Материал: Bauman.Zygmunt..modernity and holocaust, polity press 1989

Under the conditions of bureaucratic division of labour, 'the other' inside the circle of proximity where moral responsibility rules supreme is a workmate, whose successful coping with his own task depends on the actor's application to his part of the job; the immediate superior, whose occupational standing depends on the co-operation of his sub­ordinates; and a person immediately down the hierarchy line, who expects his tasks to be clearly defined and made feasible. In dealing with such others, that moral responsibility which proximity tends to generate takes the form of loyalty to the organization - that abstract articulation of the network of face-to-face interactions. In the form of organizational loyalty, the actors' moral drives may be deployed for morally abject purposes, without sapping the ethical propriety of intercourse within that area of proximity which the moral drives cover. The actors may go on sincerely believing in their own integrity; indeed, their behaviour does conform to the moral standards held in the only region in which other standards remained operative. Browning investigated the personal

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stories of the four officials manning the notorious Jewish Desk (D III) at the German Foreign Ministry. He found two of them satisfied with their jobs, while two others preferred transfer to other tasks.

Both were successful in eventually getting out of D HI, but while they were there they performed their duties meticulously. They did not openly object to the job but worked covertly and quietly for their transfer; keeping their records clean was their top priority. Whether zealously or reluctantly, the fact remain's that all four worked efficiently ... They kept the machine moving, and the most ambitious and unscrupulous among them gave it an additional push.²⁵

The task-splitting and the resulting separation of moral mini-communities from the ultimate effects of the operation achieves the distance between the perpetrators and the victims of cruelty which reduces, or eliminates, the counter-pressure of moral inhibitions. The right physical and functional distance cannot be attained, however, all along the bureaucratic chain of command. Some among the perpetrators must meet the victims face-to-face, or at least must be so close to them as to be unable to avoid, or even to suppress, visualizing the effects their actions have upon time. Another method is needed to assure the right psychological distance even in the absence of the physical or the functional ones. Such a method is provided by a specifically modern form of authority - expertise.

The essence of expertise is the assumption that doing things properly requires certain knowledge, that such knowledge is distributed unevenly, that some persons possess more of it than others, that those who possess it ought to be in charge of doing things, and that being in charge places upon them the responsibility for how things are being done. In fact, the responsibility is seen as vested not in the experts, but in the skills they represent. The institution of expertise and the associated stance towards social action closely approximate the notorious Saint-Simon's ideal (enthusiastically endorsed by Marx) of the 'administration of things, not people'; the actors serve as mere agents of knowledge, as bearers of the know-how', and their personal responsibility rests entirely in representing knowledge properly, that is in doing things according to the 'state of the art', to the best of what extant knowledge can offer. For those who do not possess the know-how, responsible action means following the advice of the experts. In the process, personal responsi­bility dissolves in the abstract authority of technical know-how.

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Browning quotes at length, the memo prepared by a technical expert Willy Just in respect of the technical improvement of the gas vans. Just proposed that the company assembling the vans should shorten the loading space: the existing vans could not negotiate the difficult Russian terrain fully loaded, so too much carbon monoxide was needed to fill the remaining empty space, and the whole operation took too much time and lost considerably in its potential efficiency:

A shorter, fully loaded truck could operate much more quickly. A shortening of the rear compartment would not disadvantageously affect the weight balance, overloading the front axle, because actually a correction in the weight distribution takes place auto­matically through the fact that the cargo in the struggle toward the back door during the operation always is preponderantly located there'. Because the connecting pipe was quickly rusted through the 'fluids', the gas should be introduced from above, not below. To facilitate cleaning, an eight- to twelve-inch hole should be made in the floor and provided with a cover opened from outside. The floor should be slightly inclined, and the cover equipped with a small sieve. Thus all 'fluids' would flow to the middle, the 'thin fluids' would exit even during operation, and thicker fluids' could be hosed out afterwards.²⁶

AH inverted commas are Browning's; Just did not seek nor use knowingly metaphors or euphemisms, his was the straightforward, down-to-earth, language of technology. As an expert in the truck construction, he was indeed trying to cope with the movement of the cargo, not with the human beings struggling for breath; with thick and thin fluids, not with human excreta and vomit. The fact that the load consisted of people about to be murdered and losing control over their bodies, did not detract from the technical challenge of the problem. This fact had anyway to be translated first into the neutral language of car-production technology before it could turn into a 'problem' to be 'resolved'. One wonders wherher a retranslation was ever attempted by those who read Just's memo and undertook to implement the technical instructions it contained.

For Milgram's guinea pigs, the problem' was the experiment set and administered by the scientific experts. Milgram's experts saw to it that the expert-led actors should, unlike the workers of the Sodomka factory for whom Just's' memo was destined, entertain no doubts as to the suffering their actions were causing, that there should be no chance for a

198 Towards a Sociological I"henry of Morality

I did not know' excuse. What Milgram's experiment has proved in the end is the power of expertise and its capacity to triumph over moral drives. Moral people can be driven into committing immoral acts even if they know (or believe) that the acts are immoral - providing that they are convinced that the experts (people who, by definition, know something they themselves do not know) have defined their actions as necessary. After all, most actions in our society are not legitimized by the discussion of their objectives, but by the advice or instruction offered by the people in the know.

Final remarks

Admittedly, this chapter stops far short of formulating an alternative sociological theory of moral behaviour. Its purpose is much more modest: to discuss some sources of moral drive other than social and some societally produced conditions under which immoral behaviour becomes possible. Even such a limited discussion, it seems, shows that the orthodox sociology of morality is in need of substantial revision. One of the orthodox assumptions that seems to have failed the test particularly badly is that moral behaviour is born of the operation of society and maintained by the operation of societal institutions, that society is essentially a humanizing, moralizing device and that, accordingly, the incidence of immoral conduct on anything more than a marginal scale may be explained only as an effect of the malfunctioning of 'normal' social arrangements. The corollary of this assumption is that immorality cannot on the whole be societally produced, and that its true causes must be sought elsewhere.

The point made in this chapter is that powerful moral drives have a pre-societal origin, while some aspects of modern societal organization cause considerable weakening of their constraining power; that, in effect, society may make the immoral conduct more, rather than less, plausible. The Western-promoted mythical image of the world without modern bureaucracy and expertise as ruled by the 'jungle law' or the 'law of the fist' bears evidence partly to the self-legitimizing need of modern bureaucracy²⁷ which set to destroy the competition of norms deriving from drives and proclivities it did not control,²⁸ and partly to the degree to which the pristine human ability to regulate reciprocal relations on the basis of moral responsibility has been by-now lost and forgotten. What is therefore presented and conceived of as savagery to be tamed and

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suppressed may prove on a close scrutiny to be the self same moral drive that the civilizing process set out to neutralize, and then to replace with the controlling pressures emanating from the new structure of domination. Once the moral forces spontaneously generated by human proximity had been delegitimized and paralyzed, the new forces which replaced it acquired an unprecedented freedom of manoeuvre. They may generate on a massive scale a conduct which can be defined as ethically correct only by the criminals in power.

Among societal achievements in the sphere of the management of morality one needs to name: social production of distance, which either annuls or weakens the pressure of moral responsibility; substitution of technical for moral responsibility, which effectively conceals the moral significance of the action; and the technology of segregation and separation, which promotes indifference to the plight of the Other which otherwise would be subject to moral evaluation and morally motivated response. One needs also to consider that all these morality-eroding mechanisms are further strengthened by the principle of sovereignty of state powers usurping supreme ethical authority on behalf of the societies they rule. Except for diffuse and often ineffective 'world opinion', the rulers of states are on the whole unconstrained in their management of norms binding on the territory of their sovereign rule. Proofs are not lacking that the more unscrupulous their actions in that field, the more intense are the calls for their appeasement' which reconfirm and reinforce their monopoly and dictatorship in the field of moral judgement.

What follows is that under modern order the ancient Sophoclean conflict between moral law and the law of society shows no signs of abating. If anything, it tends to become more frequent and more profound - and the odds are shifted in favour of the morality-suppressing societal pressures. On many occasions moral behaviour means taking a stance dubbed and decreed anti-social or subversive by the powers that be and by public opinion (whether outspoken or merely manifested in majority action or non-action). Promotion of moral behaviour in such cases means resistance to societal authority and action aimed at the weakening of its grip. Moral duty has in count on us pristine source: the essential human responsibility for the Other.

That these problems have an urgency in addition to their academic interest, reminds us of the words of Paul Hilberg:

Remember, again, that the basic question was whether a western