From Strangers at Our Door (Zygmunt Bauman, 2016) pp107-12
With their morality blinded and struck deaf no wonder that ‘millions of Americans’, as shown in the recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, ‘believe that their side is basically benevolent while the other side is evil and out to get them’. Donald Trump, by far the most popular of the Republican candidates for the American Presidency, a man with a long and continually lengthening record of the dark rhetoric of racial and religious hatred, ‘us vs. them invective and refusal to denounce hate-filled speech for some of his supporters’, has been diagnosed by Emma Roller, a New York Times opinion editor, as ‘the perfect candidate for our viral age’. Why? A psychologist from the University of Hawaii found out that the most eagerly shared viral moments are those that ‘come directly from the unconscious’ While ‘hate, fear of the Other, anger they come directly from the nonconscious.’ Loners in front of a phone, tablet or laptop screen, with only ‘viral’ others present, seem to put reason together with morality to sleep, letting the normally controlled emotions off the leash.
Obviously, the Internet is not the cause of the rising numbers of morally blind and deaf internauts – but it greatly facilitates and beefs up that rise.
When seeking the root cause of the tendency under discussion, one needs to look beyond the tools, and unfold the motives of the tools’ users, as well as digging deeper into the reasons for their inclination to grasp enthusiastically the possibilities those tools offer. For the benefits of the new tools to be keenly embraced and joyfully put to use, there must already have been a still unsatisfied need/desire searching for instruments for its gratification. This need/desire is generated by a new mode of human cohabitation that renders inadequate or insufficiently efficient the extant know-how and the habitual conduct patterns it was meant to serve. In turn, the appearance of the new tools assists in lifting that need/desire to the level of an uncontested imperative through making the until recently dominant life modes look inferior: outdated, uncompetitive and all but redundant.
Taking a leaf from Byung-Chul Han’s suggestion, we have already characterized the recently emerged kind of society (still in the process of replacing its predecessor, the ‘society of discipline’) as one of ‘performers’ (that is, to deploy Louis Althusser’s terms, a society ‘interpellating’ its members first and foremost in their capacity as ‘performers’). Let me add now that, unlike the internauts who can be described as ‘loners in constant touch’, today’s performers perform their performances in constant competition and rivalry with each other. Being cast in the capacity of performer is the outcome of individualization: of the progressive erosion of communal bonds, leading to the vulnerability, volatility and eventual dismantling of integrated collectivities, abandoning therefore their individual members to the burdensome duties of self-definition, self-assertion and (total) self-care relying all along on their own resources, capabilities and industry. In the absence of alternative settings, all those duties need to be performed in the framework of the market. Being a performer therefore equals being involved in the market-centred buying/selling of commodities and it is their individual performance that the performers must bring to the market for sale, having first made it a sellable commodity: that is, attractive to its potential buyers. To do that, they must out-bid and out-sell the other sellers, whom they cannot but regard as actual or potential competitors in the essentially zero-sum game: because other people around – neighbours, workmates or passers – by have been destined to participate in the same game, they tend to be spontaneously suspected of being ill-intentioned, malevolent rivals and to continue to be so regarded until proven otherwise. The first reaction to the presence of an-Other tends therefore to be one of vigilance and suspicion – a moment of vague anxiety, of an impulse to search for an anchor, all the more nervously for the menace being under-defined. For the duration, following moral imperatives is suspended. Instead of prompting their awakening, reason advises circumspection: let the sleeping morality lie.
And so we are nowadays residing much of the time in a resurrected Hobbesian world of war of all against all. Perhaps we are not really there but it feels as if we are. Fear has many eyes, and danger has many entrances. Walls are spattered with holes as safe as threadbare nets rather than ramparts made of concrete. Life feels, indeed, nasty and brutish the more nasty and more brutish, the longer it lasts. Facebooked friends are fun for shouting together, but, alas, of little if any use when it comes to doing things together – not to mention in the moments (rare if you are lucky, plentiful if you are not) when it comes to experimentum crucis: when, in line with the advice offered by the immortal folk wisdom, they would need to deliver proof of being ‘friends indeed’ – for instance, in the next round of cuts, outsourcings, contractings out, redundancies. At such instants, you are left to stew in your own juice, and to discover that juice to be in horribly insufficient supply.
It feels like being a victim. Of what? Of circumstances over which you have little, if any, influence let alone control. We tend to call them ‘fate’. But calling them by this name only adds offence to an injury: you are not just a failure, but, to double your humiliation and the self-contempt that follows it, you are in addition a myopic, ignorant, or clumsy and blundering failure fate has no face, and, more often than not, you try to put a face on it in vain. To avoid this offence and to rescue something of their own dignity and self-respect, victims need to locate, pinpoint and name their victimizers; and the victimizers need to have recognizable faces susceptible to being located, pinpointed and name-attached.
Migrants, and particularly the fresh arrivals among them, meet all those conditions very well indeed.
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