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

Appendix

Social Manipulation of Morality: Moralizing Actors, Adiaphorizing

Action

I believe that the great honour of the Amalfi European Prize has been given to the book called Modernity and the Holocaust, not to its author, and it is in the name of that book, and particularly of the message that book" contained, that with gratitude and joy I accept your~ professional accolade. I am happy for"the distinction this book has earned for several reasons: "" First: this is a book which grew our of the experience that spans the until-recently deep and seemingly unbridgeable divide between what we used-to call Eastern' and Western' Europe. The ideas that went into-the book and its message gestated as much in my home university of Warsaw as they did in the company of my colleagues in Britain, the country that - in the years of exile - offered me my second home. These ideas knew of no divide; they knew only of our common European experience, of our shared history whose unity may be belied, even temporarily suppressed, but not broken. It is our joint, all-European fate that my book is addressing. Second: this book would never have come to be if not for my life-long friend and'companion, "Jarilna,Twhose Winter in the Morning, a book of femintscences^from the'years of human infamy, opened my-eyes to what we normally refuse to look upon. The writing of Modernity and-the H&lecaust became an intellectual compulsion and moral duty, once I had

- read Janina's summary of the sad wisdom she acquired in the inner circle of the man-made inferno: The cruellest thing about cruelty is that it

_ dehumanizes its victims before it destroys them. And the hardest of struggles is to remain human in inhuman conditions. It is Janina's bitter wisdom that 1 tried to enclose in the message of my book.

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Third: the message itself, one about the hidden and unseemly face of our confident, affluent, brave world, and of the dangerous game this world plays with human moral impulse, seems to be resonant with ever more widely shared concerns. This, 1 presume, is the meaning of awarding the coveted Amalfi Prize to the book that contains that message.' But also of the fact that the prestigious Amalfi "Conference has been dedicated in full to the issue of morality and utility, whose divorce, as the message implies, lies at the foundation of our civilization's most spectacular successes and most terrifying crimes, and whose reunification is the one .chance our world may have to come to terms with- its own awesome powers. My lecture that follows is therefore more than a mere restatement of the book's message. It is a voice in a discourse which, one hopes, will stay in the focus of our shared vocation.

Virtutem doctrina paret naturane donet For the Ancient Roman the dilemma was as acute as it is Tor us today. Is morality taught, or does" it reside in the very modality' of "human existe'rice? Does it arise out of the process of socialization; or is it 'in place' before" all teaching starts? Is morality a social product? Or is it rather, as Max Scheler insisted, the other way round: the fellow feeling, that substance of all moral behaviour, is a

precondition of all social life?

All too often the question is dismissed as of no more than purely academic interest. Sometimes it is cast among idle and superfluous issues born of the indefatigable, but notoriously suspect, metaphysical curiosity. When asked explicitly by sociologists, it is assumed to have been answered conclusively long ago, by Hobbes and by Durkheim, in a manner leaving little to doubt, and since then to have been transformed into a non-question by routine sociological practice. For the sociologists at least, society is the root of everything human and everything human comes into existence through social learning: Hardly ever do we have occasion to argue the rase explicitly. For all we care, the matter had been resolved before it could be discussed: its resolution hadibunded the language that constitutes our distinctively sociological discourse. In that language, one cannot speak of morality in any other way but in terms of socialization, teaching and learning, systemic prerequisites and societal functions. And, as Wittgenstein reminded us, we can say nothing except what can be said The form of life sustained by the language of sociology does not contain socially un-sanctioned morality. In that language, nothing that is not socially sanctioned can be talked about as moral. And what one cannot speak of is bound to remain silent.

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All discourses define their topics, keep their integrity by guarding the distinctiveness of their- definitions and reproduce themselves through reiterating, them.. We could as it were stop at this trival observation and allow sociology to proceed, with its habitual selective speech and selective numbness, were not the stakes of continuing silence too high. Just how high they are has been brought up, gradually yet relentlessly, by Ausch­witz, Hiroshima and the Gulag. Or, rather, by the problem the victorious perpetrators of the Gulag and Hiroshima faced when bringing to trial, condemning and convicting the vanquished perpetrators of Auschwitz. It was Hannah Arendt, at her perceptive and irreverent best, who spelled out what these problems truly entailed:

What we have demanded in these trials, where the defendants had committed 'legal' crimes, is that human beings be capable of telling right from wrong when all they have to guide them is their judgment, which, however, happens to be completely at odds with what they must regard as the unanimous opinion of alt these around them. And this question is all the more serious as we know that the few who were arrogant' enough to trust only their own judgment were by no means identical with those persons who continued to abide by old values, or who were guided by a religious belief... These few who were still able to tell right from wrong went really only by their own judgments, and they did so freely; there were no rules to be abided by, under which the particular cases with which they were con­fronted could be subsumed.

And thus the question had to be asked; would any one of those now brought to trial have suffered from a guilty conscience if they had won? The most horrifying discovery' that followed was that the answer must have been emphatically 'no', and that we lack arguments to show why it should be otherwise. Having decreed out of existence or out of court such distinctions between good and evil as do not bear the sanctioning stamp of society, we cannot seriously demand that individuals take moral initiatives. Neither can we burden them with responsibility for their moral choices unless the responsibility had been de facto pre-empted by the choices being prescribed by society. And we would not normally wish to do so (that is, to demand that individuals make their moral decisions on their own responsibility). Doing so would mean, after all, allowing for a moral responsibility that undermines the legislative power of society; and what society would resign such power of its own will, unless disabled by an overwhelming military force? Indeed, sitting in judgement on the perpet-

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rators of Auschwitz was not an easy task for those who guarded the secrets of the Gulag and those who were secretly preparing for Hiroshima.

It is perhaps because of this difficulty that, as Harry Redner observed, much of life and thought as it is still carried on now js based on the assumption that Auschwitz and Hiroshima never happened, or, if they did, then only as mere vents, far away, and long ago, that need not concern us now'. The legal quandaries arising from the Nuremberg trials were resolved there and then, having been treated as local issues, specific to one extraordinary and pathological case, that were never allowed to spill over the boundaries of their carefully circumscribed parochiality, and were hastily "wound up as soon as they threatened to get out of hand. No fundamental revision of our self-consciousness occurred or was contem­plated. For many decades - to this very day, one may say - Arendt's remained a voice in the wilderness. Much of the fury with which Arendt's analysis was met at the time stemmed from the attempt to keep that self-consciousness watertight. Only such explanations of the Nazi crimes have been accepted as are conspicuously irrelevant to us, to our world, to our form of life. Such explanations commit the double feat of condemning the defendant while exonerating the world of his victors.

It is in vain to contest whether the resulting marginalization of the crime committed - in the full glare of social acclaim or with tacit popular approval - by people who 'were neither perverted nor sadistic', who 'were, and still are, terrifyingly normal' (Arendt), was deliberate or inadvertent, accomplished by design or by default. The fact is that the quarantine set half a century ago has never ended; if anything, the rows of barbed wire have grown thicker over the years. Auschwitz has gone down in history as a Jewish' or German' problem and as Jewish or German private property. Looming large in the centre of Jewish studies', it has been confined to footnotes or cursory paragraphs by the mainstream European historiography. Books on the Holocaust are reviewed under the heading of Jewish themes'. The impact of such habits is reinforced by the vehement opposition of the Jewish establishment to any attempt, however tentative, to expropriate the injustice that the Jews and the Jews alone have suffered. Of this injustice, the Jewish state would keenly wish to be the sole guardian and, indeed, the only legitimate beneficiary. This unholy alliance effectively prevents the experience it narrates as -'uniquely Jewish from turning into a universal problem of the modern human condition and thus into public property. Alternatively, Auschwitz is cast as an event explicable only in terms of the extraordinary convolutions of German history, of inner conflicts of German culture, blunders ol German philo-

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sophy or the bafflingly authoritarian national character of the Germans -with much the same parochializing, marginalizing effect. Finally, and perhaps most perversely, the strategy that results in the two-pronged effect of marginalizing the crime and exonerating modernity is one of exempting the Holocaust from a class of comparable phenomena, and interpreting it instead as an eruption of pre-modern (barbaric, irrational) forces, presumably long ago suppressed in 'normal' civilized societies, but insufficiently tamed or ineffectively controlled by the allegedly weak or faulty German modernization. One would expect this strategy to be a favourite form of self-defence: after all, it obliquely reaffirms and rein­forces the etiological myth of modern civilization as a triumph of reason over passion, and an auxiliary belief in this triumph as an unambiguously progressive step in the historical development of morality.

The combined effect of all three strategies - whether deliberately or subconsciously followed - is the proverbial puzzlement of historians who repeatedly complain that, however hard they try, they cannot understand the most spectacular episode of the present century whose story they have written so expertly and continue to write in ever-growing detail. Saul Friedlander bewails the 'historian's paralysis', which in his (widely shared) view 'arises from the simultaneity and the interaction of entirely heteroge­neous phenomena: messianic fanaticism and bureaucratic structures, pathological impulses and administrative decrees, archaic attitudes within an advanced industrial society'. Entangled in the net of marginalizing narratives we all help to weave, we fail to see what we stare at, the only thing we are able to note is the confusing heterogeneity of the picture, coexistence of things our language does not allow to coexist, the complic­ity of factors that, as our narratives tell us, belong to different epochs or different times. Their heterogeneity is not a finding, but an assumption. It is this assumption that gives birth to astonishment where comprehension could appear and is called for.

In 1940, in the heart of darkness, Walter Benjamin jotted down a message which, fudging by the historians' continuing paralysis and the sociologists' unperturbed equanimity, has yet to be properly heard: Such an astonishment cannot be starting point for genuine historical under­standing - unless it is the understanding that the concept of history in which it originates is untenable.' What is untenable is the concept of our -European - history as the rise of humanity over the animal in man, and as the triumph of rational organization over the cruelty of life that is nasty, brutish and short. What is also untenable is the concept of modern society is an unambiguously moralizing force, of its institutions as civilizing

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powers, of its coercive controls as a dam defending brittle humanity against the torrents of animal passions. It is to the exposition of this latter amenability that this paper, in line with the book on which it comments, has been dedicated.

But let us repeat first: the difficulty of proving untenable what by all standards are the commonsensical assumptions of sociological discourse derives in no small part from the intrinsic quality of the language of sociological narrative, as all languages, it defines its objects while pretend­ing to describe them. The moral authority of society is self-provable to the point of tautology in so far as all conduct not conforming to the societally sanctioned rulings is by definition immoral. Socially sanctioned behaviour remains good as long as all action societally condemned is defined as evil. There is no easy exit from the vicious circle, as any suggestion of pre-social origin of moral impulse has been a priori condemned as violating the rules of linguistic rationality - the only rationality language allows. The deployment of sociological language entails the acceptance of the world-picture this language generates, and implies a tacit consent to conducting the ensuing discourse- in such a way that all reference to reality is directed to the world so generated. The sociologically generated world-picture replicates the accomplishment of societal legislating powers. But it does more than that: it silences the possibility of articulating alternative visions in whose suppression the accomplishment of such powers consists. Thus the denning power of language supplements the differentiating, separa­ting, segregating and suppressing powers lodged in the structure of social domination. It also derives its legitimacy and persuasion from that struc­ture.

Ontologically, structure means relative repetitiousness, monotony of events; epistemologically, it means for this reason predictability. We speak of structure whenever we confront a space inside which probabilities are not randomly distributed: some events are more likely to happen than others. It is in this sease that human habitat is structured': an island of regularity in the sea of randomness. This precarious regularity has been an achievement, and the decisive defining feature, of social organization. All social organization, whether purposeful or totalizing (i.e., such as cut-out fields of relative homogeneity through suppressing or degrading - making irrelevant or otherwise down-playing - all other, differentiating and thus potentially divisive, features), consists in subjecting the conduct of its units to either instrumental or procedural criteria of evaluation. More impor­tantly still, it consists in delegalizing all other criteria, and first and foremost such standards as may render behaviour of units resilient to

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uniformizing pressures and thus autonomous visa vis the collective pur­pose of the organization (which, from the organizational point of view. makes them unpredictable and potentially de-stabilizing).

Among the standards marked for suppression the pride of place is kept by moral drive - the source of a most conspicuously autonomous (and hence, from the vantage point of the organization, unpredictable) behaviour. The autonomy of moral behaviour is final and irreducible. It escapes all codification, as it does not serve any purpose outside itself and does not enter a relationship with anything outside itself; that is, no relationship that could be monitored, standardized, codified. Moral behaviour, as the greatest moral philosopher of the twentieth centurv, Emmanuel Levinas, tells us, is triggered off by the mere presence of the Other as a face, that is, as an authority without force. The Other demands without threatening to punish or promising reward; his demand is without sanction. The Other cannot do anything; it is precisely his weakness that exposes my strength, my ability to act, as responsibility. Moral action is whatever follows that responsibility. Unlike the action triggered off by fear of sanction or promise of reward, it does not bring success or help survival. As, purposeless, it escapes all possibility of heteronomous legisla­tion or rational argument, it remains deaf to conatus essendi, and hence elides the judgement of 'rational interest' and advice of calculated self-preservation, those twin bridges to the world of 'there is', of dependence and heteronomy. The face of the Other, so Levinas insists, is a limit imposed on the effort to exist. It offers therefore the ultimate freedom: freedom against the source of all heteronomy, against all dependence, against nature's persistence in being. Morality is a 'moment of generosity'. 'Someone plays without winning ... Something that one does gratuitously, that is grace ... The idea of the face is the idea of gratuitous love, the conduct of a gratuitous act,' It is because of its implacable gratuity that moral acts cannot be lured, seduced, bought off. routinized. From the societal perspective, Kant's practical reason is so hopelessly impractical . . From the organization's point of view, morally inspired conduct is utterly useless, nay subversive: it cannot be harnessed to any purpose and it sets limits to the hope of monotony. Since it cannot be rationalized, moralitv must be suppressed, or manipulated into irrelevance.

The organization's answer to the autonomy of moral behaviour is the heteronomy of instrumental and procedural rationalities Law and interest displace and replace gratuity and the sanctionlessness of moral drive Actors are challenged to justify their conduct by reason as defined either by the goal or by the rules of behaviour. Only actions thought of and

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argued in such a way, or fit to be narrated in such a way, are admitted into

the class of genuinely social action, that is rational action, that is an action that serves as the defining property of actors as social actors. By the same token, actions that tail to meet the criteria of goal-pursuit or procedural discipline are declared non-social, irrational and private. The prganiza tion's way of socializing action includes, as its indispensable corollary, the privatization of morality.

All social organization consists therefore in neutralizing the disruptive and deregulating impact or moral behaviour. This effect is achieved through a number of complementary arrangements: (1) stretching the distance between action and its consequences beyond the reach of moral impulse; (2) exempting some 'others' from the class of potential objects of moral conduct, of potential faces'; (3) dissembling other human objects of action into aggregates of functionally specific traits, held separate so that the occasion for re-assembling the face does not arise, and the task set for each action can be free from moral evaluation. Through these arrange­ments, organization does not promote immoral behaviour; it does not sponsor evil, as some detractors would hasten to charge, yet it does not promote good either, despite its own self-promotion. It simply renders social action adiaphoric (originally, adiaphoron meant a thing declared indifferent by the Church) - neither good nor evil, measurable against technical (purpose-oriented or procedural) but not moral values. By the same token, it renders moral responsibilin' for the Other ineffective in its original role of the limit imposed on the effort to exist (It is tempting to surmise that the social philosophers who at the threshold of the modern age first perceived social organization as a matter of design and rational improvement theorized precisely this quality of organization as the immortality of Man that transcends, and privatizes into social irrelevance, the mortality of individual men and women). Let us go one by one through these arrangements that, simultaneously, constitute social organization and adiaphorize social action.

To start with the removal of the effects of action bevond the reach of moral limits, that major achievement of the articulation ol action into the hierarchy of command and execution: once placed in the agentic state and separate from both the intention-conscious sources and the uliim.ne effects of action by a chain of mediators, the actors seldom face the moment of choice and gaze at the consequences of their deeds, more importantly, they hardly ever apprehend what they gaze at is the consequ ences of their deeds. As each action is both mediated and 'merely mediating, the suspicion of causal link is convincingly dismissed through

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theorizing the evidence as an unanticipated consequence", or at any rate

the 'unintended result' of, by itself, a morally neutral act - as a fault of

reason rather than ethical failure. Social organization may therefore be

described as a machine that keeps moral responsibility afloat; it belongs to

no one in particular, as everybody's contribution to the final effect is too

minute or partial to be sensibly ascribed a causal function. Dissection of

responsibility and dispersion of what is left results on the structural plane

in what Hannah Arendt poignantly-described as rule by Nobody'; on the

individual plane it leaves the-actor, as a moral subject, -speechless and

defenceless when faced with the twin powers of-the task and the procedu- -