By depicting these people as a threat, rather than an economic and cultural resource (Bauman and Mazzeo 2012: 12–15), as both the Right and the Left are inclined to do in the present age, they are deprived of the “emancipatory chance entailed in the modern project” (Bauman 1995: 56). The media do not encourage discussions and debates concerning their plight. The traditional mass media programs, such as TV shows, and also the new media such as internet and World Wide Web, are not interactive at all. They are in fact asymmetrical and enlarge the chasm between the global elite and the common people. They do not promote communities among their audiences, whose members are and remain solitary individuals. They do not therefore encourage the agora; for they do not contribute to form or preserve a public opinion or a political community of citizens. The media, on the contrary, turn people’s attention away from what would matter for their life, limited social and economic inequality and a comprehensive Welfare State, and are accordingly inimical to democracy (Bauman 1998a: 51–54; 2002: 168–93). “The bulk of the electorate,” Bauman maintains, follow the politicians’ message. The electorate supports them according to “the severity they manifest in the course of the ‘security race’” (Bauman 2011a: 19).
By doing so, politicians and their electorate lose sight of what a good society ought to be. A good society, as Bauman conceives of it, would be based on citizen’s active participation in political life (Bauman 1997: 63). These conditions, however, no longer obtain in the current age of globalization. The globalization processes have been one of Bauman’s central concerns because of their undesirable consequences, according to Bauman. “An integral part—he writes—of the globalizing processes is progressive spatial segregation, separation and exclusion” (Bauman 1998a: 3). In the political sphere, globalization has caused “a parceled-out world of sovereign states” and their demise, as they are no longer self-sufficient from a military, economic and cultural point of view. At the same time, however, globalization has brought about the coming into existence of “two power blocks,” and “supra-state integration” as a consequence (Bauman 1998a: 63).
As his fellow debater Carlo Bordoni has commented, the State can longer “act as a strong and decisive interlocutor of social mediation, as regulator of the economy, as guarantor of security” (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 142). In Bauman’s own words, “a divorce” has occurred “between power and politics” (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 12). The current functions of the State are limited to preserve law and order, and to attract foreign capital; more in general, to create the most favorable condition for capital investments. (Bauman 2002a: 75–76). The State, however, now refrains from providing “the safety net that the process of globalization requires” (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 14). The social and individual consequences of globalization, which have been deemed pernicious, have been Bauman’s central concern for a long time; as according to him globalization has also exerted a negative impact because of their undesirable consequences not only for politics, but also for society and individuals.
The current state of crisis epitomizes such conditions. Crisis, as Bauman views it, means uncertainty and ignorance as to what direction, or course of life, should be taken to face the current predicament, but at the same time the urgency of taking some action nonetheless (Bauman and Bordoni 2014: 7–8, 11). The only certainty is that globalization calls for a global, rather than local, answer (Bauman 2002a: 79); for the space has now become “the battlefield of continuous space wars” conducted in urban areas between well-to-do minorities who can choose to live in secluded and fortified spaces, and majorities who cannot afford to do so (Bauman 1998a: 21–22). Globalization increases social inequality not only objectively, as indicated by its tendency to parcel out the social space between the haves and the have-nots, but also from a subjective viewpoint. In a society “where disengagement is practiced as a common strategy of the power struggle and self-assertion […] long-term commitments and obligations […] seem counterproductive, downright dangerous” (Bauman 2004: 68).
A “genuine, and so risky, dialogue” is thus avoided (Bauman 2004: 70) at the cost, however, of having a bizarre pseudo-community, as made by those individuals watching talk shows on TV, every one of whom “suffers in solitude” (Bauman 2002a: 169). The status of these individuals’ identity is “provisional,” “precarious and forever incomplete.” This status tends to be “suppressed and laboriously covered up.” It is therefore “something one needs to build from scratch,” and can never consolidate (Bauman 2004: 16; see also 2005: 15–38). The have-nots are, in Bauman’s language, the globalization’s “collateral damage” (Bauman 2011a), for globalization has been to the exclusive and increasing benefit of the haves. The predicament of the have-nots has been Bauman’s long-time concern, at least since his Legislators and Interpreters (1987b). Contemporary consumer society, Bauman contends, “cannot reproduce itself without reproducing inequalities on an ever rising level” (Bauman 1987b: 187).
Bauman’s recent works reiterate this thesis. They also emphasize, however, the causal connection between globalization and rising social inequality. Inequality has greatly increased in the last decades in the United States, United Kingdom and several other countries, and is currently very high, as Bauman argues by citing several sources, including United Nations statistics (Bauman 2013: 6–19). Inequality, as advocated by politicians, has found support in a number of beliefs, such as those held and advocated by Margaret Thatcher and other conservative political leaders, to the effect that inequality promotes economic efficiency, and that social exclusion and its attending social psychological consequences cannot be avoided (Bauman 2013: 21–26). These beliefs, however, are demonstrably false. Deregulation, in particular, has brought about the demolition of the Welfare State and the lifting of controls on the financial markets. A serious economic and social crisis has followed as a consequence, in addition to a world that is “inhospitable to trust and to human solidarity and friendly cooperation” (Bauman 2013: 88).
Globalization and Postmodernity
Bauman considers today’s global elite and its counterpart, the socially deprived, as the epitome of the social inequality and polarization. Globalization has caused or increased both of them. In contrast to solid modernity, modernity is now “liquid,” to the effect that “flexibility has replaced solidity as the ideal condition to be pursued of things and affairs” (Bauman 2013: ix). This is the condition characteristic of postmodernity. It does not reject modernity, but rather looks at it “at a distance,” making an inventory of “its gains and losses” (Bauman