Bauman is at pains to make clear that the Nazi perpetrators of murder and other odious crimes were “ordinary people,” “whenever they took their uniforms off” (Bauman 1989b: 151). He mentions in this connection the well-known Milgram Experiment. The Yale psychologist Stanley Milgram asked some of his students to administer what they were told were severe electric shocks to a purported subject if that person gave the wrong answer to questions formulated by the experimenter. The students were told that the experiment had a scientific purpose, and that it had to be conducted to the end, irrespective of the amount of pain inflicted. Most students fully cooperated with the experimenter to the end. They did not know that it was not a real one, as no electric shocks were administered to anyone. Milgram actually wanted to test the extent to which normal people are willing to submit to an authority, even if this authority asks them to act unethically (On Milgram’s study, see Robertson 1977: 131–33).
Bauman draws several inferences from that study: (1) inhumanity originates from social relations; (2) it increases its capacity and efficiency to the extent that relations are rational and technically advanced; (3) it varies inversely according to the distance between the victims and the perpetrators of violence; according, therefore, to the presence of intermediaries; (4) it results from exposure to one source only of authority. Therefore, morally normal people are less likely to commit unethical actions if they live under conditions of political and social pluralism; and (5) it is made possible by the absolute power some people are able to exert over some other people (Bauman 1989b: 165–66). Bauman’s main thesis—that morality originates from society—originates from Durkheim, as he points out. Bauman objects that society’s effect is ambivalent in that countervailing forces may offset the moralizing ones. The Holocaust proved especially ambivalent in this sense; as morality could manifest itself only in “insubordination toward socially upheld principles. and in action openly defying social solidarity and consensus.” Insubordination and defiant action became “a moral responsibility for resisting socialization” (Bauman 1989b: 177).
Morality, as Bauman maintains with reference to the French philosopher Levinas, requires proximity to the other, in the sense of being responsible toward the other. Bauman draws a distinction between morality and ethics. Moral action is “whatever follows that responsibility” (Bauman 1989b: 214). Ethics, instead, is “a code of law that prescribes the correct behavior ‘universally’—that is, for all people at all times; one that sets apart good from evil once for all and everybody” (Bauman 1994: 2). Morality has no ethical foundations, Bauman contends, for “we can no longer offer ethical guidance for the moral selves” (Bauman 1994: 7). Morality without ethics, as it is the case of our contemporary autonomous and purposeless society, is “uncontrollable and unpredictable” (Bauman 1994: 8), in keeping with the “chaos and contingency” of this postmodern age (Bauman 1994: 16). There is not, therefore, “an unambiguous ethical principle suitable for the occasion” (Bauman 1994: 32). In our times of uncertainty, Bauman wonders what the prospects of morality are, and answers this question by stating—again with reference to Levinas—that “one is obliged towards the strong. One is responsible for the weak” (Bauman 1998c: 19). Ambivalence, which marks our age, “is the only soil in which morality can grow” (Bauman 1998c: 22).
Bauman has concerned himself with the subject of morality especially with reference to Nazi’s attitude toward, and treatment of, the Jews. The Nazis endeavored to neutralize this “communally sustained” sense of responsibility, which would elicit sympathetic attitudes toward the victims on the part of many Germans and thus stand in the way of their “willingness to co-operate in mass murder” (Bauman 1989b: 185). The Jews epitomized in the Nazi’s minds “the other”; namely, “a category beyond redemption,” “a diseased organism, both ill and infectious, both damaged and damaging” (Bauman 1991: 47). The Jews’ forced exclusion from society, and their depersonalization and dehumanization, were instrumental to carry out the massacre. “Evidently,” Bauman comments, “moral inhibitions do not act at a distance” (Bauman 1989b: 192). Moral values have then no impact on social action. They make it, Bauman’s own words, “adiaphoric,” meaning neither good nor bad, “measurable against technical (purpose-oriented or procedural) but not moral values” (Bauman 1989b: 215).
No one is therefore morally responsible as an individual, nor is anyone a source of moral demands, or even exists as a moral subject. Technology, with its “destructive potential,” has been made subservient to “the thoroughly adiaphorized action” (Bauman 1989b: 217). This has in turn been put at the service of some ultimate grand purpose, such as the proletariat’s or the Arian race’s mission. The “social suppression of moral responsibility” (Bauman 1989b: 188) toward “the other,” that is, toward negatively stereotyped people, is the first of a sequence of steps. Confiscating their properties; concentrating them into camps; and finally, their annihilation, follow in this sequence. Performing the steps of this sequence require moral indifference toward the victims on the part on the bulk of the population, and therefore their socially produced distantiation from it. The Nazi State apparatus proved a rational and effective instrument to accomplish this end in all its steps, as Bauman illustrates with reference to the construction of the gas chambers. The Nazi accomplishment was then to make evil formally rational. Both the massacre perpetrators and their victims had been rationally deprived of their humanity.
For the sake of self-preservation, potential victims cared only for themselves and their families, while passively watching the victimization of others, and thus became the accomplices of evil. Bauman auspicates the rise of a new ethic, one “that would reach over the socially erected obstacles of mediated action and the functional education of human self” (Bauman 1989b: 221). As he has added in a subsequent edition, the main issue of the Holocaust is “the facts that the Holocaust is able to tell us about the hidden capacities of present-day life” (Bauman 1989b: 223). He recalls in this connection more recent genocides, such as those that occurred in Africa and elsewhere in the 1990s. In all such cases, past and present, two conditions were necessary for the massacre to be accomplished, according to Bauman. First, a tendency to attribute negative strongly attributes to those groups, which are hated by those wishing to perpetrate the genocide against them. They are not connoted otherwise; Bauman calls “essentialism”