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tm_666's review against another edition
5.0
"Modern genocide, like modern culture in general, is gardening."
a gut-wrenching must read. changed my worldview forever.
a gut-wrenching must read. changed my worldview forever.
caitastrophe's review against another edition
5.0
Fascinating perspective on something so many of us put in a vacuum or block out as incomprehensible.
nate_s's review against another edition
5.0
As I started reading this, I realized it was going to be a great, thought-provoking book. As I read on, I realized it may be one of the most important works of non-fiction I've ever read.
Most of us have a stock set of answers concerning what caused the Holocaust. It's driving forces all seem pretty self-evident: anti-semitism, totalitarianism, etc. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman sets out to uncover the major lesson the world has yet to learn from it, namely that such a crime could only have been committed within modern civilization. The major hallmarks of modern society he targets are the supremacy of rationality, bureaucratic techniques of organization, and rapidly advancing technology; and with these three instruments at their disposal, the social engineers of the modern state. All of these, in their ascendance, are unique to the modern world, and enable a unique effectiveness never before dreamed of.
Rather than a regressive attack on modern civilized society, like some spontaneous, bloodthirsty pogrom, Bauman argues that the Holocaust was the climax of all that makes that society distinctive: rationalistic management techniques, bureaucratically administrated nation-states, assembly-line style division of labor, social engineering projects. The bloodless systems by which Holocaust was carried out were routinely, unceasingly efficient and rational. Nothing about the phenomena of bureaucracy, technology, and rationality would prevent such a crime from happening again, argues Bauman. We have not learned our lesson. Especially in the developed world, we heartily embrace the means by which the Holocaust was accomplished, and actually assume these phenomena are protecting us from such crimes.
Bauman writes:
"At no point of its long and tortuous execution did the Holocaust come in conflict with the principles of rationality...The most shattering lesson deriving from the analysis of the "twisted road to Auschwitz' is that - in the last resort - the choice of physical extermination...was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means-ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application...The Nazi revolution was an exercise in social engineering on a grandiose scale.
"From the Enlightenment on, the modern world was distinguished by its activist, engineering attitude toward nature and toward itself." Science was a power "allowing its holder to improve on reality, to reshape it according to human plans and designs, and to assist it in its drive to self-perfection...Human existence and cohabitation became objects of planning and administration; like garden vegetation or a living organism, they could not be left to their own devices, lest should they be infested by weeds or overwhelmed by cancerous tissues...the murder of Jews was an exercise in the rational management of society."
To my mind, this "modern, rational flavor" of the Holocaust is a quality not well understood. At the street level, I have never heard anyone explain it as a phenomenon of modernity. Even listening to some teachers I've known, you would think the Nazis and German society were all lunatic monsters (Bauman frequently cites Hannah Arendt against this assumption), and that the road to a Nazi-style extermination is best tracked through the rise of racism or some other sort of "hatred." It would appear that progressives (and that’s almost everyone, on some level) are especially loath to consider the Holocaust as a thoroughly modern event, because from within the ideology of progress we are required to assume that progress is improvement and vice versa, and clearly institutions of modernity are vast technical improvements over those of the pre-modern order. Thus the modern state and its tools must be essentially better - in every way - than pre-modern society, or else we would have to give over our progressivism. (This accounts for much of the often sneering, superior tone with which modern people refer to peoples of the past.) Progressivism must instinctively grab hold of the easier explanation of racism/antisemitism to fully explain the Holocaust, but must ignore that modern, technically superior "civilization" and its architects and managers, nation-builders, social engineers, etc, operating by fully rational designs and means, were central to the Holocaust's execution; and that all of these have only become more advanced with time. Nothing like the Holocaust ever took place before modernity, nor could it have.
"Alone, antisemitism offers no explanation of the Holocaust." It seems that, during the first part of the 20th century, had one asked "which European nation is most likely to mount an extermination campaign against Jews," the informed bystander would have thought of France, or a number of others, before Germany. Even during Hitler's regime, the Third Reich's standard-bearers were disappointed in the low level of zeal among German citizens for their anti-Jewish projects. Bauman does not shrink from calling this an anti-Jewish, anti-semitic crime. But he makes clear that anti-semitism was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause:
"Only in its modern, 'scientific,' racist form, the age-long repellence of the Jews has been articulated as an exercise in sanitation...Before that, the Jews were sinners; like all sinners, they were bound to suffer for their sins, in an earthly or other-worldly purgatory - to repent and, possibly, to earn redemption...Cancer, vermin, or weed cannot repent...There is nothing to punish them for. By the nature of their evil, they have to be exterminated..." It is impossible, he says "to conceive of such an idea separately from the engineering approach to society, the belief in the artificiality of social order, institution of expertise and the practice of scientific management of human setting and interaction... the exterminatory version of anti-Semitism... could occur only in an advanced state of modernity."
In one of my favorite passages Bauman unveils the assessment modern civilization seems to have of itself; its "etiological myth" (and this recalls that superior tone I mentioned):
"Western civilization has articulated its struggle for domination in terms of the holy battle of humanity against barbarism, reason against ignorance, objectivity against prejudice, progress against degeneration, truth against superstition, science against magic, rationality against passion. It has interpreted the history of its ascendance as the gradual yet relentless substitution of human mastery over nature for the mastery of nature over man. It has presented its own accomplishment as, first and foremost, a decisive advance in human freedom of action, creative potential and security. It has identified freedom and security with its own type of social order: Western, modern society is defined as civilized society, and a civilized society in turn is understood as a state from which most of the natural ugliness and morbidity, as well as most of the immanent human propensity to cruelty and violence, have been eliminated or at least suppressed."
But:
"...the overall non-violent character of modern civilization is an illusion. More exactly, it is an integral part of its self-apology and self-apotheosis...It is not true that our civilization exterminates violence... If modernity is indeed antithetical to the wild passions of barbarism, it is not at all antithetical to efficient, dispassionate destruction, slaughter, and torture... terrorism and torture are no longer instruments of passions; they have become instruments of political rationality."
In modernity, violence is merely shunted to the margins, or contained in pockets that are made invisible to mainstream society. One of the most shocking qualities about the Holocaust is just this invisibility- both its secrecy, and the bureaucratic, technological means by which this secrecy was accomplished. According to Bauman, the "functionalist" school of Holocaust studies has won the day- the project was not intended from the beginning as a mass extermination, but the requirements of rational calculus eventually and by stages yielded the conclusion that extermination was cheaper and easier than relocation. The success of the program would depend on as little public knowledge as possible- if a general outcry was to be prevented, the Jews would need to be kept unaware of their fate, as would the general population, to the greatest possible degree. As horrors became progressively known, it was with a well-managed social distance between populations which eroded the likelihood of such an outcry. This secrecy was maintained by techniques of communication and the technology of mass killing which enabled even the people directing crowds and pushing the buttons never to be confronted with the results of their actions, or even to know what those results were. A new, bureaucratically cleansed language emptied reality of meaning: gas chambers were "baths," blood and excreta caused by execution methods were "fluids" to be managed.
The efficient liquidation of masses of people at minimum expense was accomplished through the "meticulous functional division of labor, and the substitution of technical for a moral responsibility" that occurs within modern society and workplace. Links in a bureaucratic chain may have no knowledge of the tasks set before those lower in the hierarchy. Those in command, unlike a premodern state in which the master knows everything the journeyman does only better, may have no practical or functional knowledge about how a project gets from beginning to end, or only an "abstract, detached awareness" of it. "The kind of knowledge best expressed in statistics."
"Would workers in the chemical plants that produced napalm accept responsibility for burned babies?... Would such workers even be aware that others might reasonably think they were responsible? Of course they wouldn't, and there is no bureaucratic reason why they should. The splitting of the baby-burning process in minute functional tasks and then separating the tasks from each other have made such awareness irrelevant... remember as well that it is chemical plants that produce napalm, not any of their individual workers." In this state of affairs “only the quantifiable success or failure matter, and seen from that point of view, the tasks do not differ.”
"The result is the irrelevance of moral standards for the technical success of the bureaucratic operation.” The pretense of moral thinking is retained, but morality is redefined in terms of the rational-technical instead of good and evil. One is a "good" worker when one carries out his duty with excellence and according to plan, in submission to the expert prescriptions of the workplace authority. The tasks of individual workers are narrowly defined, as in an assembly line, reducing the possibility of moral assessment of the task, and making it interchangable with others. One can manage personnel in a weapons plant, or manufacture a necessary widget, with roughly the same skillset as in a car dealership.
"In such a society the effects of human action reach far beyond the 'vanishing point' of moral visibility." A missile is fired with the push of a button, thousands of miles away, and pointing in the opposite direction of the target, with no visible evidence of the destruction available to the button-pusher. We need no longer be confronted with the effects of what we do. Tasks that once required soul-searching and moral consideration are divided up into many discrete parts and parcelled out to various persons, who are kept distant from their effects, thus rendering the old-fashioned 'moral sensibility' inoperative. In this fashion reprehensible things can be done (with maximum efficiency), even while making any later possibility of assigning blame very difficult.
These examples of technologically and bureaucratically induced distance are related to the phenomenon of "social distance" necessary to keep people indifferent to suffering. The process of staging successively greater social distance between Jews and non-Jews was essential for deadening any moral impulses the average German may have had for the impoverishment, incarceration, and destruction of their Jewish neighbors. Bauman notes how, while the average German did feel moral revulsion at the idea of mass murder, and routinely made exceptions in their generalized anti-semitism, they were much more likely to support laws/policies targeting Jews because it was against “the conceptual Jew” which Nazi propaganda sought their support. The contrast between their inter-personal experience with Jewish neighbors and the Nazi-engineered outcry over the conceptual Jew did not occur to them as cognitive dissonance. Nazi language and imagery had succeeded in using the political, the generalized, and the distant to annul real-life affection and day-to-day inter-personal knowledge among neighbors. Bauman employs the infamous Milgram experiment to show how social distance and monolithic authority can annul a person's normal moral inhibitions against cruelty. Reading the Milgram results back into the Holocaust, he explains this cruelty not as (per Durkheim) the creation of a new, bloodthirsty impulse in people, but the immobilization of the normal, socially reinforced moral impulses. So Nazism didn't create thousands of monsters out of normal people, it simply created the social distance (reinforced by the "officialness" of policy) that would reduce moral feeling to indifference or even cooperation.
Likewise, this engineering of social distance helps us understand yet another of the most bone-chilling aspects of the Holocaust: the participation of the victims in the demise of their own people, and of themselves. "The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of their rulers...the oppressors encountered surprisingly little difficulty in soliciting the rationally motivated complicity of their victims." Native French Jews felt themselves lucky as Yiddish speaking immigrants were deported. In exchange for the privilege of staying momentarily alive, the upper classes and the most skilled were eager to provide the desk-work necessary to manage the rounding up and destruction of their kin. Class antagonisms were easily manipulated to keep people suspicious of one another, despite all alike being targeted for destruction. Betrayal of kinsmen was a norm. All of this was part of the bureaucratically planned and administered drive toward efficiency- the less expense to the Reich in this massive undertaking, the better. But more importantly, it was an efficient management technique which wielded social distance to keep people indifferent to the fate of their neighbors, so that the rulers would encounter minimum resistance, and minimum costs.
I think I'm going to break off here and finish up, because... well, you could just go on forever. The only final thing I will mention is the one point at which Bauman recommends something: he believes that pluralism is the social character best suited to prevent the kind of social distance, depersonalization, and moral deconstruction that the totalitarian state wields to accomplish its ends. I tend to agree. Rather than trying eliminate the political or racial Other, we ought to assume some form of that Other needs to be a present, countervailing pressure so that various parties and pressure groups are held in tension. We should assume our own group can get out of hand and oppressive just as soon as any other could, and those whose party gets its way rarely find themselves in the driver's seat getting exactly what they want, and are often subjected to violent power dynamics within their own party, ones they find odious, and perhaps even regret working with in the end.
So to close this absurdly long review, one very much "catches the drift" during this flood of sociological scrutiny- the Nazi world was not a world populated by bloodthirsty monsters bent on carrying out the goals of their irrational hatred. It was populated by those we would not notice as much different then ourselves- going about the workday, playing with children, using reason and technology to solve problems, and trusting in big, mostly invisible institutions to administer public life. We inhabit roughly the same world they did, and the reason that we are not perpetrating a crime on the scale of the Holocaust is simply that there has not been the necessary convergence of certain modern phenomena yet. People in our time and place are not particularly more moral, or more capable of resisting a Holocaust-like event, than Germans were in 1933. Modernity has trundled (or soared) on, and we mostly continue to assume that its distinctives are 'normal,' and are the only type of priorities one could possibly employ in the success of a society. This conviction largely transcends political differences, with liberals and conservatives each slandering each other as "irrational," and angrily shrieking for 'change' in the leadership of the bureaucracy and technocracy, but not substantially disagreeing that it's bureaucracy and technocracy that are best suited to defining and governing the world.
This is a difficult, technical book that will be read by only a specialized audience, often parsing intramural debates of sociology, but it's so important that I felt the need to give my review unrestricted length, in case it's the closest someone gets to encountering this evaluation of modernity. Highly recommended.
Most of us have a stock set of answers concerning what caused the Holocaust. It's driving forces all seem pretty self-evident: anti-semitism, totalitarianism, etc. In Modernity and the Holocaust, Zygmunt Bauman sets out to uncover the major lesson the world has yet to learn from it, namely that such a crime could only have been committed within modern civilization. The major hallmarks of modern society he targets are the supremacy of rationality, bureaucratic techniques of organization, and rapidly advancing technology; and with these three instruments at their disposal, the social engineers of the modern state. All of these, in their ascendance, are unique to the modern world, and enable a unique effectiveness never before dreamed of.
Rather than a regressive attack on modern civilized society, like some spontaneous, bloodthirsty pogrom, Bauman argues that the Holocaust was the climax of all that makes that society distinctive: rationalistic management techniques, bureaucratically administrated nation-states, assembly-line style division of labor, social engineering projects. The bloodless systems by which Holocaust was carried out were routinely, unceasingly efficient and rational. Nothing about the phenomena of bureaucracy, technology, and rationality would prevent such a crime from happening again, argues Bauman. We have not learned our lesson. Especially in the developed world, we heartily embrace the means by which the Holocaust was accomplished, and actually assume these phenomena are protecting us from such crimes.
Bauman writes:
"At no point of its long and tortuous execution did the Holocaust come in conflict with the principles of rationality...The most shattering lesson deriving from the analysis of the "twisted road to Auschwitz' is that - in the last resort - the choice of physical extermination...was a product of routine bureaucratic procedures: means-ends calculus, budget balancing, universal rule application...The Nazi revolution was an exercise in social engineering on a grandiose scale.
"From the Enlightenment on, the modern world was distinguished by its activist, engineering attitude toward nature and toward itself." Science was a power "allowing its holder to improve on reality, to reshape it according to human plans and designs, and to assist it in its drive to self-perfection...Human existence and cohabitation became objects of planning and administration; like garden vegetation or a living organism, they could not be left to their own devices, lest should they be infested by weeds or overwhelmed by cancerous tissues...the murder of Jews was an exercise in the rational management of society."
To my mind, this "modern, rational flavor" of the Holocaust is a quality not well understood. At the street level, I have never heard anyone explain it as a phenomenon of modernity. Even listening to some teachers I've known, you would think the Nazis and German society were all lunatic monsters (Bauman frequently cites Hannah Arendt against this assumption), and that the road to a Nazi-style extermination is best tracked through the rise of racism or some other sort of "hatred." It would appear that progressives (and that’s almost everyone, on some level) are especially loath to consider the Holocaust as a thoroughly modern event, because from within the ideology of progress we are required to assume that progress is improvement and vice versa, and clearly institutions of modernity are vast technical improvements over those of the pre-modern order. Thus the modern state and its tools must be essentially better - in every way - than pre-modern society, or else we would have to give over our progressivism. (This accounts for much of the often sneering, superior tone with which modern people refer to peoples of the past.) Progressivism must instinctively grab hold of the easier explanation of racism/antisemitism to fully explain the Holocaust, but must ignore that modern, technically superior "civilization" and its architects and managers, nation-builders, social engineers, etc, operating by fully rational designs and means, were central to the Holocaust's execution; and that all of these have only become more advanced with time. Nothing like the Holocaust ever took place before modernity, nor could it have.
"Alone, antisemitism offers no explanation of the Holocaust." It seems that, during the first part of the 20th century, had one asked "which European nation is most likely to mount an extermination campaign against Jews," the informed bystander would have thought of France, or a number of others, before Germany. Even during Hitler's regime, the Third Reich's standard-bearers were disappointed in the low level of zeal among German citizens for their anti-Jewish projects. Bauman does not shrink from calling this an anti-Jewish, anti-semitic crime. But he makes clear that anti-semitism was a necessary, but not sufficient, cause:
"Only in its modern, 'scientific,' racist form, the age-long repellence of the Jews has been articulated as an exercise in sanitation...Before that, the Jews were sinners; like all sinners, they were bound to suffer for their sins, in an earthly or other-worldly purgatory - to repent and, possibly, to earn redemption...Cancer, vermin, or weed cannot repent...There is nothing to punish them for. By the nature of their evil, they have to be exterminated..." It is impossible, he says "to conceive of such an idea separately from the engineering approach to society, the belief in the artificiality of social order, institution of expertise and the practice of scientific management of human setting and interaction... the exterminatory version of anti-Semitism... could occur only in an advanced state of modernity."
In one of my favorite passages Bauman unveils the assessment modern civilization seems to have of itself; its "etiological myth" (and this recalls that superior tone I mentioned):
"Western civilization has articulated its struggle for domination in terms of the holy battle of humanity against barbarism, reason against ignorance, objectivity against prejudice, progress against degeneration, truth against superstition, science against magic, rationality against passion. It has interpreted the history of its ascendance as the gradual yet relentless substitution of human mastery over nature for the mastery of nature over man. It has presented its own accomplishment as, first and foremost, a decisive advance in human freedom of action, creative potential and security. It has identified freedom and security with its own type of social order: Western, modern society is defined as civilized society, and a civilized society in turn is understood as a state from which most of the natural ugliness and morbidity, as well as most of the immanent human propensity to cruelty and violence, have been eliminated or at least suppressed."
But:
"...the overall non-violent character of modern civilization is an illusion. More exactly, it is an integral part of its self-apology and self-apotheosis...It is not true that our civilization exterminates violence... If modernity is indeed antithetical to the wild passions of barbarism, it is not at all antithetical to efficient, dispassionate destruction, slaughter, and torture... terrorism and torture are no longer instruments of passions; they have become instruments of political rationality."
In modernity, violence is merely shunted to the margins, or contained in pockets that are made invisible to mainstream society. One of the most shocking qualities about the Holocaust is just this invisibility- both its secrecy, and the bureaucratic, technological means by which this secrecy was accomplished. According to Bauman, the "functionalist" school of Holocaust studies has won the day- the project was not intended from the beginning as a mass extermination, but the requirements of rational calculus eventually and by stages yielded the conclusion that extermination was cheaper and easier than relocation. The success of the program would depend on as little public knowledge as possible- if a general outcry was to be prevented, the Jews would need to be kept unaware of their fate, as would the general population, to the greatest possible degree. As horrors became progressively known, it was with a well-managed social distance between populations which eroded the likelihood of such an outcry. This secrecy was maintained by techniques of communication and the technology of mass killing which enabled even the people directing crowds and pushing the buttons never to be confronted with the results of their actions, or even to know what those results were. A new, bureaucratically cleansed language emptied reality of meaning: gas chambers were "baths," blood and excreta caused by execution methods were "fluids" to be managed.
The efficient liquidation of masses of people at minimum expense was accomplished through the "meticulous functional division of labor, and the substitution of technical for a moral responsibility" that occurs within modern society and workplace. Links in a bureaucratic chain may have no knowledge of the tasks set before those lower in the hierarchy. Those in command, unlike a premodern state in which the master knows everything the journeyman does only better, may have no practical or functional knowledge about how a project gets from beginning to end, or only an "abstract, detached awareness" of it. "The kind of knowledge best expressed in statistics."
"Would workers in the chemical plants that produced napalm accept responsibility for burned babies?... Would such workers even be aware that others might reasonably think they were responsible? Of course they wouldn't, and there is no bureaucratic reason why they should. The splitting of the baby-burning process in minute functional tasks and then separating the tasks from each other have made such awareness irrelevant... remember as well that it is chemical plants that produce napalm, not any of their individual workers." In this state of affairs “only the quantifiable success or failure matter, and seen from that point of view, the tasks do not differ.”
"The result is the irrelevance of moral standards for the technical success of the bureaucratic operation.” The pretense of moral thinking is retained, but morality is redefined in terms of the rational-technical instead of good and evil. One is a "good" worker when one carries out his duty with excellence and according to plan, in submission to the expert prescriptions of the workplace authority. The tasks of individual workers are narrowly defined, as in an assembly line, reducing the possibility of moral assessment of the task, and making it interchangable with others. One can manage personnel in a weapons plant, or manufacture a necessary widget, with roughly the same skillset as in a car dealership.
"In such a society the effects of human action reach far beyond the 'vanishing point' of moral visibility." A missile is fired with the push of a button, thousands of miles away, and pointing in the opposite direction of the target, with no visible evidence of the destruction available to the button-pusher. We need no longer be confronted with the effects of what we do. Tasks that once required soul-searching and moral consideration are divided up into many discrete parts and parcelled out to various persons, who are kept distant from their effects, thus rendering the old-fashioned 'moral sensibility' inoperative. In this fashion reprehensible things can be done (with maximum efficiency), even while making any later possibility of assigning blame very difficult.
These examples of technologically and bureaucratically induced distance are related to the phenomenon of "social distance" necessary to keep people indifferent to suffering. The process of staging successively greater social distance between Jews and non-Jews was essential for deadening any moral impulses the average German may have had for the impoverishment, incarceration, and destruction of their Jewish neighbors. Bauman notes how, while the average German did feel moral revulsion at the idea of mass murder, and routinely made exceptions in their generalized anti-semitism, they were much more likely to support laws/policies targeting Jews because it was against “the conceptual Jew” which Nazi propaganda sought their support. The contrast between their inter-personal experience with Jewish neighbors and the Nazi-engineered outcry over the conceptual Jew did not occur to them as cognitive dissonance. Nazi language and imagery had succeeded in using the political, the generalized, and the distant to annul real-life affection and day-to-day inter-personal knowledge among neighbors. Bauman employs the infamous Milgram experiment to show how social distance and monolithic authority can annul a person's normal moral inhibitions against cruelty. Reading the Milgram results back into the Holocaust, he explains this cruelty not as (per Durkheim) the creation of a new, bloodthirsty impulse in people, but the immobilization of the normal, socially reinforced moral impulses. So Nazism didn't create thousands of monsters out of normal people, it simply created the social distance (reinforced by the "officialness" of policy) that would reduce moral feeling to indifference or even cooperation.
Likewise, this engineering of social distance helps us understand yet another of the most bone-chilling aspects of the Holocaust: the participation of the victims in the demise of their own people, and of themselves. "The rationality of the ruled is always the weapon of their rulers...the oppressors encountered surprisingly little difficulty in soliciting the rationally motivated complicity of their victims." Native French Jews felt themselves lucky as Yiddish speaking immigrants were deported. In exchange for the privilege of staying momentarily alive, the upper classes and the most skilled were eager to provide the desk-work necessary to manage the rounding up and destruction of their kin. Class antagonisms were easily manipulated to keep people suspicious of one another, despite all alike being targeted for destruction. Betrayal of kinsmen was a norm. All of this was part of the bureaucratically planned and administered drive toward efficiency- the less expense to the Reich in this massive undertaking, the better. But more importantly, it was an efficient management technique which wielded social distance to keep people indifferent to the fate of their neighbors, so that the rulers would encounter minimum resistance, and minimum costs.
I think I'm going to break off here and finish up, because... well, you could just go on forever. The only final thing I will mention is the one point at which Bauman recommends something: he believes that pluralism is the social character best suited to prevent the kind of social distance, depersonalization, and moral deconstruction that the totalitarian state wields to accomplish its ends. I tend to agree. Rather than trying eliminate the political or racial Other, we ought to assume some form of that Other needs to be a present, countervailing pressure so that various parties and pressure groups are held in tension. We should assume our own group can get out of hand and oppressive just as soon as any other could, and those whose party gets its way rarely find themselves in the driver's seat getting exactly what they want, and are often subjected to violent power dynamics within their own party, ones they find odious, and perhaps even regret working with in the end.
So to close this absurdly long review, one very much "catches the drift" during this flood of sociological scrutiny- the Nazi world was not a world populated by bloodthirsty monsters bent on carrying out the goals of their irrational hatred. It was populated by those we would not notice as much different then ourselves- going about the workday, playing with children, using reason and technology to solve problems, and trusting in big, mostly invisible institutions to administer public life. We inhabit roughly the same world they did, and the reason that we are not perpetrating a crime on the scale of the Holocaust is simply that there has not been the necessary convergence of certain modern phenomena yet. People in our time and place are not particularly more moral, or more capable of resisting a Holocaust-like event, than Germans were in 1933. Modernity has trundled (or soared) on, and we mostly continue to assume that its distinctives are 'normal,' and are the only type of priorities one could possibly employ in the success of a society. This conviction largely transcends political differences, with liberals and conservatives each slandering each other as "irrational," and angrily shrieking for 'change' in the leadership of the bureaucracy and technocracy, but not substantially disagreeing that it's bureaucracy and technocracy that are best suited to defining and governing the world.
This is a difficult, technical book that will be read by only a specialized audience, often parsing intramural debates of sociology, but it's so important that I felt the need to give my review unrestricted length, in case it's the closest someone gets to encountering this evaluation of modernity. Highly recommended.
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