Liquid Modernity, part 1

Zygmunt Bauman's interpretation of our age.

Has the present epoch moved beyond Modernity into what might be called a post-modernity, or do the major themes and structures that characterize our Western world reflect a later-stage modernity?

This is a question that caused somewhat of an interesting disagreement in the world of academic sociology. While academic sociology is at present mostly a useless and snobbish leftist field, not only do the roots of sociology have many traditionally conservative themes (see Max Weber, Karl Mannheim, Emil Durkheim, Robert Nisbet), but there are still debates that are interesting to those seeking more “meta” understandings of our time.

I was thinking about this question before I realized it was a debate. I was thinking about it in the context of the so-called Great Reset, and that phrase of sinister effect: you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy. Conservatives expressed outrage at such a “socialist” conspiracy to bring the world under the thumb of global elites, and severely undermine the conservative activist’s ability to acquire additional consumer goods over time.

However, people probably will be happy, or at least what we label happiness in our time. Which is probably better described as gratification, not happiness. The 20th century has shown that the masses can be bought off with increasing capacities to consume, and a vast “market” of goods and, thanks to technology, “services” that numb them to the overall transformation of an economy of widespread ownership to centralized prosperity management.

The twentieth century is the American century and, in the mind of the everyday mass conservative American, it is the fruition and zenith of Western history. It is in this century that the means of production have shifted ownership from the family and community-level organizations, to the international absent-ownership corporate model. It is not even the owners (the stockholders) who make decisions, but the executives screened, selected, and hired by the managers of stockholder ownership shares.

Yes, people can be made to be “happy”—to be distractingly gratified— by creating a society build off the amusement park model. We can live the perpetual life of a post-80s college student, never maturing, never struggling, living within the bounds of a campus set up for our enjoyments. Ownership implies judgment and responsibility, it implies thinking ahead multiple generations, it implies recognizing the temptations inherent in immediate gratification, and it implies an impediment to mindless consumption. In this sense, and perhaps we could elaborate in a future post, the Great Reset is a consolidation of themes present in American cultural life that have been decades in the making.

So then, in the twenty-first century, do we find continuity with the nineteenth century sociological tendencies, or has there been a clear break? While in the realm of philosophy, truth, and reality, post-modernism certainly reflects a new revolution against objectivism, reason, and science, there are aspects of our present moment that reveal similarity. Specifically, there is similarity in our eagerness to participate in constant change, to reject the holistic stability that was sought as a social end in pre-modern socio-political arrangements.

The Polish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has grappled with these dynamics and, in his book Liquid Modernity (no easy reading!), expressed his own conclusion that:

The society which enters the twenty-first century is no less modern than the society which entered the twentieth; the most one can say is that it is modern in a different way.

It is the aim of the book to deal with the similarities and dissimilarities between what might be called classical modernism and the present neo-modernism. Bauman labels our present modernism as liquid modernism because of the particular characteristics of our moment that most obviously differentiate us from the modernism of our great grandparents. It is World War II that is an obvious dividing line between these two modernisms.

What makes us thoroughly modern, as opposed to post-modern, according to Bauman, is our “compulsive and obsessive, continuous, unstoppable, forever incomplete modernization;" the overwhelming and ineradicable, unquenchable thirst for creative destruction (or of destructive creativity, as the case might be).”

Bauman sees in both the cultural transformations of the nineteenth and twenty-first century a uniting spirit that seeks to mindlessly overcome what has been deemed stale and to call into question any structures that have not perpetually justified their existence before the jury of the world-changers.

Bauman perceives a unity in the modern project of “clearing the site in the name of a new and improved design; of dismantling, cutting out, phasing out, merging or downsizing, all for the sake of a greater capacity for doing more of the same in the future.” This is important because, “change” has become a sort of orthopraxy of the modern activist. We make it plain to our youth that they ought to seek ways of “changing the world” rather than preserving it or carrying the old ways with them into the future unknown.

What makes a society modern for Bauman is the theme of constant recreation, of scrapping yesterday and making something new. “Being modern came to mean [then], as it means today, being unable to stop and even less able to stand still. We move and are bound to keep moving…because of the impossibility of ever being gratified. The horizon of satisfaction, the finishing line of effort and the moment of restful self-congratulation move faster than the fastest of runners.”

That’s a small summary of Bauman’s case for similarity. But he also is adamant that there are ways of differentiating the present modernity. These differentiations are obvious to those ready to see, but they were always baked into the tendencies of the modern spirit, even in its classical expression. There are two features that separate our “liquid modernity” from the classical modernity, and from these we discover the reason for Bauman’s label “liquid.”

First, contrary to classical modernism, there is no goal in mind. Classical modernism had variations in motivation: economic equality, classlessness, a certain basic standard of living, the guidance of human behavior by reason rather than religion. The architects of the new age sought some specific “telos of historical change, a state of perfection to be reached tomorrow or next year… some sort of good society, just society, and conflict-free society.” Sometimes these were expressed in economic terms, sometimes in ethical, other times in purely political. But nevertheless, what characterized classical modernity’s relation with telos is that they had objectives to be sought.

Liquid modernity, being liquid and not solid, denies the importance of some stable goal on the horizon. Change for its own sake, change as a prerequisite for tomorrow’s change, a constant flow and chaos without longevity. These are much more characteristic of our present version of the modern spirit. Our great great grandparents were modern because they thought they could bring about a better stability than the tensions of the falling medieval world, but we now don’t give longterm stability any meaningful role in our socio-economic pursuits; we don’t even think longterm.

Bauman haș taken his phrase from one of the most moving passages of Karl Marx, when he observed that the Ancient Regime was crumbling to the forces of economic modernization:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

(It is my own conviction that whereas modern man, including both socialists and classical liberals, praised the liquidation of the old world and its ancient ties, Marx’s observation can be seen as true, and as a Great Tragedy in the unfolding of world history).

Secondly, whereas classical modernism emphasized the social whole in its quest to make a better world, arguing that “we are all in this together” and that there was an objective (materialistic and naturalistic) reality to which man ought to conform to be a productive citizen, liquid modernity has let this understanding of the world fall to pieces. Society could be improved via legislation, central planning, and the conformity of the individual to the grand social plan. There was a just society in the minds of the social reformers.

Liquid modernity on the other hand emphasizes “human rights” much more than the objective just society; there has been a fragmentation in the social order where reality, justice, emancipation, and improvement are all individually determined, rather than socially determined. Bauman states that there has been a “refocusing [of the] discourse on the right of individuals to stay different and to pick and choose at will their own models of happiness and fitting life-style.”

This interpretation may immediately strike the reader as ridiculous specifically on the basis that individual liberties have vanished from our midst. Do we not live in a frightening moment of sinister group pressure to hold the correct opinions on various cultural themes? The answer to this must be elaborated in part two of this essay, but the answer lies in the inability to align the interests of political power with the narratives of radical individualism. Radical individualism, which animates the spirit of liquid modernity, must always result in the very thing it pretends to most oppose: totalitarianism.