Zygmunt Bauman (born 19 November, 1925), pictured above in a 2011 photograph
‘What is wrong with the society we live in, said Cornelius Castoriadis, is that it stopped questioning itself. This is a kind of society which no longer recognizes any alternative to itself and thereby feels absolved from the duty to examine, demonstrate, justify (let alone prove) the validity of its outspoken and tacit assumptions.
This does not mean, though, that our society, has suppressed (or is likely to suppess, barring a major upheaval) critical thought as such. It has not made its members reticent (let alone afraid) of voicing it either. If anything, the opposite is the case: our society — a society of “free individuals” — has made the critique of reality, the disaffection with “what is” and the voicing of disaffection, both an unavoidable and an obligatory part of every member’s life-business. As Anthony Giddens keeps reminding us, we are all engaged nowadays in “life-politics”; we are “reflexive beings” who look closely at every move we take, who are seldom satisfied with its results and always eager to correct them. Somehow, however, that reflexion does not reach far enough to embrace the complex mechanisms which connect our moves with their results and decide their outcomes, let alone the conditions which hold such mechanisms in full swing. We are perhaps more “critically predisposed,” much bolder and intransigent in our criticism than our ancestors managed to be in their daily lives, but our critique, so to speak, is “toothless,” unable to affect the agenda set for our “life-political” choices. The unprecedented freedom which our society offers its members has arrived, as Leo Strauss warned a long while ago, together with unprecedented impotence.’
This does not mean, though, that our society, has suppressed (or is likely to suppess, barring a major upheaval) critical thought as such. It has not made its members reticent (let alone afraid) of voicing it either. If anything, the opposite is the case: our society — a society of “free individuals” — has made the critique of reality, the disaffection with “what is” and the voicing of disaffection, both an unavoidable and an obligatory part of every member’s life-business. As Anthony Giddens keeps reminding us, we are all engaged nowadays in “life-politics”; we are “reflexive beings” who look closely at every move we take, who are seldom satisfied with its results and always eager to correct them. Somehow, however, that reflexion does not reach far enough to embrace the complex mechanisms which connect our moves with their results and decide their outcomes, let alone the conditions which hold such mechanisms in full swing. We are perhaps more “critically predisposed,” much bolder and intransigent in our criticism than our ancestors managed to be in their daily lives, but our critique, so to speak, is “toothless,” unable to affect the agenda set for our “life-political” choices. The unprecedented freedom which our society offers its members has arrived, as Leo Strauss warned a long while ago, together with unprecedented impotence.’
—from Liquid Modernity (2000)
