A World Beyond Morality

In his little book, Alone Again, Zygmunt Bauman summarizes his characteristic themes: We live in a liquid world, nothing permanent, nothing solid, nothing predictable.

Typically pungent, Bauman points to “the overall tendency to dismantle, deregulate and dissipate the once solid and relatively lasting frames in which the concerns and efforts of most individuals were inscribed. Jobs, once seen as ‘for life’, are more often that not now temporary and may disappear virtually without notice, together with the factories or offices or bank branches which offered them. Even the skills which the jobs required are ageing fast, turning overnight from assets into liabilities. Being prudent and provident, thinking of the future, becomes ever more difficult, as there is little sense in accumulating skills for which tomorrow there may be no demand, or saving money which tomorrow may lose much of its purchasing power. At the moment young men and women enter the game of life, none can tell what the rules of the game will be like in the future. Their only certainty is that the rules will change many times over before the game is finished” (12).

What happens to morality in this kind of world? Bauman appeals to Levinas to argue that “To take a moral stance means to assume responsibility for the Other; to act on the assumption that the well-being of the Other is a precious thing calling for my effort to preserve and enhance it, that whatever I do or do not do affects it, that if I have not done it, it might not have been done at all, and that even if others do or can do it this does not cancel my responsibility for doing it myself. . . And this being-for is unconditional (that is, if it is to be moral, not merely contractual) – it does not depend on what the Other is, or does, whether s/he deserves my care or repays in kind. One cannot conceive of an argument that could justify the renouncing of moral responsibility – putting it in cold storage, lending or pawning” (15).

But if all relationships are temporary and conditional, there can be no morality as Levinas describes it. Bauman writes, “Ours is the age of what Anthony Giddens perceptively described as ‘pure relationship’ which ‘is entered for its own sake, for what can be derived by each person’ and so ‘it can be terminated, more or less at will, by either partner at any particular point’; of ‘confluent love’ which jars with the ‘for-ever, one-and-only’ qualities of the romantic love complex so that ‘romance can no longer be equated with permanence,’ of ‘plastic sexuality,’ that is sexual enjoyment ‘severed from its age-old integration with reproduction, kinship and the generations’.We can see that to keep the options open, to be free to move is the guiding principle of all three. ‘I need more space’ is the curt yet common excuse used by all those who do move away – meaning ‘I do not wish others to intrude, such others as I wished yesterday to intrude; I wish to be concerned solely with myself, with what is good and desirable for me.’ Whoever seeks more space, must be careful not to commit themselves, and particularly not to allow commitments to outlast the pleasure which can be derived from them” (15).

Our world doesn’t just make the moral life difficult. It pressures us to evacuate our lives of moral commitment entirely: “the ‘I need space’ strategy militates against any moral stance. It denies the moral significance of even the most intimate interhuman action. As a result, it exempts core elements of human interrelationships from moral evaluation. It neutralizes the parts of human existence which the neutralizing mechanisms of bureaucracy and business could not (or did not need, or wish to) reach” (16).

Moralistic exhortations don’t get to the problem, because the problem lies in conditions that make moral strategies seem nonsensical: “The odds against taking a moral stance and sticking to it through thick and thin are formidable – all the socially generated pressures sap the emotional bonds between people, favouring free-floating agents. Nothing short of changing the odds will regain for morality the areas now ‘emancipated from moral constraints’” (17).

To live a life of moral commitment is, Bauman suggests, to swim against very powerful tides.