Liquid Life

When an eighty year old East European intellectual with several major works to his name, a mind like a razorblade and a cheekily saturnine bearing that belies his age pipes up, I shut up and listen.

This chap, Zygmunt Bauman, is one of the most important living sociologists:

In a paper called Living in Utopia (the second of three Miliband Lectures he has just given in London), Bauman argues that our search for utopias was a dream of a world with no accidents and, thus, no fear. Utopias were, he says, like the greyhounds' rabbit - pursued, but never captured.

Even the dimmest undergraduate will notice that the age of catastrophe has not ended and that we are hardly living in a utopia. The emeritus professor of sociology at Leeds University, as befits a Polish-Jewish intellectual readily if unfairly written up as a gloomy sod, draws the glum inference that those 150 years of enlightenment effort - all the sweat, ingenious invention, engineering triumphs, medical advances - didn't really achieve the main job. Our fate is to be like Auden sitting in a dive on 52nd Street watching our ancestors' clever hopes expire and becoming uncertain and afraid.

"What in the 18th century seems to be a great leap forward was not. What happened in those years was just a detour. We've just returned to the starting point after all this tremendous investment in science and technology. The difference now is that we no longer trust the future or believe in progress, we are without the illusions that sustained the modern project. Have a grape."

Fascinating. And as for this, it's chillingly accurate and ruthlessly perceptive:

He argues: "Civilisation, the orderly world in which we live, is frail. We are skating on thin ice. There is a fear of a collective disaster. Terrorism, genocide, flu, tsunamis."

There is not just fear of a collective disaster, Bauman argues, but of personal disaster - the humiliating fear of falling among the worst off or otherwise ostracised. "That is the fear - that I will be thrown away from the party and that is in popular ideology - if you watch Big Brother and Lady Robinson." Lady Robinson? "The Weakest Link lady." Ah. "The Weakest Link is all about exclusion. In Big Brother the element of exclusion comes once a week, in The Weakest Link it is all the time."

Bauman's 2003 book Liquid Love tackles this issue of exclusion for us "liquid moderns", who have lost faith in the future, cannot commit to relationships and have few kinship ties. We incessantly have to use our skills, wits and dedication to create provisional bonds that are loose enough to stop suffocation, but tight enough to give a needed sense of security now that the traditional sources of solace (family, career, loving relationships) are less reliable than ever. Bauman finds his liquid modern hero working everywhere - jabbering into mobile phones, addictively texting, leaping from one chatroom to another. The liquid modern is forever at work, forever replacing quality of relationship with quantity - always panicking about being left behind or becoming obsolete.

The entire interview is here. Slow down your liquid life for ten minutes, use the time to read it.