Modernity and the Holocaust

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Distance, technology, abstraction, are all modern tools that help overcome people’s aversion to acts that their morality would otherwise never let them commit. The analogies go beyond the most extreme act of killing. A person who would never dream of harming a cat can still play the role of consumer in a factory-farming system that tortures and brutalizes millions of animals. A person who would never steal a penny and gives charity regularly can go to work for a credit card company that systematically cheats and impoverishes the most vulnerable people in society. Massive injustices can be committed in which no one feels responsible, since everyone’s most rational option is to simply take part while not think about it too much.

The book has been seen as a criticism of modernity, as one of Bauman's arguments is that it was modernity that led to The Holocaust, and that despite several decades passing, the modernity has not yet come to terms with this tragedy. [1] [2] Contents [ edit ]The philosophical-anthropological scrutiny of documents and archival material leads Stone to the conclusion that, despite all historiographic trends, the analysis of antisemitism qua ideology remains essential to the understanding of the Nazi program of total extermination and detects a strong support of this approach in works belonging to the ‘voluntaristic turn’, according to which the Nazi rule was exercised by consensus, rather than terror (pp. 4, 162, 285). Junkers, Gabriele (2013). "The Empty Couch: The Taboo of Ageing and Retirement in Psychoanalysis". Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-59861-3 . Retrieved 24 April 2020.

Prof. Bauman rezygnuje z honorowego doktoratu ('Prof. Bauman resigns honorary doctorate')". Gazeta Wyborcza (in Polish). 19 August 2013 . Retrieved 10 June 2014. Stone deepens the cut between eugenics and Nazi ideology by demonstrating convincingly the false compatibility between the Nazis’ apocalyptic view of racial struggle, on the one hand, and biology (even under the flawed form of the study of racial difference), on the other. His inquisitive scrutiny of an impressive amount of relevant literature shows that eugenics and antisemitism were not necessarily related and that the Holocaust was motivated more by the latter than by the former. Behind the Nazi anti-Jewish actions Stone finds not the trumpeted triumph of modern eugenics, science and technology, but mystical antisemitism and political conspiracy theories. Modernity and the Holocaust is a 1989 book by Zygmunt Bauman published by Polity Press. As the title implies, it explores the relationship between modernity and The Holocaust. [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]with Leonidas Donskis): Moral Blindness: The Loss of Sensitivity in Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity. ISBN 978-0-7456-6274-9 PART 2: Rationality, obedience, agency 3. From understanding victims to victims' understanding: rationality, shame and other emotions in Modernity and the Holocaust 4. Warsaw Jews in the face of the Holocaust: 'trajectory' as the key concept in understanding victims' behaviour 5. Visual representations of modernity in documents from the Lodz Ghetto The essence of modernity is to suppress base human instincts and emotions, enshrining reason in their place. We tend to think of this as obviously a good thing, but this is a dangerous simplification. As Hannah Arendt noted, for example, it is a normal human emotion is to feel basic pity for the pain of other people when they are in distress, especially the young, weak or enfeebled. The Nazi system succeeded in suppressing this “animal pity” in the German population through the effective use of bureaucracy and technology. Germany society under the Nazis put people at a distance from the Jews, while slowly transforming them into an abstraction on spreadsheets and databases. They were spoken about in dehumanizing ways and framed by German leaders as effectively a problem to be solved. While people may have had individual Jewish friends, the abstracted “Jew” became first a public health issue, then later a unit of production for national industry. The only difference is that instead of producing fridges or helicopters, the German industrial machine and all its components was geared to producing dead human beings. Alone, antisemitism offers no explanation of the Holocaust." It seems that, during the first part of the 20th century, had one asked "which European nation is most likely to mount an extermination campaign against Jews," the informed bystander would have thought of France, or a number of others, before Germany. Even during Hitler's regime, the Third Reich's standard-bearers were disappointed in the low level of zeal among German citizens for their anti-Jewish projects. Bauman does not shrink from calling this an anti-Jewish, anti-semitic crime. But he makes clear that anti-semitism was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause: Stone does not leave aside the tremendous impact of the Holocaust on Western culture, our obsession with memory, or the post-war hypocrisy and fascination toward the genocide of the Jews. His impressive number of books and articles already recommends him as an authority in the field, a remarkable analyst of what he calls, following Dan Dinner, the event that ‘shattered the elementary bases of civilization and culture’ (p. 286).

Brad Evans and Henry A. Giroux, "Self-Plagiarism and the Politics of Character Assassination: the Case of Zygmunt Bauman", CounterPunch, 27 August 2015. The people who went out of their way to save Jews from being murdered were the “freaks” of German society. They broke the law and transgressed every norm and value that they had been taught, betraying the world that raised them in the process, as well as their friends and colleagues. Baumann argues that the existence of people like this even in a totalitarian society like Nazi Germany suggests an inherent moral compass in human beings that even the most effective bureaucracy will struggle to completely eradicate. It reminds me that when Chelsea Manning revealed a video of innocent people being murdered by laughing U.S. soldiers in Baghdad, many people genuinely believed that Manning was the one who had committed the moral transgression in this situation. In 2015 the University of Salento awarded Bauman an honorary degree in Modern Languages, Literature and Literary Translation. [46] Plagiarism allegations [ edit ] As I started reading this, I realized it was going to be a great, thought-provoking book. As I read on, I realized it may be one of the most important works of non-fiction I've ever read.Hermeneutics and Social Science: Approaches to Understanding. London: Hutchinson. ISBN 0-09-132531-5 As a conclusion, the author warns us that, instead of increasing our optimism and comfort (entailed by deepening the knowledge of human condition), reflection on the Holocaust should ‘chill us to the bone’ as we increasingly realize that the resources employed for the ‘final solution’ are similar to those so familiar to us today – ‘censuses and the categorization of people, technology, medicalization, “biopower”’ – and that our ‘rational’ lives are in fact impregnated with ‘magical’ thinking which ‘under the right circumstances can be put to terrible use: fear of immigrants and disease, hygiene fetishism, body-culture obsession’ (p. 287). Commodification: The decline of all facets and aspects of life to the items of monetary exchange, utilization and consumption. This lesson of the Holocaust is about the danger of modernity itself: how our bureaucratic, technological, rational society can lead perfectly normal people to collectively commit monstrosities. Rather than representing a breakdown of modern civilization, Bauman argues that the organized and largely emotionless mass killing of the Holocaust represented its chilling pinnacle. Upon reading this book it became disturbingly clear that the bloodless, bureaucratic manner of thinking which made the Holocaust possible is still very much active today. El holocausto es la muestra de lo que se puede hacer cuando se disponen de los medios para lograr un objetivo y concentrar todos los recursos para conseguirlo.

Palese, E. (2013). "Zygmunt Bauman. Individual and society in the liquid modernity". SpringerPlus. 2 (1): 191. doi: 10.1186/2193-1801-2-191. PMC 3786078. PMID 24083097. T]he more we discover about the penetration of Nazi antisemitic indoctrination into every sphere of life in the Third Reich, the more it becomes clear that whilst policy-making and individual decisions may have been made on an ad hoc basis, they were made within a framework of vicious, paranoid Jew-hatred... The Holocaust was ‘modern’ insofar as it took place in a ‘modern’ society, was organized bureaucratically and relied in part on technological killing methods... [Yet] the deep essence of the Holocaust was an outburst of transgressive violence that owed more to fantasy-thinking than to the logic of reason, ‘biopower’ or the ‘dialectic of Enlightenment’. But, as I show, thinking about the Holocaust in these terms does not exculpate modern society altogether; rather, the rationalized structures of modernity not only channelled but created the fantasies of Nazism (p. 7). Keith Tester, Michael Hviid Jacobsen, Sophia Marshman, Bauman Beyond Postmodernity: Conversations, Critiques and Annotated Bibliography 1989–2005. Aalborg: Aalborg University Press; ISBN 87-7307-783-6 With a new potentially genocidal war at the centre of Europe, Zygmunt Bauman’s warnings in Modernity and the Holocaust that this could happen again are chillingly borne out.' – William Outhwaite, Studia Litteraria et Historica Subjectivity, Proximity and Responsibility in Zygmunt Bauman’s Thought’ – Prof. Spiros Makris (University of Macedonia)

Summary

a b c Arte, ¿líquido?. Bauman, Zygmunt, 1925–2017., Ochoa de Michelena, Francisco. Madrid: Sequitur. 2007. ISBN 978-84-95363-36-7. OCLC 434421494. {{ cite book}}: CS1 maint: others ( link) Dennis Smith, Zygmunt Bauman: Prophet of Postmodernity (Key Contemporary Thinkers). Cambridge: Polity; ISBN 0-7456-1899-5 Memories of Class: The Pre-History and After-Life of Class. London/Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul. ISBN 0-7100-9196-6 with Szymon Chodak, Juliusz Strojnowski, Jakub Banaszkiewicz): Systemy partyjne współczesnego kapitalizmu [The Party Systems of Modern Capitalism]. Warsaw: Książka i Wiedza.