Why every Christian Leader Should Still Read Postmodern Ethics By Zygmunt Bauman

First published in Substack: https://johneger.substack.com/p/why-every-christian-leader-should

Let’s never mind the reality that Zygmunt is an excellent name and any author with that as a surname should be read. Close behind that are the riches of the book itself. While published in 1993, Postmodern Ethics still has a clear punch into articulating cultural pre-assumption about how groups and individuals believe, think and ultimately act.

Ultimately Postmodern Ethics is a road map to behavior that begins in the interior self and dissects our beliefs as they relate to our behaviors within society.

Utilizing history, sociology, biology, and anthropology, the Polish expat philosopher details a narrative that helps the reader understand, with maybe a little more clarity and hopefully wisdom, what it means to live within the promises of postmodernity.

Understood almost as taxonomy, the moniker “postmodern” assumes that it comes after something modern. Bauman juxtaposes modernity as an unattainable standard, one created where the great hope was emancipation that could never be obtained. Emancipation, or forms of freedom, is a future hope and was not able to be experienced in any present standard. “that project, that Grand Idea at the heart of modern restlessness, that guiding lantern perched on the prow of modernity’s ship, was the idea of emancipation” (Bauman 1993, 225).

Because modernity created a standard it could not meet, postmodernity swung the other way and removed the standard entirely. It acted by reacting, and the reaction itself was a removal of attaining to old ethical models.

But every void is a vacuum. And when the old ethical models were removed, even though the absence of standards were the intent, new standards moved in. These became the foundations, shaky as they sometimes seem, that our culture currently stands on.

The primary confession of postmodernity is that there are too many issues to demand singular solutions. Each demand defines a need for its own solution. Knowing that there are many issues that need to be called out but yet those same issues don’t have solid solutions. They cannot be straightened completely. The messiness of the human condition is here to stay, problems and conflict and all, without an encompassing solution. When we don’t have any existing norms our responsibility has to lie “one step ahead” and is denied the comfort of any existing norms because we are making things up as we go along. Wisdom becomes “more difficult (Baunman 1993, 245).

The difficulty in this culture is the mass of ambivalence it produces. Ambivalence, defined as having mixed feelings about something and not knowing how to decide on it, defines our culture. We are a society of ambivalence and this presents itself in human morality. Human morality is essentially ambivalent in postmodernity. And while defined as something that cannot decide, that is not firm, it is a place that Bauman believes we can understand ethics. “‘Humans are essentially good, and they only have to be assisted to act according to their nature’, and ‘Humans are essentially bad, and they must be prevented from acting on their impulses’, are both wrong. In fact, humans are morally ambivalent: ambivalence resides at the heart of the ‘primary scene’ of human face-to-face” (Bauman 1993, 10). This issue for Bauman is not the condition of the individual but rather how ambivalence naturally places human “face to face.” Because we have a difficult time landing on moral absolutes and live in an emotivistic frame (Macintyre) we are not left with the structures of modernity to communicate our values but rather are left without any structures and only have what Emmanuel Levinas calls the “Face of the other” to contend with. Without the social arrangement of ethics, our only choice is to see the other as they are and to act on that, on their behalf, as they should be. (Bauman 1993, 73).

So we are stuck within a culture that cannot hold to a structure, our only constant is the face before us. This is the place where Bauman does his ethical work. His diagnostic ability is nearly unparralled. He understands the culture and what it does and why (by proxy, what we do and why). The structures that modernity let fall has removed the task of the structure but not the need for one. In the wasteland that follows the removal of structure, we don’t find freedom as much as we find a need for replacement. Because no one is trying to legislate morality on a nation state level, morality becomes situated within the community or interpersonal relationship. We are a culture of constant competing pressures. (Bauman 1993, 45).

These pressures creates mini meta narratives about what it means to live well, what it means to live morally with the other. Postmodernity, in its shedding of societal meta narratives, still cannot remove its largest: we still have to live with one another if we want our lives to mean much of anything. And that means we have to learn not just to live with one other. But also multitudes of others. Crowds and groups. And without a larger story, it becomes very difficult very quickly.

Bauman points to the complexity of the world we live in and in his diagnosis, creates handholds for a social exegete to better understand how people think and behave in interaction. While not from a specific Christian orthodox position, Bauman’s assessment is still helpful. Because we can understand how culture thinks and acts through engagement with the author’s ideas, any leader in Christian thought or practice benefits from understanding. It is up to the pastor or church leader to act on what Batman shows. In some fitting ways, to subvert the ideas that Postmoidern Ethicsreveals.

There is a myth in Postmodernity that defines freedom as encompassing for human behavior. You cannot claim that you are completely free while at the same time demanding that everyone else is completely free (Bauman 1993, 30). There is a cost within relationship that to a degree, because of myth, goes unaccounted for. We desire personal freedom but aren’t sure what it osts others.

While this is not a firm foundation to stand on, it is the sandbox the culture rests in. And it is up to the Church who belongs to Jesus to step into the sandbox, and speak from within it. To be able to understand cultural foundations and then invite people to something more stable.

While not a perfect diagnosis, Bauman’s Postmodern Ethics is an entirely helpful map toward understanding our current culture climate. It’s a worthwhile effort to understand and be able to help to point to something reliable in the person of Christ Himself.

Bauman, Zygmunt. 1993. Postmodern Ethics. 1st ed. Wiley -Blackwell.