Wednesday, May 14, 2008

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.

6 comments:

praymont said...

Does Bauman say much about Max Weber?

Alok said...

yes, he actually assumes a basic familiarity with Weber's ideas. I haven't read him but I suppose, this idea of bureaucratic rationality and reason as rule-following and problem solving comes from him. Bauman connects many of these theoretical ideas to specific aspects of modern societies and also specific events from the Holocaust....There are lots of other things in the book which I didn't mention in this brief post too - Like "modernity" of racism, or the connection between science and ethics...

Kubla Khan said...

Much is said and written about the holocaust....rightly so. but what about the nakba? the destruction of palestine, their very existence, their memories.....the very reason of their existence.
the palestinians are paying for the holocaust and antisemitism which is a European/ christian attitude. and yet, the nakba is not equated as an experience with the holocaust.
the holocaust book industry, as i feel it looks like, and the very upright writers and their readers take judicious and very moral stances and in the same breath, ignore the palestinian experience. for the palestinian side, to mention their rights etc is to be excessive, to be anti-jewish, anti-western etc.
the drift here is not to question the holocaust experience, which is authentic, but for the same moral standard bearers to talk of the nakba, the obliteration of an entire people.
the entire experience forces the victims themselves to be guilty.

i think this is a sign of blatant hypocrisy. palestine is dead and nothing matters.
just a few thoughts.....

Alok said...

Hi Kubla, I understand what you are saying... I don't approve of the way holocaust is politically exploited or used as a justification for Zionism (or at least the crude, literalist version of it). Bauman himself doesn't agree with the interpretation that holocaust should be see as an exclusively Jewish phenomena, an event which is meaningful only in the context of Jewish history.

To your other comment about why there are so many books on Holocaust and so little on Palestinians I reall don't know what to say. I am not even sure if that is the case.

Speaking only for myself however it is true I have mentioned holocaust repeatedly here on the blog and almost never talk about middle east. I will have to think about why that is the case -- why this blog is so eurocentric...?

Kubla Khan said...

I am glad you agree.
regarding eurocentricity....it is a question of making more effort. there is no dearth of great literature in other languages. the easily available ones are in european languages.and the other languages are generally considered "exotic, alien, slothy" so on.

one kind of cultural domination leads on to another.to be objective, with our normal prejudices, is to be estranged. we live estranged from the happening world.others philosophize this and call it existential despair.

i am baffled that any critique of Zionism is labelled as anti-semitic, astoundingly by the same clique that invented anti-semitism, that created the holocaust.one of the holocaust related works that i like is Levi's If this is a man, especially the first sentence, which reveals his lack of agenda.

the palestinian experience, for which the arabic word nakba( loosely meaning catastrophe but more than that) has not yet found way in popular discourse, apart from obviously the usual suspects, like Foucault, Deleuze and now chomsky.

no one literature is superior to the other.however, people may not actually believe so "inside themselves", lest they be branded racist etc
Btw......have you read Bolano's short story, the insufferable gaucho? even the great Bolano meanders into naivete.....the superior prejudice shows. it reflects the same malaise.
ciao

Alok said...

I haven't read the Bolano story. Is it collected in his Last Evenings on Earth? I must have missed it...

I think we have locked horns on this issue in the past too. Somehow I am not as sensitive to this whole Orientalist school of criticism as you seem to be. I don't know the exact reason for this. It is certainly not that I deny my origins or identity as an Indian or because of any prejudice against brown-skinned people. The eurocentricity of my interests and curiosities is probably just a side-effect of my attempts to transcend this specific identity. I know it sounds a bit like a lame excuse...middle eastern and arabic culture is probably as foreign to me as is Europe :) but yes I would vehemently deny any charges of prejudice or even blind spots...