Abstract
One of the central principles of the Enlightenment project was the idea that the reason alone should guide human understanding of the world. Although this idea has been challenged by many for the past three centuries, the Enlightenment project has still been spreading throughout the world ever since. Zygmunt Bauman demonstrated in his Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) that even the Nazis were not opposed to the key values of the Enlightenment. Instead, they just racialised its central massage but remained committed to the idea that knowledge and human progress bring happiness. Hence, the fascists movements highly valued many aspects of modernity including science, technology and the modern bureaucracy. Of course, there were always some dissenting voices that opposed the Enlightenment project – from the romanticism, nihilism, perspectivism to poststructuralism and postmodernism. However, these voices were never strong enough to significantly undermine the fundamentals of modernity. This seems to be changing now.
In his new book, Ethical Violence, Carlo Bordoni explores the recent challenges to the Enlightenment project. He argues that for the first time the institutional foundations of modernity are experiencing a breakdown across the world. While before only a small number of people rejected the view that the reason should be the main tool of analysis, today the key Enlightenment principles are under attack everywhere. Bordoni zooms in on different aspects of contemporary onslaught on the legacy of modernity. He examines the recent movements that promote the climate of irrationality and question the value of science including the anti-vaccine groups, the climate change denialists, the promoters of the pseudoscience, the advocates of the conspiracy theories and the general disappearance of doubt as the litmus test of reason (chapters 1 and 2).
The book focuses in particular on the ever-stronger attempts to justify the use of violence in the social and political life, thus challenging one of the central idioms of the Enlightenment – the resolution of conflicts through peaceful means. Chapters 3 and 4 explore the historical trajectories for the justification of violent conflicts and the power of the states to declare wars. Bordoni theorises the ethics of violence and argues that in the contemporary world ‘ethification’ becomes a form of legitimation for the use of violence. This concept stands for the historical process through which individual acts of violence become normalised and moralised. He argues that in the traditional world, violence was a collective phenomenon and as such legitimate tool against other collective foes. In contrast, in modernity, the acts of violence are deemed to be a responsibility of the specific individuals. As such the use of violence is considered unethical and is criminalised. However, as ‘modernity needs to use violence, and since it cannot impose it, it must resort to the subterfuge of “ethifying” it through a process of legitimation that justifies the state of exception’ (p. 75). In Bordoni’s view, ‘ethical violence’ represents any act where ‘power exerts psychological pressure to accept the use of violence, presenting it as an ethical value’ (p. 76). Hence, nearly all contemporary wars are framed not as acts of conquest but as a defensive response to a hostile provocation. He sees emotions as playing the central role in this process with the environment of irrationality being very conducive for the generation of real and imaginary enemies. Drawing on Foucault, Arendt, Mbembe and Schmitt Bordoni analyses, different forms violence takes in the contemporary world. He zooms in particular on the less visible forms of violence including the ‘letting die’ practice of non-interfering in the context of domestic violence, the environmental degradation that affects the life chances of many and the numerous deaths of migrants on their journeys to Europe. Echoing Butler, Bordoni also emphasises different ethical norms that govern mourning and remembrance of one’s own dead soldiers and civilians and the complete lack of empathy towards the ‘enemy’ human beings even many years after the violent conflicts: ‘the enemies defeated have no ethical value and are not worthy of mourning’ (p. 87).
The last two chapters of the book aim to identify the key causes of this onslaught on the Enlightenment project and possible remedies. Hence, Bordoni argues that the rising mistrust of science, democratic institutions and reason can be traced to the unfulfilled promises of modernity. The modern project pledged to provide more progress, freedom, equality and democracy but it has generated more inequality, more bureaucratic domination, the destruction of environment and the lack of accountability for the political and economic elites. The direct outcome of this deep crisis is what Bordoni calls ‘systematic disindividuation’. This concept is premised on a central difference between individualisation and individuation: while the former represents egocentrism and the disengagement from the wider world, the latter stands for the personal growth, self-awareness and responsibility towards others. Bordoni detects complete dominance of the former over the latter in the contemporary world and sees systematic disindividuation as fuelling distrust in science, democracy and social progress. Systematic disindividuation generates a self which is ‘mechanical, repetitive and dehumanising’ (p. 117). Furthermore, individualisation also fosters a paradoxical situation where science is rejected but technology, a direct product of science, is glorified and fully embraced in everyday life, albeit in a very passive way. Hence, Bordoni argues that in such a disillusioned environment technology is the only viable remedy. Following Derrida and Stiegler Bordoni understands technology as pharmakon – ‘a drug with the double effect of both curing and poisoning’ (p. 119). Thus, he advocates the refocusing on ‘the positive side of technology’, that is a side that recognises the centrality of science and value of knowledge. As he put it ‘only technology can save us now. It can only do so if knowledge is cultivated and considered the highest form of human production’ (p. 114).
Bordoni’s new book is full of great insights about our world. He successfully synthetises classical and contemporary social and political theories and builds on this vast scholarship to interpret the recent social trends. The book is also very good at linking together many diverse ongoing processes to show how and why they all converge in their sustained attack on the values and institutions of the Enlightenment. The last two chapters are particularly valuable in tracing many contradictions that underpin the ever-increasing climate of irrationality and the rejection of science. As a disciple of Bauman, Bordoni also demonstrates the continuous usefulness of using Baumanian analytical tools to understand the everchanging social landscape. Although Bordoni sees ‘liquid modernity’ as a phase that best encapsulates fin de siècle period between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and ‘appears to have been shelved’ now, his analysis is still firmly grounded in the Baumanian approach. It is good to see that the Bauman’s tradition of social theory continues to grow and develop as it has much to offer in understating the contemporary predicament.
Nevertheless, there are also some pronounced weaknesses in this approach. For one thing Buamanians operate with a very narrow and one-dimensional periodisation of social change and as such cannot adequately capture the long-term dynamics of historical transformations. Thus, Bordoni differentiates between six modernities: the early modernity that starts with the sixteenth century and is best represented in the work of Jean Bodin on sovereignty; the second modernity associated with Hobbes’s absolute sovereignty; the third modernity linked to the Enlightenment ideas of Diderot and Voltaire; the fourth modernity associated with Marx and the contradictions of industrialisation; the fifth modernity which reaches its apex in the twentieth century and is centred on instrumental rationality and technology as analysed by Weber and Heidegger; and the liquid modernity of Bauman characterised by acute crisis and elusiveness which is now disintegrating (pp. 9–10). This linear, rigid and rather uniform periodisation leaves no room for historical fluctuations, parallel existence of different intellectual and social realities and the impact of non-Europeans on the global social change. This type of periodisation also overemphasises the impact of handful of intellectuals on the world-wide trends. The relatively arbitrary character of such typologies does not help us detect the long-term developments. Good social theory has to build on the accumulated knowledge from historical sociology to make useful typologies of social change. This is not the case here as Bordoni operates with a linear periodisation that overgeneralises on the bases of very short periods of time. For example, he writes about ‘the two decades of transition from postmodernity to liquid modernity (between the 1980s and the 2000s)’ (p. 120) as if the large-scale social transformations take only several years rather than centuries or millennia. This present-focused and deeply Eurocentric type of analysis is not particularly helpful in tracing the long-term trends in human societies.
The lack of engagement with historical sociology is particularly pronounced in Bordoni’s view of nationalism. Just as Bauman Bordoni sees nationalism as an ideology of the nineteenth century which is ‘historically outdated’ and ‘no longer makes sense’ (p. 109). He is adamant that ‘wars waged to defend or extend national borders, in particular, are anachronistic’ (p. 68), that national citizenship is futile (p. 69) as ‘the nation-states progressively lost power’ (p. 109). For the Baumanians, rampant individualisation transforms citizens of nation-states into individualised consumers. As such ‘nation-building coupled with patriotic mobilisation has ceased to be the principal instrument of social integration’ (Bauman 2002, p. 84). Bordoni follows the same line of argument as Bauman and insists that ‘nationalism is the childhood illness of modernism’ that ‘no longer has reason to exist’ (pp. 108–110). In this economistic view of social world, where there is no autonomy of the political, ordinary individuals are perceived to be the irrational dupes whose actions are driven by false consciousness. However, to understand the power of nationalism in the contemporary world, it is crucial to explore this phenomenon through the prism of historical sociology. The historical sociologists who have studied this phenomenon for decades have demonstrated empirically that rather than experiencing a decline, and an inevitable demise nationalism is a dominant from of modern subjectivity that has been gradually developing and expanding over the past two centuries (Malešević, 2013, 2019; Wimmer, 2018). Rather than beings some kind of irrational anomaly, nationalism remains the principal source of political legitimacy in modernity. In contrast to the popular stereotypes that place this ideology in the nineteenth century, historical sociologists show that nationalism was a marginal phenomenon in that world still dominated by empires, aristocratic lineage and illiterate peasantry. Nationalism becomes a fully fledged sociological phenomenon only in the twentieth century when the majority of population starts identifying primarily in national, rather than local, kinship based or religious terms. Once nation-states have become the hegemonic form of territorial organisation in the world, all rulers had to invoke the idea of popular sovereignty to justify their right to govern. Furthermore, as the scholarship on banal nationalism demonstrates convincingly the nation-centric idioms are reproduced much more in everyday life today than every before (Fox, 2017). Hence, there is no sudden and unexpected resurgence of nationalism, this is a social process that has been experiencing a continuous rising trend for the past two centuries and the scholars of nationalism have documented this amply.
Nevertheless, the most problematic aspect of Bordoni’s argument is his biologically determinist take on violence and emotions. In his view, the proliferation of violence in the contemporary world is linked to the decline of reason and the rise of emotional action. He writes about ‘the revival of emotions’ which are traced to the animal character of human beings: ‘we still harbour instincts and impulses; something innate that drives our survival instinct…we are pack animals, it makes us want to group together’ (p. 10). He perceives emotions as static, biologically given and unchangeable phenomenon that lacks any autonomy: ‘as far as the emotions are concerned nothing has changed, they have always remained in their embryonic state…they have not been touched by evolution, only suppressed at appropriate time’ (p. 11). In this context violence is understood as a ‘regression to instinctual behaviour’ (p. 25). It is really unusual to see a contemporary sociologist deploying such crude essentialist language. Instead of engaging with the well-developed scholarship in the sociology and history of emotions that demonstrates how complex, subtle and relational are human emotional actions, he reduces all emotional dynamics to ‘the primeval emotional instincts’ (p. 46). Even if one leaves sociology aside and engages with the recent developments in science including some strands of cognitive evolutionary theory, critical neuroscience, biocultural anthropology, among others, it is possible to see that emotions are not fixed and static but are shaped by culture, history and social processes. Human beings are the most emotional creatures on this planet, and their emotional responses are highly contextual and variable, not something that is unchangeable and ingrained (Malešević, 2022, pp. 16–44). It is precisely for this reason that the scale of violence perpetrated by humans is vastly greater than anything other animals are capable of doing. If human violence was nothing more than an ‘instinctual’ and ‘impulsive’ response, there would be no total wars, mass scale revolutions, nuclear bombing of cities or genocides. Relying on the crude, nineteenth-century biological language, cannot help us understand the dynamic of organised violence in the contemporary world.
This is a very useful book that offers a new conceptual apparatus for the analysis of recent social developments. Bordoni is an insightful observer who pushes the Baumanian paradigm further to analyse the new aspects of ever-changing social reality. However, more engagement with historical sociology and the sociology of emotions would serve to enhance the analysis offered in the book.
