By Fr Anthony Paganoni
The present Australian government has decided to ban from public scrutiny the refugee boats arriving (or presumably not being sighted any longer) in Australian waters, at the top end of the continent.
More recently, they have been referred to as “illegal maritime arrivals”. News abounds, however, on other crossings elsewhere, by sea or by land, not infrequently ending in disasters and the tragic loss of human lives.
The island of Lampedusa is so busy with episodes of this nature. But so, too, are several coastal localities on the southern coast of Spain, facing Morocco, and so too are other frontiers guarded by walls, such as the US-Mexican border and other frontiers to Central American nations, repeatedly perforated by thousands of train riders on their way to the El Norte.
Aside from the thousands of lives lost forever and the traumas experienced by their families, there is at least an equal number of potential refugees, children and women included, whose lives are jarred by the frequent spectacles of violence and rape, as a result of the ransom extorted by frontier guards, coyotes or companions turned vicious.
The number of lives on the scrap heap seems to be growing larger and larger by the day. We honour soldiers fallen on the battlefield, but what of the many other people falling on the path to self-redemption?
In my view, it is totally unacceptable to make the self-defeating statement that the world is somewhat bound to be the way it is. It betrays a feeling that is damning the situation and yet at the same time burying any sense of human responsibility.
The world we live in, enjoyable and equally abhorrent, is of our making. Human migrations and the way they are handled by governments, UN agencies and NGOs, and by ourselves, is a measure of our sense of humanity. And so the question keeps reappearing: Why are so many lives lost and so many more hopes broken?
Zygmunt Bauman, a Polish sociologist teaching at the universities of Leeds and Warsaw, has shown himself to be, in an impressive display of many books and articles, one of the most acute contemporary analysts of modernity.
He has coined the concept of fluid modernity, which he applies to the many faces of contemporary living.
The word fluid, the opposite of solid, he has then applied to liquid modernity (book published in 2000); love (2003); fear (2006); contemporary times (2006) and life (2005).
In each of these books, he has developed variations on fundamentally the same argument: we now live in a world of precarious uncertainty, short-term planning, instant gratification, the weakening of institutions, struggles to manage risks and volatile consumerist identities. “Solid modernity,” states Bauman, “was an era of mutual engagement.”
“Fluid modernity is the epoch of disengagement, elusiveness, facile escape and hopeless chase. In liquid modernity, it is the most elusive, those free to move without notice, who rule.”
Ironically, those who rule are themselves ruled. For Bauman, “liquid modern consumerism” thrives insofar as its members live in a perpetual state of non-satisfaction: “The society of consumers derives its stimulus and momentum from the dissatisfaction it expertly produces itself.”
The choices offered by the consumer society from this point of view are illusory, without lasting bonds. We live in a society in which consumption, and no longer production, defines the status of the citizen.
Not all theoreticians agree with Bauman’s analytical wisdom. His notion of liquid modernity has gained prominence within social work’s academic literature, but his concept of solid modernity has come under close scrutiny.
I suspect that some of the problem may lie in the fact that, when you start theorising about fluid modernity and then turn to solid modernity or vice versa, somehow the process may be faulty and, in a prejudicial manner, obscure the contours and substance of very complex social realities such as modernity and post-modernity.
No matter what one may think, what holds his contributions together, however, is that all his books are drenched in solidarity with and sympathy for people caught and suspended in the webs of power, oppression, persecution and potential extermination.
This is the reason why his attention has been increasingly turning to migratory movements. The development in the field of migration, with the upsurge of economic and forced migrations over the last few decades, has been noted by Bauman as evidence of our globalised societies, in which the element of insecurity has pervaded every sphere of human existence, both on the collective level (government and communities) as well as on the private level.
In one of his most recent publications, Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age (2011), Bauman sums up some of his previous releases.
He explores the changing relationship between private and public spheres, the increasingly widespread feeling of vulnerability experienced by citizens who are losing the protection of the nation-state and the support of strong family ties.
The collateral damage of a persistent and all-pervading attitude to consumerism is particularly absorbed by the weak and disregarded ones in our societies.
The disposal of waste – industrial, chemical, toxic and nuclear – is one of the most perplexing dramas for contemporary developed societies.
Even if, in recent times, not much has been reported about the disposal of nuclear wastes (I wonder why), it is assumed that government-to-government arrangements have been struck in an effort to deal with a most serious issue for future generations.
In a provocative mood and metaphorical manner, Bauman places alongside the dilemma posed by all kinds of waste the saga of “human wastes”, that is, people who have been excluded from our productive, social and cultural systems and relegated to the scrap heap.
During the so-called period of solid modernity (the industrialisation process of the 19th and 20th centuries), new frontiers, that is, new lands, were opened to the human disposables (immigrants and refugees), which the growth of modern industrialisation could not incorporate.
Retrospectively, the policy of the colonial powers (England, France, Holland), was later followed by Germany and Italy, seeking a “place under the sun”, as the German Chancellor Otto Von Bismark would repeatedly state. This situation would continue till modernity would remain an uncontested privilege.
Modernity has now been globalised, either as an achieved goal or as a possible target of national governments in emerging economies or globally in the minds of television viewers and internet users.
As Bauman acutely observes, governments, deprived of many of their earlier prerogatives by the process of globalisation which they cannot control or contain, feel cornered and bound to choose with great diligence the targets with which to affirm their sovereignity and show too, in some way, that their mission has been accomplished.
As part of this mission, there came a form of labelling which was carried out, and is still being pursued simultaneously in many developed countries, including Australia.
The association of refugees – stateless, nameless and silent people mostly – with terrorists, criminals or plainly economic migrants has had a severe impact on public opinion.
The very idea of asylum which several decades ago would generate feelings of human understanding and compassion has been belittled and vilified.
The extensive reporting on the category “economic migrants” during the latter part of the 20th century has been replaced by the poisonous, sinister and health-threatening category of “refugees”.
In order to defend themselves from such enemies, walls and security apparatuses have been strengthened in many nations.
Thus reinforced and made visible, the consequent fortress mentality has been kept alive by on-site media reporting of bloody wars, homes perforated by bullets or missiles and gutted by aerial bombardment and fires in the lands producing migrants and refugees.
The refugee is elevated to a symbol or a token of misfortune, long before he might one day become one of us. If he ever will.
One of the worst effects of globalisation has been, according to Bauman, the deregulation of wars. Most of the bloody conflicts nowadays are being waged by groups that are not affiliated with governments or states and are behaving as if state or international conventions or laws were not binding or non-existent.
Innocent people caught in the crossfire and fleeing extremely volatile situations find themselves very often in an illegal situation, when crossing real or imagined frontiers.
They end up in camps where either walls, barbed wire or well-guarded boundaries define the identity of the refugee: stateless, purposeless, unproductive and with no access to any form of self-determination: mere numbers inside camps and a feared nuisance should they attempt to leave the camp.
The image, however unsavoury and revolting, of scrap heap, returns. For the majority of citizens on planet earth, freely moving and thinking and attempting to establish and maintain some semblance of order, the human scrap heaps, both migrants and refugees, viewed from a comforting distance, arouse discomfort, anger and public outcry.
In some, but not very many, a sense of remorse, since it reminds them of a collective failure in relation to other human beings.
The only difference between refugees and economic migrants is that those in the first case are the product of international quest for order or utter disorder, and those in the second case have become the by-products of economic progress which has enveloped the whole planet.
We are thus, as a consequence, headed towards communities defined by closely watched borders than by contents.
Defence of the community is seen as the hiring of armed gatekeepers, deployed on land or at sea, to control the entry: separation in lieu of negotiation of a life in common.
A community where mutual trust is all but vanished and when it is talked about it is downgraded to a sign of ingenuity and regarded as a trap for the naïve and inexperienced.
It is clear that the ever more elusive search for safety – highlighted, for example, by the continual announcements by the CIA and FBI of imminent attacks – leads to paranoiac delusions propagating suspicion and fear, and coercing human existence into forms of ambiguities and scapegoating which cannot be resolved satisfactorily. Perhaps, in an overly pessimistic mood, Bauman leaves very little doubt about the inner decadence of the social phenomenon called fluid modernity.
In his Liquid Modernity, Bauman goes along with Bernard Crick who quotes from the Politics of Aristotle his idea of a good polis, articulated in defiance of Plato’s dream of one truth, one unified standard of righteousness, binding all in his commentary. Crick advances, and here I must quote: “The idea of a kind of unity which neither patriotism nor nationalism is eager to support and more often than not would actively resent: a kind of unity which assumed that civilised society is inherently pluralistic, that living together in such a society means negotiation and conciliation of naturally different interests, and that it is normally better to conciliate different interests than to coerce and oppress them perpetually.
“In other words, that the pluralism of modern civilised society is not just a brute fact which can be disliked or even detested but not wished away, but a good thing and fortunate circumstance, as it offers benefits much in excess of the discomforts and inconveniences it brings, widens horizons of humanity and multiplies the chances of life altogether more prepossessing than the conditions any of its alternatives may deliver…
“We may say that the most promising kind of unity is one which is achieved, and achieved daily anew, by confrontation, debate, negotiation and compromise between values, preferences and chosen ways of life and self-identification of many and different, but always self-determining, members of the polis… A unity which is an outcome, not a prior given condition, of shared life, a unity put together through negotiation and reconciliation, not the denial, stifling and smothering out of differences.”
“This I wish to propose,” states Bauman rather emphatically, “is the sole variant of unity (the only formula of togetherness) which the condition of liquid modernity renders compatible, plausible and realistic.”
While cautioning the reader about making easy assumptions until he or she has read some of Bauman’s works, one cannot, however, but marvel at the insights provided by the Polish sociologist.
The over-arching reach of its analysis of contemporary life in its modern expressions supports the feeling that there is further validity to the old saying: there is always a story behind our story.
The passage from solid to fluid modernity may yet prove to be a departure more radical than the advent of capitalism.
Throughout human history, the work of culture consisted in sifting lives and fleeting human actions, in conjuring up duration out of transience, continuity out of discontinuity. Demand for this kind of posture is shrinking and its consequences are yet to be seen.