Winter Week 9 - Bauman, Giddens

Question 1

How does Bauman connect modernity and genocide?

Answer 1

-the Holocaust showed what the rationalizing, designing, controlling dreams and efforts of modern civilization are able to accomplish if not mitigated, curbed or counteracted

Question 2

Explain whether emotion or bureaucracy sustains long term violence?

Answer 2

• people can be manipulated into fury, but fury cannot be maintained for 200 years
• emotions and their biological basis, have a natural time course, ex. can sometimes be moved by sympathy
• thorough, comprehensive, exhaustive murder required the replacement of the mob with a bureaucracy, the replacement of shared rage with obedience to authority

Question 3

Explain the idea of rational violence.

Answer 3

• their nature could not be changed, they could not be improved or re-educated
• free from emotions and purely rational
• dehumanization of the objects of bureaucratic operation

Question 4

Which elements of modernity helped make the Holocaust happen?

Answer 4

1. powerful centralized state; state being in command of a huge, efficient bureaucratic apparatus
2. state of emergency; extraordinary wartime condition, which allowed hat government and the bureaucracy it controlled to get away with things which could, possibly, face more serious obstacles in time of peace
3. the passive acceptance of those things by the population at large
   - bureaucracy, dehumanization, hierarchization, scientific management

Question 5

Explain: Bauman’s division of labour.

Answer 5

• the substitution of technical for a moral responsibility
• new morality is decided by following orders rather than using critical thought
• ethical indifference to the effects of your labour

Question 6

What is Gidden’s stance of whether we have moved into post-modernity?

Answer 6

• we have not ‘moved beyond’ modernity to postmodernity, but rather, that modernity has become radicalized
• ex. development of abstract systems

Question 7

How has modernity effected trust and personal relations? (Giddens)

Answer 7

• we have to believe in the legitimacy of this anonymous other, the bureaucracy, corporations, the police (blind trust) because trust in a community we identify with that will help us is gone, but we still need a sense of security, ex. trust neighbours to watch house while your away  trust house alarm to call police
• influences individuation, from being part of my community to indentifying as Canadian, or with a brand
• the constant interaction with cold, abstract systems, leads to a push back in the form of a need for warm, real, intimate relationships

Question 8

Define/explain: the jaggernaut, risk and danger (Giddens)

Answer 8

• a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent but which also threatens to rush out of our control and which could rend itself asunder
• crushes those who resist it
• sometimes seems to have a steady path, but there are times when it veers away erratically in directions we cannot foresee
• -riding the Jaggernaut is not always a terrible experience, we are part of this, ex. through buying things
• so long as the institutions of modernity endure, we shall never be able to control either completely either the path or the pace of the journey