It's Zygmunt Bauman's World

Liquid Modernity Gushing Out All Over

Zygmunt Bauman (watch the interview here)

Two things flopped over the social media transom yesterday. They epitomize the spirit of liquid modernity that has overtaken us.

Here’s the first:

The New York Post was present too to witness and film it.

The US southern border is a fiction. And Washington is fine with it. What does this tell you about what America has become? The near-frictionless movements of foreigners across the border, to settle. As I’ve said before: if these men carried weapons, we would know exactly what this was. It is an unarmed barbarian invasion, same as the vast movements of peoples that helped collapse the Roman Empire. When a nation that can defend its borders chooses not to, then it’s not a nation.

Here is the second liquid modernity instance:

In a sane society, this woman, or whatever she considers herself to be, would be on the far margins of her profession, and possibly even a candidate for institutionalization. But this Pansy Penis Lady is in fact a leader in her field. Watch the video — she looks forward to using technology to sculpt genitalia.

Why not? We have already torn down the gender binary, as well as the sensible standard that children cannot consent to medical procedures. What’s having Dr. Frankencoochie there going snip-snip on a little boy’s todger, and turning it into an origami swan made of flesh?

You regular readers know how much respect I give to the late Zygmunt Bauman’s theory of liquid modernity:

The metaphor of liquidity is one of the most effective because it is the essence of the world we live in: its rapidity, permeability and mutability. Stability, and therefore certainty, that characterised the face of modernity in the past, as had originally been established between the sixteenth and seventeenth century to ensure economic development through social stability and legal guarantees, is partly being nullified because of that very progress, the evolution of knowledge and technological progress that modernity itself had endorsed. According to Bauman, liquefaction is only a matter of accelerated motion and time of observation: the frequency with change happens makes us realise reality as unstable, as well as its consistency and reliability, and will only last for a shorter period of time that does not seem to be long enough. In reality, it is a change of pace, an “optical” phenomenon which also has a considerable impact on our behaviour.

The speed of events and susceptibility to sudden change are combined with permeability, because of the development and the ease of communications, which enables information to arrive in real time, reaching every nook and cranny of society, and cause unpredictable effects.

The combination of these elements conjures up an image of a liquid reality that we can not control, that slips through our fingers and is no longer “manageable”. Difficult to keep up with and difficult to predict what direction it will take, until it is already too late, when it has led us to irreversible consequences. Not being able to control has repercussions on us who live in this kind of “interregnum” between a way of life that no longer exists and something stable that does not exist yet – it makes us feel insecure. It is likely that the stability of the future, assuming that there will be a stable condition, will be the effect of an adjustment/ formatting of the human mind to the rapidity of change, rather than a slowing down/stabilisation of events.

No borders, or weak borders. The collapse of limits and standards. Not being able to “predict which direction it will take, until it is already too late.” This is us!

Imagine going back to the year 2000, and telling people then that in 2024, there would be National Guard troops guarding the US-Mexico border, and one day a large group of migrant males would overrun them to get into the US — and it would hardly even make the news.

Imagine going back to the year 2000, and telling people then that a leading medical practitioner in a new field of medicine would be waxing eloquent about how the new standards in her field, and the rise of technology, might soon allow us to sculpt our genitals to look like works of art.

A normal person back then would have thought: “This is some kind of right-wing nut paranoia. That can’t happen here.”

But it can, and it is. This is how we live now. And as far as I can tell, the only major political leader in the West who gives a damn is Viktor Orban (read his speech from last weekend, and try to imagine any American leader giving such a visionary address on a national holiday). Him, and Nayib Bukele, though El Salvador is not a major Western country. At least Bukele is willing to fight to save civilization. Not our gangs, either Democratic or Republican. Not Trump. He might be the only shot our side has, but that being the case just shows how weak we are. Maybe J.D. Vance. May the Lord let me live long enough to cast a vote for J.D. Vance for President.

Anyway, sorry for the gloominess here at week’s end. But not sorry, not really — the fact that some people will inevitably say, This is just nut-picking, everything is fine, is a big part of how we got to this blasted heath.