Modernity and the Holocaust

I spent the last sunday reading Zygmunt Bauman's Modernity and the Holocaust. It is an extraordinary, brilliant (and very gloomy) sociological analysis of modern society, taking Holocaust as an extreme example of all its ugliness. Bauman is a Polish philosopher and sociologist who has lived and taught in England for a number of years. I guess, to professional sociologists and philosophers much of what he says will come across as familiar but to me it was a revelatory reading experience, not because his ideas were new but because I had never thought about these in such a systematic manner as he does in the book.

I knew about the arguments about how holocaust must be seen as a peculiarly "modern" phenomenon and not as a temporary outbreak of insanity on a mass scale or an unfortunate recidivism to ancient bestialities present in human nature but I had always been uncomfortable the way rationality and enlightenment was brought into the debate. Reading Bauman's discussion of rationality really disabused me of a lot of falsely-comforting notions I had and really changed the way I looked at the whole thing. I can't summarise the whole argument here but the key to his discussion is the idea of "instrumental rationality". In modern societies, specially within the omnipresent structures of state, bureaucracy, corporates and other institutions, reason is used not to critically evaluate the aims and meanings of any action but rather just to decide the most efficient and optimized way of reaching a goal which is already set by the impersonal structure. It is no longer the "whys" of the action that matters but rather the "hows". Eichmann and his entire team were not motivated by blind hatred. They were all rational creatures, only the rationality was instrumental, not the personal, self-introspective rationality of Kant or Spinoza.

Another idea from the book that struck me was the idea of "goal displacement." In the pre-modern era, the eventual goals of any action were evident but not any more. One can be working on a solution for a mathematical problem and the same solution can be used for building a missile tracking system or deciding on an innovative strategy for speculating on essential commodities in the financial markets. How complicit will the programmer or the mathematician be in this case? The German bureaucrats who made the whole system so efficient worked on the same principle too.

I found the idea of instrumental rationality particularly disturbing because as engineers (and it is true for other professionals also) the only rationality we are taught is the same - instrumental rationality. We are taught to find the best solution to the problem which is always assumed to be already "given". Thinking about "whys" is often discouraged because it results in inefficiencies and wastage. But still without any clear moral imperatives the whys will inevitably lead to some sort of an infinite regression and that's what the main problem is - this search for absolute moral imperatives which can help answer all the whys and we are back again in the Musilian territory...

Lots of rambling and black thoughts. Anyway, I can't recommend Bauman's book highly enough. The Wikipedia entry on him is quite informative with some links at the bottom. Some of his articles on consumerism and post-modern culture are also fantastic.