Solidarity has been preached incessantly of late and practised almost nowhere. No one picketed Land of Leather in defence of its 800 workers. Instead Gordon Brown exhorted us to ‘make a reality of the vision of a global society in which we create global civic institutions that turn words of friendship into bonds of human solidarity stronger than any divisions between us.’ Yet no one from his ‘global citizenship corps’ was there ‘ready to serve a neighbour or a even stranger in need of help and hope’ when Barclays laid off 2,500 staff in the UK (1). Nicolas Sarkozy, expressing his frustration with Israel perhaps, has also called on solidarity, like an external power which could force us to become better:

The time has also come for the solidarity dictated by geography, history and culture to drive the peoples of Europe and the Mediterranean to share the responsibilities, decide unanimously, and recognise equal rights and duties for all….It is in the Mediterranean that the religions of the Book were born. It is around the Mediterranean and nowhere else that they must be reconciled (2).

Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O’Connor echoed Pope John Paul II in calling for a ‘globalization of solidarity’ and Barack Obama casts his solidarity net wide enough for: ‘young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled’ (3). Even actress Juliet Stephenson exhorted us to stop being just so selfish and show some compassion:

We don’t even know we’re born. We think we are having a hard time when we get a parking ticket. The Palestinians are suffering unimaginable horror and grief and terror (4).

But no one sent aid to Hamas (or Israel for that matter), no one went there to join their fight, and hardly anyone challenged the right of Western governments to dictate a two-state solution on the people of the Middle East. Instead protestors in London smashed up a Starbucks, a potent symbol of global consumerism long before it was falsely accused of funding the Israeli military. Solidarity these days is all about appearing to be above self-interest, putting the greed of the noughties behind us. Fashionable morality – despite the best efforts of national governments and central banks to keep us spending– is all about saving. Saving for a rainy day, saving each other, saving our souls, saving the environment. This is a morality of conspicuous denial not consumption.

Buying morality

Zygmunt Bauman’s latest book, Does ethics have a chance in a world of consumers?, may then have already passed its sell-by date, at least in the question posed by the title. The concern he addresses is how to ground a contemporary morality in a world of ‘liquid-modernity’: a ‘deregulated and privatized setting focused on consumerist concerns and pursuits’ (p.49). In other words, how to make us love each other and not just our greedy selves. He examines how this might have been achieved in the past – in terms of Hobbes and Freud – through society imposing a ‘duty of solidarity’ on the ‘selfish, aggressive inclinations of its members’ or – following Levinas – by society ‘tempering their endemic and boundless altruism’: giving them license to be greedy in other words.

Bauman sees the central problem as one of how to treat strangers as oneself, as other-love, how in short society imposes morality on our behaviour. In his broad schema of history, in the beginning - the pre-modern period - we only produced what we needed to consume and all was good. Then – during modernity – we produced, produced, to a Protestant work ethic, and deferred consumption’s pleasures till later. Now – so-called liquid-modernity – we consume, endlessly, fruitlessly, like a 21st century Tantalus. Advertising has replaced the old rules and standards of civil society with its relentless pressure towards self-fulfilment and the materialisation of love: ‘coercion is being replaced by seduction’ (p.50).

The seeming liberation afforded the shopper in the boutique of the post-modern is just that of course. Consumption cannot create meaning, its gratifications as fleeting as they are instant. There is no consumo ergo sum: what is consumed is literally spent up, destroyed. That destruction and ‘wastage’ was relatively unproblematic when morality was seen as a matter of what we did, how we acted, the values we produced, but now that it is seen as a matter of who we are, what we eat and how we feel, waste has become a moral absolute, a new Evil. To consume is to eat into a stock of resources now seen - given our relative estrangement from the process of production, given the naturalisation of the market system - as altogether limited and natural. If we accept that premise, then to consume more than some unavoidable minimum is to deny others, yes, but worse still is to exploit nature with who knows only what consequences. Four legs good, two legs bad. Contemporary morality, therefore, the new ethics, becomes a matter not of how we choose to behave but a question of adjudicating on what behaviour is acceptable and what is not: a matter of restraining human activity; a morality of restraint.

Choking greed

On the one hand stands the accused: man. On the other his victim: nature. The crime? Trying to use reason to remove ‘uncertainty’ from human life, namely ‘floods and droughts, famines that struck without warning, and contagious diseases’. This ‘civilising process’ – Bauman’s scare quotes, not mine - was about ‘defending its subjects against the fearsome powers of nature’ or, if you allow Bauman’s rather considerable gloss, ‘managing human affairs through the exclusion of everything unmanageable and thereby undesirable.’ From here it is but a hop, skip and a jump to claiming that ‘the modern state was about the activity of cleansing and the purpose of purity.’ And from there he arrives at his goal: the Holocaust was made possible by ‘the uncontested rule of instrumental reason.’ He believes the Holocaust was the result of Enlightenment thinking.

Exactly the reverse is the truth. The Holocaust was the result of unbridled irrationality. A vicious reaction of racial thinking under challenge from those who wanted to organise society rationally. A moment’s reflection on the Nazi’s affinity for the natural, for blood and soil, mountains and Heimat, above all their love of the organic as opposed to the systematic (5), should cast a pretty long shadow on Bauman’s claim that the Holocaust was the inevitable outcome of man’s attempts (which have defined humanity’s entire history remember) to increase his power over nature.

But such is Bauman’s distaste for man’s arrogance and greed that he believes that the most significant lesson of the Holocaust is how it reveals ‘the genocidal potential endemic to our forms of life.’ We are all potential Himmlers in the eyes of nature. Our longing for order, certainty and safety leads us to value the end of personal survival above anyone who might get in the way: any means will do, genocide included. He employs the Holocaust - as he did in his Modernity and the Holocaust - as a moral absolute unsullied by any values-relativism: as a way of providing a grounding or underpinning for at least some kind of system of morality. It was Wrong without question and therefore those who claim to have learned from it are Right.

Where once the Holocaust was something that its survivors wanted to put behind them and forget, now it is the only reference point that can seem to cast light on moral ambiguity. Darfur - a Holocaust: we must oppose it. Rwanda - a Holocaust. Gaza - not quite a Holocaust but at least a Ghetto. Wherever the weak are seen to be suffering at the hands of the strong - Holocaust. The weak, confused, the dirty and the naked: Holcaust victims. The strong, purposeful, clean and uniform: Nazis. Nature: Holocaust victim. Man: Nazi.

Elevating elites

Morality then for Bauman exists in the uncertain territories of the victims. It is avowedly irrational, natural and organic:

Morality is nothing but an innately prompted manifestation of humanity - it does not serve any ‘purpose’ and most surely is not guided by the expectation of profit, comfort, glory, or self-enhancement.

This is a morality that stands in the way of attempts to improve the living standards of humanity because all such attempts are seen as being at the expense of nature. It is undoubtedly a morality on the side of the poor and the weak - at least so long as they remain that way. It is on the side of those who have put self-interest and other worldly things to one side, who have achieved ‘moral elevation.’ Bauman in the chapter ‘Hurried Life’ advocates ‘lifelong education’ to fashion citizens from consumers, as if we were all addicts in recovery from our addition to a ‘civilization of excess’. You can feel the hair shirts and cold baths.

These educators teach an ethics of behaviour that has at its heart a radical misanthropy. Their project is to tell us how to live. This means making ethics not a question of what the good life should be (oriented towards the possible) but a question of living ethically, a question of how to behave (oriented towards the necessary). This of course dictates that those who behave badly must appear before the ethics committee, the ethical task force, the standards board…

Who is it that can restrain us, I mean retrain us? The US no longer has hegemony he says - and Americans still consume too much, are too contaminated with greed. China is notably not worth mentioning for Bauman - the Chinese produce too much one imagines. That leaves the Europeans as his somewhat unlikely saviours. Not me and you of course, ordinary people living in Europe, but Bauman and the likes of Vaclav Havel, Habermas and so on: European intellectuals. Why? Because of the experience of the Holocaust, Europeans’ supposed ability to overcome local antagonisms in a ‘solidarity of strangers’ because they have learned how ‘to live with the prospect of permanent cultural diversity’, a lesson ‘the rest of the world most badly needs’.

So, there we have it. Europeans - some at least - have a privileged moral insight, a spiritual assignment in the words of George Steiner, which qualifies them to teach the rest of the world a badly needed lesson (6). This is an elite morality that wants to tell us what to do, how to live, on the basis of some inherited moral birthright. That’s bad enough of course, but it is also a morality that consciously rejects the role of human reason in determining what sort of lives we should lead, what we value and what we don’t.

Producing ethics

It is also a morality that disdains the increases in the standards of living that amounted to real social mobility in the 20th century – conspicuous consumption was at least in principle open to us all and social standing did not depend solely on one’s inheritance, one’s family name. While trying to better oneself in terms of buying bigger fridges was certainly limited in its ability to create a universe of moral meaning, it did at least keep man and his activity at the centre of human values and aimed to remove mankind from the limits of nature.

Now materialism is a dirty word - in terms of producing and consuming things both. We are told to accept that ‘Nature’ has limited resources and that we must restrain our greedy desires. Fashionable misanthropy goes so far as to even question the morality of human reproduction - are we not just creating more greedy mouths that an overpopulated world cannot afford to feed?

Instead of the exercise of human reason and purposeful activity towards goals we believe will benefit us we are offered an ethics of denial and restraint. Solidarity with strangers is not to be based on any rational equation - say, I defend your right to free speech on the basis that if we don’t all have it then none of us will - but grounded in a belief that not practising solidarity leads to Auschwitz. It is also a solidarity that asks us to accept supposed natural limits:

The bitter truth of deep inequality has been disguised by an era of cheap imported goods and the anyone-can-make-it celebrity myth. An American model of each individual citizen for himself, each individual citizen the architect of his own life’s trajectory, has conquered old notions of solidarity, not needed in good times (7, my emphasis).

We should reject such an idealised solidarity that wants to determine our behaviour and values holding hands in a hovel over being able to afford a bigger fridge. Real solidarity is more than sympathy with others, more than empathy. It is a matter of believing that supporting others in their endeavours, their struggles, is of benefit to oneself. Who would trust an altruistic ‘solidarity’? Can we afford to rely on the charity of others?

Our humanity is expressed, is constituted, not through restraint, not through holding back, but by pushing ahead, testing boundaries and overstepping limits: making a world for fit for us to live in. Which means that human morality is about increasing our power over nature, over limits, while reducing the power of man over man. It means becoming more social and less natural. It means more exercise of human reason and not less. It means taking up Kant’s challenge, sapere aude, daring to know and not being afraid to leave ‘each man free to make use of his reason in matters of conscience’ (8).

(1) Gordon Brown, Speech to the Knesset, 21 July 2008
(2) Nicolas Sarkozy, Paris summit of the Union for the Mediterranean, 14 July 2008
(3) Barack Obama, Acceptance Speech, 5 November 2009
(4) Gaza conflict: Stars demand end to Israeli bombardment, Ham & High, 15 January 2009
(5) Victor Klemperer, The Language of the Third Reich, continuum London 2000. In particular, he notes how the Nazis used das System to refer to the system of the Weimar Constitution, the target of their organic revolution (p91).
(6) Klemperer, op. cit., quotes Rosenberg in The Myth of the Twentieth Century rejecting a ‘single, universally valid truth’ in favour of an ‘organic truth’ which ‘emerges from the blood of a particular race and is only valid for that race’. It is grounded in the “mysterious centre of the soul of a people and of a race (geheimnisvollen Zentrum der Volks- und Rassenseele)’ (p93).
(7) Polly Toynbee, We will all remember where we were today - even in lazily cynical Britain, Guardian, 20 January 2009
(8) Immanuel Kant, What is Enlightenment?