There is nothing new about evil; it has been with us since time
immemorial. But there is something new about the kind of evil that
characterizes our contemporary liquid-modern world. The evil that
characterized earlier forms of solid modernity was concentrated in the
hands of states claiming monopolies on the means of coercion and using
the means at their disposal to pursue their ends ends that were at times
horrifically brutal and barbaric. In our contemporary liquid-modern
societies, by contrast, evil has become altogether more pervasive and at
the same time less visible. Liquid evil hides in the seams of the
canvass woven daily by the liquid-modern mode of human interaction and
commerce, conceals itself in the very tissue of human cohabitation and
in the course of its routine and day-to-day reproduction. Evil lurks in
the countless black holes of a thoroughly deregulated and privatized
social space in which cutthroat competition and mutual estrangement have
replaced cooperation and solidarity, while forceful individualization
erodes the adhesive power of inter-human bonds. In its present form evil
is hard to spot, unmask and resist. It seduces us by its ordinariness
and then jumps out without warning, striking seemingly at random. The
result is a social world that is comparable to a minefield: we know it
is full of explosives and that explosions will happen sooner or later
but we have no idea when and where they will occur.
In this new book, the sequel to their acclaimed work Moral Blindness
Zygmunt Bauman and Leonidas Donskis guide the reader through this new
terrain in which evil has become both more ordinary and more insidious,
threatening to strip humanity of its dreams, alternative projects and
powers of dissent at the very time when they are needed most.
