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  • Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity by Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis
  • David A. Meir
Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. By Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis. Malden, MA: Polity, 2013. Pp. iv + 218. $22.50. ISBN 978-0745662746.

In recent years, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and philosopher Leonidas Donskis have explored aspects of Europe’s shifting sense of identity and insecurity as it enters its own brave new world. Anchored in an Eastern European cultural milieu, Bauman [End Page 478] and Donskis exchange reflections on the implications of a new normality in everyday life guided by an all-pervasive “insensitivity to human suffering” (7). The title uses a phrase from Bauman’s earlier works, “liquid modernity,” to signify not so much social uncertainty as a narcissistic shifting of moral sands. The authors present what they see as the two-fold consequence of instantaneous gratification achieved through a superficial connectivity—e.g., Facebook, email, and texting—specifically the elevation of a materialist capitalism and an evasive moral imperative.

Intellectual iconoclasts in their own right, Bauman and Donskis draw upon a rich field of cultural-intellectual social critiques characterizing twentieth-century discourse but incapable of grasping the liquidity of the twenty-first. Donskis bridges Anatole France’s piercing analysis of social blindness with those of Milan Kundera and Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil; similarly, Bauman redirects Aldous Huxley’s focus from an impending totalitarianism to the “consumerist society, an eminently Western creation” (21). Dehumanizing prisoners in Abu Ghraib by otherwise ordinary people—conceptually paralleling Christopher Brown’s Ordinary Men (1993)—fits well with dehumanized killing by drones, mass surveillance, and the voluntary surrendering of personal privacy. According to Bauman, Emmanuel Levinas recognized these trends in the refocusing of social attention away from pending anxieties about the future and towards a present-time, euphoric, delusional ecstasy “of being in control.” In the process, questions about good and evil disappear along with an active historical memory (31). Donskis finds historical parallels of our contemporary adiaphorization in Greek Stoicism and in the French Revolution, which Bauman refines further as moments when the heroic was displaced by the elevated, degraded individual.

Bauman and Donskis integrate numerous suggestive reference points into their exchange. Bauman’s passing reference to Ludwig Wittgenstein evokes the shadow of logical positivism while his use of Theodor W. Adorno reminds one of the sociological implications of totalitarianism. For both, literature provides the clearest field in which the political has mutated towards a technocracy in the guise of “democracy and free choice” (45). Similar to Huxley’s work, Donskis finds in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s literary work from the 1930s a dystopian world devoid of its classical heritage and humanistic impulses. Bauman detects a dystopian theme in the more contemporary fiction of Michel Houellebecq. Houellebecq’s Possibility of an Island (2007) appears as the intellectual successor of George Orwell, Zamyatin, and Huxley. Houellebecq’s liquid dystopia portrays a society addicted to sexual gratification, material excess, personal fame, and a masochistic critique of itself through humor. Although Bauman and Donskis return several times to Houellebecq’s Possibility for inspiration, their comments appear equally inspired by Houellebecq’s earlier work The Elementary Particles (2000), which is not mentioned.

As communicative discussants, Bauman and Donskis explore the declining political manifestations of a voice of moral authority through a plethora of examples. Human [End Page 479] rights advocates of the stature of Andrei Sakharov failed to materialize during either the so-called Occupy movement or the Arab Spring. Facebook dominated discussions of power while Twitter could claim a Nobel Prize nomination. Each vied for dominance in manipulating the final public record, transferring an unprecedented volume of data into the hands of millions. Enamored by the growing international crisis, Bauman projects that their greatest impact would be against a “tyrannical or authoritarian regime” whereas democracies could channel popular discontent into the new social media. “Greed, rapacity and ostentatious consumption” signifies the objectives and existential uncertainty which defined the precariat—a blending of middle and working classes (63–64). Jean Baudrillard and Lutz Niethammer perceived within these political phenomena an unquestioning and uncritical embrace of every media sensation. Houellebecq...

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