness through
the institution of community.The world of what Bauman calls
liquid modernity and light capitalism is too horrible to
comprehend, yet it is a reality no one can escape. Is this the
end of the road for humanity at large? Is the vision of a
better future a passe, a mirage, to delude the naive and the
stupid with the march of history calling a final halt at a
point of "end of history" as visualised by Fukuyama?
Fortunately, Zigmunt Bauman does not think so, though he does
not claim to have answers to all the nagging and painful
questions. As a perceptive thinker, his diagnosis of social
malady is powerful, incisive and penetrating to an extent that
it becomes part of the treatment. As correctly put by him, the
absence of an adequate diagnosis is a crucial, perhaps
decisive, part of the disease. As explained by Cornelius
Castoriadis, society is ill if it stops questioning itself and
to start-questioning is a long step towards the cure. One with
conscience to feel the suffering cannot but wholeheartedly
agree with Bauman that watching human misery with equanimity
while placating the pangs of conscience with the ritual
incantation of TINA (there is no alternative) creed, means
complicity and is an act of immorality.
|
THE
post-modernity phase has generally been characterised by
Zygmunt Bauman as liquid modernity. In the earlier phase, many
things in the life of an individual as well as society was had
an element of permanence, a semblance of immutability that
infused life with a meaning. In the post-modernity phase,
everything has become fragile, evanescent and ephemeral.
Fluidity, a quality of liquid and gas, is a leading metaphor
of the present stage of the modern era, "profaning the
sacred" and dethroning the past.
