When I visited Zygmunt Bauman for the first time, I was astonished by what seemed a contradiction between the person and his work. Arguably the most influential European sociologist, someone whose anger about the state of the world can be felt in his every line, Bauman enchanted me with his wry sense of humour. His charm was disarming, his joie de vivre infectious.
Following his retirement from the University of Leeds in 1990, Zygmunt Bauman had published book after book at an almost alarming pace. The themes of these books stretch from intimacy to globalization, from reality TV to the Holocaust, from consumerism to cyberspace. He has been called the ‘head of the anti-globalization movement’, the ‘leader of the Occupy movement’ and the ‘prophet of postmodernism’. He is read the world over and considered a truly exceptional scholar in the field of the humanities, whose fragmentation into separate, sharply delineated and jealously protected areas of research he ignored with the insatiable curiosity of a Renaissance man. His reflections do not distinguish between the political and the personal. Why we have lost the capacity to love, why we find it hard to make moral judgements: he investigates the social and personal aspects of these questions with the same thoroughness.
It was this epic view of the world that fascinated me when I began to read his books. It is impossible to remain indifferent to what Zygmunt Bauman writes, even if one does not agree with one or other of the points he makes – or, indeed, even if one disagrees with him altogether. Whoever engages with his work comes away viewing the world, and him- or herself, differently. Zygmunt Bauman described his task as that of making the familiar unfamiliar and the unfamiliar familiar. This, he said, is the task of sociology as such.
This task can only be approached by someone who has the whole human being in view and who moves beyond his or her particular discipline and into philosophy, psychology, anthropology and history, art and literature. Zygmunt Bauman is not someone for minute details, statistical analyses and polls, figures, facts or projections. He draws his pictures with a broad brush on a large canvas, formulates claims, introduces new theses into discussions and provokes disputes. In terms of Isaiah Berlin’s famous typology of thinkers and writers – based on the dictum of the Greek poet Archilochos that ‘The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing’ – Zygmunt Bauman is both hedgehog and fox.1 He introduced the concept of ‘liquid modernity’ to describe our present times, wherein all aspects of life – love, friendship, work, leisure, family, community, society, religion, politics and power – are transformed at unprecedented speed. ‘My life is spent recycling information’, he once said. That sounds modest until one appreciates the amount of material involved.
In a time marked by fear and insecurity, when many people are being taken in by the simple solutions offered by populism, critical analysis of the problems and contradictions in society and the world is needed more than ever. Such analysis is an essential precondition if we are to be able to think about alternatives, even if these are not within easy reach. Zygmunt Bauman, erstwhile communist, never stopped believing in the possibility of a better society, despite all the dreams that have failed. His interest was never in the winners, but in the losers, the uprooted and disenfranchised, the growing numbers of the underprivileged – not only poor people of colour in the Global South, but also members of the Western workforce. The fear that the ground that seemed rock solid during the good old post-war years is giving way is today a global phenomenon, and the middle classes are not spared from it. In a climate that asks you to accept the given and to understand the world, following Leibniz, as the best of all possible worlds, Zygmunt Bauman defends the moment of utopia – not as a blueprint for some future castle in the air but as a motivation to improve the conditions under which we live here and now.
Zygmunt Bauman welcomed me to his house in Leeds, England, for four long conversations on his life’s work. The enchanting front garden, with its moss-covered chairs and its table overgrown by shrubs, borders on a busy road, as if to illustrate that it is only through contradiction that things become fully clear. At 90 years of age, Zygmunt Bauman was tall, slim and as lively and perspicacious as ever. He accompanied his deliberations with extensive gesticulation, as if he were a conductor; in order to emphasize a point, he slammed his fist down on his armrest. When talking about the prospect of dying, he did so with the composure of someone who, as a soldier in the Second World War, a Polish Jew, a refugee in Soviet Russia and a victim of the anti-Semitic purge of Poland in 1968, had experienced at first hand the dark side of the ‘liquid modernity’ whose theoretician he had become.
On each occasion, the coffee table was overloaded with croissants and biscuits, canapés and fruit tarts, cookies and crab mousse, accompanied by hot and cold drinks, juices and Polish ‘kompot’. While my host shared his thoughts with me, he also never forgot to remind me to help myself to all the delights that had been set out in front of me.
Zygmunt Bauman talked about life and the attempts to shape it that are consistently thwarted by fate; he spoke also about the effort to remain, amid all this, someone who can look at himself in the mirror. His hope for me, he said, grasping both my hands as he bade me farewell, was that I would live to be as old as him, because every age, despite all its tribulations, has its beauty.
Zygmunt Bauman died on 9 January 2017 at his home in Leeds.
These final conversations with Bauman will, I hope, be taken up and continued by the reader with other people and in other places.
Peter Haffner, January 2017
Note
1 1 Isaiah Berlin, The Hedgehog and the Fox: An Essay on Tolstoy’s View of History (London: Orion Books, 1992), p. 3.
Love and Gender Choosing a partner: why we are losing the capacity to love
Let us begin with the most important thing: love. You say that we are losing the capacity to love. What brings you to that conclusion?
The trend of looking for partners on the internet follows the trend towards internet shopping. I myself do not like to go to shops; most things, such as books, films, clothes, I buy online. If you want a new jacket, the website of the online shop shows you a catalogue. If you are looking for a new partner, the dating website also shows you a catalogue. The pattern of relationships between customer and commodity becomes the pattern of relationships between human beings.
How is this different from earlier times, when you met your future life companion at the village fete or, if you lived in a city, at a ball? There were personal preferences involved in that as well, weren’t there?
For people who are shy, the internet is certainly helpful. They do not have to worry about blushing when they approach a woman. It is easier for them to make a connection; they are less inhibited. But online dating is about attempting to define the partner’s properties in accordance with one’s own desires. The partner is chosen according to hair colour, height, build, chest measurement, age, and their interests, hobbies, preferences and aversions. This is based on the idea that the object of love can be assembled out of a number of measurable physical and social properties. We lose sight of the decisive factor: the human person.
But even if one defines one’s ‘type’ in this way, isn’t it the case that everything changes as soon as one meets the actual person? That person, after all, is much more than the sum of such external properties.
The danger is that the form of human relationships assumes the form of the relationship one has towards the objects of daily use. I do not vow to be faithful to a chair – why should I vow that I shall keep this as my chair until my dying day? If I do not like it any longer, I buy a new one. This is not a conscious process, but we learn to see the world and human beings
