it also asks how each of us shamefully compromise with power, often against our better judgments.
Yes. This raises the issue of complicity. As I discussed in the essay, there are ways in which I have been shaped to believe that looking at women with a dominating gaze or desiring women only for sexual pleasure is “normal.” Yet it is this process of “normalization” that produces a kind of “walking dead” mentality where many of my social practices (sexual desire being one, fixed gender role expectations being another) support the oppression of women. The process of normalization is often so effective that there isn’t much resistance coming from one’s “better judgment,” especially as one’s better judgment has already been defined by the terms of normalization.
In this case, one’s “better judgment” has already been compromised, has already become an extension of the power of normalization. Your use of the term “shameful” is important. Shame implies a powerful sense of disgrace. It is not limited to the assignment of blame, which is more like guilt. Shame suggests the sense of disrupting one’s ethical “certainty” or business as usual. After all, one can be guilty without ever feeling shame. So violence, for me, has to be attended to at those levels where we are going about our business as if we are not doing violence to other individuals.
The fact that we don’t hear cries of pain doesn’t let us off the hook. Ethical discourse and practice must be imbued with an effort to remain honest, especially about one’s own ethical shortcomings and the pain and suffering that we cause others.
A critique of violence must include an understanding that one doesn’t escape the many ways in which one perpetuates violence—violence against those who we may never see face to face, violence against those who are closest to us, violence against the earth, and perhaps even violence against one’s own sense of self-integrity.
Violence is all around us. Yet we prefer to remain asleep—the walking dead. For me, personally, the more I become aware of the magnitude of violence in our world, what many of us would rather deny or not see, the more I enter into that space of the “dark night of the soul,” a place where dread and hopelessness reside. The objective, though, is to continue, to remain awake, to keep fighting for a better world even as one endures the dark night of the soul.
FOUR
THE REFUGEE CRISIS IS HUMANITY’S CRISIS
Refugees have been stripped of their humanity and denied their “inalienable” rights.
“The world is now full,” Zygmunt Bauman once wrote. “There is nowhere left to map, nowhere to run.” The late sociologist and critical theorist dedicated his life and writings to the problem of the refugee but not simply out of academic curiosity. Having lived through some of the worst episodes in political history, he came to embody the intellectual refugee, endlessly in search of a safe place he might call “home.” But what does the figure of the refugee really show us today? And does it reveal more about our prejudices than we care to consider? This conversation took place against the backdrop of the Syrian refugee crises, which for Bauman revealed more broadly a crisis of the political and philosophical imagination and the limits of our tolerability.
Brad Evans interviews Zygmunt Bauman
May 2, 2016
Zygmunt Bauman was emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Leeds, UK, until his death in 2017. His many books included Retrotopia and Strangers at Our Door, both published by Polity Press.
Brad Evans: For over a decade you have focused on the desperate plight of refugees. Your work draws particular attention to the many indignities and insecurities the refugee faces on a daily basis. You have also stressed how the problem is not entirely new and must be understood in a broader historical context. With this in mind, do you think the current refugee crises engulfing Europe represent yet another chapter in the history of flight from persecution, or is there something different taking place here?
Zygmunt Bauman: It does seem like “yet another chapter,” though as with all political problems, which all have histories, something is added to the contents of its predecessors. In the modern era, massive migration itself is not a novelty, nor is it a sporadic event. It is in fact a constant, steady effect of the modern mode of life, with its perpetual preoccupation with order-building and economic progress. Those two qualities in particular act as factories endlessly capable of producing “redundant people,” those who are either locally unemployable or politically intolerable and are therefore forced to seek shelter or more promising life opportunities away from their homes.
It’s true that the prevalent direction of migration has changed following the spread of the modern way of life from Europe, its place of origin, to the rest of the globe. As long as Europe remained the only “modern” continent of the planet, its redundant populations kept being unloaded onto the still “premodern” lands—recycled into colonist settlers, soldiers, or members of colonial administration. Indeed, up to sixty million Europeans are believed to have left Europe for the two Americas, Africa, Australia during the heyday of colonial imperialism.
Starting from the middle of the twentieth century, however, the trajectory of migration took a U-turn. During this time, the logic of migration changed as it was dissociated from the conquest of the lands. The migrants of the postcolonial era have been and still are exchanging inherited ways of eking out an existence, now destroyed by the triumphant modernization promoted by their former colonizers, for the chance of building a nest in the gaps of those colonizers’ domestic economies.
On top of that, however, there is a rising volume of people forced out from their homes, particularly in the Middle East and in Africa, by the dozens of civil wars, ethnic and religious conflicts, and sheer banditry in the territories the colonizers left behind in nominally sovereign, artificially concocted “states” with little prospects of stability but enormous arsenals of weaponry supplied by their former colonial masters.
Hannah Arendt once used the term “worldlessness” to define those conditions where a person doesn’t belong to a world in which they matter as human beings. This seems to be equally resonant in describing the plight of contemporary refugees. Might the problem here be our framing of the debate in terms of “security”—that of either the refugees or their destinations?
Part of the issue is the way in which the political world is framed and understood. Refugees are worldless in a world that is spliced into sovereign territorial states and that demands identifying the possession of human rights with state citizenship. This situation is further compounded by the fact that there are no countries left ready to accept and offer shelter and a chance of a decent life and human dignity to the stateless refugees.
In such a world, those people who are forced to flee intolerable conditions are not considered to be “bearers of rights,” even those rights supposedly considered inalienable to humanity. Forced to depend for their survival on the people on whose doors they knock, refugees are in a way thrown outside the realm of “humanity,” as far as it is meant to confer the rights they aren’t afforded. And there are millions upon millions of such people inhabiting our shared planet.
As you rightly point out, refugees end up all too often cast in the role of a threat to the human rights of established native populations, instead of being defined and treated as a vulnerable part of humanity in search of the restoration of those same rights of which they have been violently robbed.
There is currently a pronounced tendency—among the settled populations as well as the politicians they elect to state offices—to transfer the “issue of refugees” from the area of universal human rights into that of internal security. Being tough on foreigners in the name of safety from potential
