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Modernity & the Holocaust

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Peruse any mega-bookstore for works on the Holocaust and you will likely find yourself in a section called "Jewish Studies" or "Holocaust Studies." This is indicative of a general attitude that the Holocaust was merely a gross aberration in the advancement of western civilization, that it is exclusively a Jewish problem or, at best, an anomalous eruption of the irrational latent in the German psyche.

In this stunning, bold, and original work, Professor Bauman challenges this conventional wisdom. The Holocaust is not the story of European civilization gone awry; rather it embodies the most salient principles of modernity itself. It was "horrifyingly normal."

The logic of self-interest, rational management, modern bureaucratic order, technological efficiency, the relegation of values to the realm of subjectivity, science as intrinsically instrumental and value-free: such are the values comprising the shared vision of western civilization set in motion during the Enlightenment. And Bauman identifies the sum of these values as the necessary (but not sufficient) cause of the Holocaust. The SS exploited the logic of rational self-interest by making the cooperation of prisoners a condition for self-preservation. Death camps utilized the applied technology of mass production and transportation. The Third Reich was the picture of modern bureaucratic efficiency. All of this was done by highly trained engineers, technicians and doctors within an ethical framework consistent with modernity's moral relativism. And each of these conditions is still present today. This is a sobering, thought-provoking study of the Holocaust and its haunting resonance with the values of modern thought.

Zygmunt Bauman argues that the modern society we accept as normal and the highest form as civilization, contains the seed, soil and water of the Holocaust. He argues that the Holocaust is not an anomaly but a warning and sign of what we, as human beings, have become. The Holocaust would not have happened save for modern civilization. Technological know how is important, but not the only important factor.

Mass atrocity requires three things: that violence be authorized by a legitimate authority, that the violent actions be routinized, and that the victims be dehumanized. Bauman recounts the experiments of Stanley Milgram in support of his argument. I add that, after weeks of chanting "Kill, kill, kill" over and over, and of hearing the "enemy" described as "dinks", "slopes", "gooks", "japs", "women", "niggers" and "injuns", I was able to sit through a lecture on the "law of war" in which my medic class was instructed that one of our jobs would be to execute wounded prisoners. Yes, that's illegal, immoral, and something terrorists do. Military training works. (If you respond that "war is hell" and that such things are normal, think of the fuss we put up about how our prisoners are treated.)

Military training works because normal socialization prepares us for it. Society, Bauman writes, silences morality. Rather than supporting our innate morality, society replaces it, teaching us what is good and what is bad, who is good and who is bad. It divides the world into the "moral universe", relatively small, and the universe in which we are encouraged to to act with amoral abandon. Take, for instance, the example of "family values". The moral universe cannot shrink much further. Yes, we should obey the law, if practicable, but only until we change it to allow us to do what we want. We certainly aren't responsible for anyone outside the family. Family values? Christ pointed out that even the heathen support that.

The answer to the social design and engineering which created the Holocaust is, Bauman suggests, unconditional responsibility. We, each of us as a moral agent, are responsible for and to everyone regardless of whether we believe them to be good or evil. We and they are human. It's a tough sell, but Bauman's argument that the alternative led to the Holocaust and will lead to more similar atrocities is convincing.

Bauman makes his arguments without jargon, with style and passion. This is a most important and compelling book. If you're going to read only one book this year, make it this one.

This is one of those rock-em, sock-em books that seems to have a startling insight on every page. Bauman's thesis is that the Holocaust is not an aberration, peculiar to a particular time and place, but a general symptom of modernity. In other words, events akin to the Holocaust are capable of happening again and again in the modern world. The book is thus frightening and sobering. Bauman argues that modern institutions are characterized by dispassionate bureaucratic efficiency assisted by technology. Large government and corporate bureaucracies function in such a way that individual responsibility for the actions of the bureaucracy are dispersed. In other words, the buck is passed through the system, without a Harry Truman to say, "The buck stops here." The danger, according to Bauman, is that if a Hitler rises to the top of such a bureaucracy, he can set the system rolling toward an inhumane goal (the destruction of the Jews in Europe), and it is possible that nobody within the system or outside it will be able (or interested enough) to do much to stop it. The book highlights (for me) the crucial importance of checks and balances within systems, and strong investigative journalism as an important component to a functioning democracy. It also suggests to me the importance of keeping authoritarians out of high public office. They can set large systems rolling in disastrous directions.

This book is not easy. It must be read slowly and allowed to sink in. There are easier places to start reading ZB (I recommend "Liquid Modernity"). But M&H will go down as a classic, where this wise old refugee from the 20th century pulled the wool off our eyes and gave us a hug. This is not a book about "the Nazis" or other "villains" we love to hate. It is a painfully honest stare at what really happens with "decent" people. The critical social theory is a liberating tool for making the invisible structures we live in visible: so we can see how bureaucratic social orders, market economies, "liberal" value systems, and information age technologies combine to form a system that exploits human nature on an historically unprecedented and massive scale. But there is more than a critical theory at work in this book. There is a compelling humanism and a surprisingly old-fashioned moral theory that is anything but "relativistic." Bauman uses his critical theory to SHOW EXACTLY HOW a basic human moral sense GETS PREEMPTED by the false incentives of a substitute morality that disconnects us from a feeling response to our own humanity, the suffering of other people and the needs of the world around us. ZB does not need to prove his little affective moral theory (he is quite subtle with it actually); all he needs to do is to SHOW EXACTLY HOW basic human moral sentiments GET SHORT CIRCUITED and WHY. The evidence of the crime and the purposes of the villain tell us all we need to know about what it was the victim stood to lose. The critical theory works like a pair of surgeons -- one removing a tumor from the brain so that the patient can think again and the other clearing blockage from peripheral arteries so the heart can function, as it should. This is the most important book I have ever read.

Decent societies are correct to express righteous indignation at those who deny that the holocaust ever occurred, or who deny that even if it did happen, something less than six million Jews were murdered. The poster child for this kind of mindless, intentionally evil denial, include the skin-heads that now populate a large part of the West, and not insignificantly, at least one prominent head of state from the Middle East, the current President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

A key theme of this book is the author's not so subtle suggestion that "crazies" such as the "skinheads" or Ahmadinejad are not the only holocaust deniers. The window that this analysis has opened up so widely to us is that there is yet another even larger group of holocaust deniers, one that just happens to include nearly all the rest of us.

This group includes all of those of us who continue to deny that the holocaust was an organic product of the most sophisticated, advanced, rational and respected representative of Western culture, Germany. And thus that as the flagship of Western culture, values, morality and humanity, far from being an aberration, Germany was more a "moral proxy" for the emerging cultures of the modern world. Moreover, given that nearly a dozen or so holocausts have occurred and then gone virtually unnoticed since World War II, clearly even in retrospect, the European Holocaust can no longer be considered just a Jewish tragedy -- no longer just a private matter between Hitler and the Jews -- but represents a generalized moral failure of the modern world.

By pretending that Hitler's "final solution" of insulated bureaucratized and mechanized, technocratic mass murder, was the act of a lone nut and his henchmen, and thus pretending further that it had nothing at all to do with the rest of us, almost reduces our denials to being as ludicrous as those of Ahmadinejad. By portraying Nazi genocide as merely the isolated act of a lone nut mass murderer, rather than (what it really was) part of the organic progression of anti-Semitism and racism that even today remains endemic to Western culture, we do not so much insulate ourselves from guilt and complicity as we reveal a deep ignorance about the true meaning of the holocaust, and equally, reveal our deep-structure need to avoid facing the truth about the shared but deeply flawed and inhuman conditions still existing in our modern world.

What the author drives home forcefully here is that there is a dark side to our Judeo-Christian civilization, a side that leads directly and inexorably from slavery, burning people at the stake, wars of aggression, mindless exploitation, and greed, to Auschwitz. And as much as we pretend not to know it, the "technocratic production of death" that ended in the ovens of Poland, was not at all the case of a lone nut and his henchmen, but was indeed a normal progression of the Judeo-Christian tendency to socially regulate morality downwards, and to do so as we "condition" and "desensitize" ourselves to, and turn our heads away from, the moral ugliness that goes on within our midst, daily. In the international system for instance, it is almost an article of faith that no matter how morally depraved are acts that go on within the boundaries of its members, those acts will forever remain there and beyond the reach of international law and of the international community more generally.

It is curious that in terms of why this is so, both Albert Speer (Hitler's second in command) and the international psychologists Herbert C. Kelman agree on what the preconditions for the erosion of moral inhibitions that could lead directly to another holocaust are; that: (1) people must be operating under the rules of "authorized violence;" (2) such violence must become numbingly routine; and (3) the targeted victims must be dehumanized.

It seems to me that throughout its history, including today, that the U.S. qualifies on all three accounts: It has participated in more wars than any other nation in the history of the world and domestically remains one of the most violent nations on earth. Due to its racist practices, it holds in its wings a ready made scapegoat -- its black population -- which, remains in a permanent inferior status as constantly primed and targeted for further dehumanization. Not to mention that it was the U.S. Eugenics Program, American Archaelogists, Psychologists and Sociologists, that gave Hitler the first ideas about ridding the world of the genetic "weeds" (Jews) of civilization through a "final solution."

Beyond the U.S. there is also the international community at large, which even today, although the UN has finally outlawed the right for a state to commit genocide against its own peoples, we nevertheless have seen repeatedly (in East Timor, Rwanda, Yugoslavia, Kurdistan, and the Sudan, among others) the UN edicts remaining ignored and unenforced; and its laws thus essentially remaining a dead letter. But as if this were not enough evidence that modernity carries the germ of holocausts to come, even more astonishingly, U.S. practice and international law aside, nothing within Max von Weber's own exposition of modern bureaucracy -- the rational spirit, principles of efficiency, that science is instrumental and value-free, relegating values to the subjective, etc. -- precludes the possibility of any of the excesses committed by the Nazis of reccurring.

What professor Bauman reminds us of here is that whatever moral instinct is to be found in human conduct, we can never forget that it is not inherent in the human condition, but is "socially produced." And sadly, so too are its inhibitions and the tendency to be "indifferent to" or "distant ourselves from," moral responsibility.

Thus what the holocaust teaches us about ourselves in particular and about the modern world more generally is that what little morality that remains, quickly dissolves as soon as societies malfunction. The paradox that brings this point home most clearly is that in an otherwise entirely innocent state, (that is one that is altogether free of social influence and regulation such as religious teachings, formal education, political ideologies, etc.), people at worse have no interest in injuring others. But, with the mere presence of social regulation and organized indoctrination, they then become anxious to injure at the behest of societal administrations, tribal, racial, religious and group rules and norms.

Put simply, the intended civilizing thrust of social regulation, which was to impose moral constraints on our otherwise rampant selfishness and our inborn tendency towards savagery, in actual practice, too often works exactly the opposite: Savagery in the name of societal rules conveniently masked by after-the-fact rationalizations, and wedded to ideology and the reward and punishment structure of society, becomes a bureaucratic tool that lowers the inhibitions of those within a group, at the same time that it instigates them to commit acts of savagery they otherwise would not commit -- all in the name of the group, organization, race, or nation.

As the author notes, Hannah Arendt, one of my heroes, was shouted down when she suggested that victims of the holocaust may have lost some of their humanity on the road to perdition. It brings to mind the scene in the movie Munich in which Golda Meir is supposed to have said: "just because Jews were victims of the holocaust, does not make them decent." And if we look at the events currently unfolding in Israel, we see clearly that this is precisely the case. There is also a Chinese proverb that says: "society prepares the crime and the criminal only carries it out." Put simply, "internal state violence" is a socially arranged affair just as are morality and the narratives of victimology. All follow the script prepared by the rules of the drama of society.

It may come as a surprise to know that less than the normal ten percent of Hitler's SS were considered psychopaths. When discovered, they were summarily removed from duty. Himmler's main problem was not sadistic killers chomping at the bit to kill, but one of keeping normal Germans, who overnight had been turned into murderers, from going insane. It was modernity -- technology and bureaucracy that saved him from his fate and sent 20 million people to the death camps and eventuallly to their deaths..

In summary, this author tells us that the "Hitler did it," dog won't hunt. The roots of the horror of the holocaust was not just a hiccup in the straight line progression of moral development in our modern world. The roots of the holocaust does not lie just in Hitler's anti-Semitic obsession, the obsequiousness of his henchmen, the mindless cruelty of his followers, the moral indifference of the German character (which is an embedded racist theory in itself), but within the weaknesses inherent in our Judeo-Christian ethics and the way the Western world has arranged to manage them. And more importantly, he tells us that pretending that it is otherwise: that this is not the case, leaves us morally disarmed against the very same weaknesses that led to the European Holocaust and all others that have occurred since. Our denial simply disarms us against the kind of humanity we pretend not to know that we have really socially sanctioned and brought fully into being. 100 Stars.

This book is a very well-written, in-depth anaylsis of how the modern, "civilized" mindset enabled normal, everyday Germans (businessmen, professors, soldiers, journalists -- just like your average U.S. citizens) to either actively participate or stand by and do nothing while the leaders of their nation murdered millions of people (the vast majority of whom -- 14 million out of 20 million -- were political opponents, not Jews -- 6 out of 20 million).

As the U.S. government is currently murdering millions of people over in the Middle East, everyday Americans are standing around -- either supporting it or doing nothing. For instance 2.5 million people died in the U.S. invasion of Vietnam, tens of thousands of people still die each year in Laos from all of the leftover cluster bombs dropped there by the U.S. (look up "laos plain of jars"), and over 2 million people (500,000 of whom are children) have died in Iraq since the first Persian Gulf War as a result of economic sanctions and U.S. aerial strikes (look up "madeline albright iraq sanctions")--- this is just slightly under the number of Jews that the Nazi regime killed, and it's only three of the U.S.'s dozens of wars that took place during the 20th century.

This is the topic of this book -- what causes everyone to stand around and justify large scale, state sanctioned murder? Is it cowardice, cruelty, or something else?

This book provides a conceptual bridge between Hannah Arendt's famous "banality of evil" thesis and the more recent thesis presented by Giorgio Agamben that the concentration camp is the paradigm of political modernity. It has affinites with the post-holocaust ethics of Primo Levi and Judith Shklar as well. In the context of recent attempts to give torture and indefinite detention the imprimatur of law, Bauman's book serves as a reminder that formalizing or bureaucratizing these activities is not likely to humanize these practices-- for example, scientifically "humane" methods of execution or legally proscribed torture warrants-- but rather to erode moral resistance and sensibilities.

This book explains "sameness" and "otherness", two powerful dimensions in contempt and values, so clear a five year old can get it. Zygmund also talks about doubt. An unpleasant state of mind seeking comfort and where this human machinery (doubt/comfort) is pushing most of us.