Zygmunt Bauman
The tragedy is what - given the 'right circumstances,' - normal decent folks, like you and me, will do. This is what makes me worry whenever looking on the road that Israel entered and shows no intention of leaving.Collection: Israel
There are, by the most conservative counting, two grave and deeply regrettable collateral victims of the peer-review gruesome stratagem: one is the daring of thought (wished-washed to the lowest common denominator), and the other is the individuality, as well as the responsibility, of editors (those seeking shelter behind the anonymity of "peers", but in fact dissolved in it, in many cases without a trace).Collection: Responsibility
We have a reversal of a longstanding trend, from rising inequality across nations and constant or declining inequality within nations, to declining inequality across nations and rising inequality within them.Collection: Rising
All the skills which I have acquired during my sociological life allow me to diagnose and explain what is going on, but not to predict what will happen.Collection: Skills
The problem of insufficient security was, until quite recently, a matter of a minority; now it is becoming very quickly a majority matter. That is a major change.Collection: Majority
Indeed, I did not truly "belong" to any school, order, intellectual camaraderie or clique; I did not apply for admission to any of them, let alone did much to deserve an invitation; nor would I be listed by any of them - at least listed unqualifiedly - as "one of us".Collection: School
As the run-by-capital society of producers turned since into the run-by-capital society of consumers, I would say that the main, indeed "meta", function of the governments has become now to assure that it is the meetings between commodities and the consumers, and credit issuers and the borrowers, that regularly take place.Collection: Running
Fully "biodegradable" structures are nowadays the ideal and the standards to which most, if not all structures, struggle to measure up.Collection: Struggle
Everybody is in trouble, including the up-and-coming economic miracles of China, Brazil or India.Collection: Miracle
I was watching the TV broadcasts interviewing people stranded at airports for days on end, losing their holidays, their important business meetings and the long-awaited ability to see their families... In short, suffering. No one complained, though! They kept repeating: we are so grateful for the care taken of our safety, for feeling. They were ready to surrender a good deal of their human dignity, individuality, freedom of choice.Collection: Taken
It is more or less clear that one idea which should emerge from the crash, whatever happens with the attempts to save the banks from bankruptcy and people from being evicted from their homes, is that this kind of life is unsustainable. We cannot go on like this... something must be done.Collection: Home
Lev (Léon) Shestov, a Russian Jew who later became a French Jew and even converted to Catholicism, defined God not by His power to create the laws of universe, but His ability to break them at will - the capacity for miracles. God could cancel the past! For instance, God could decide retrospectively, that Socrates was never poisoned... Assimilation demanded a miracle: that you stop having been somebody else before... But only God can do it.Collection: Past
There is less pressure on abandoning native communities: what for? There is nothing to be gained by it. On one hand, there are plenty tempting opportunities of experimenting with identities - being one kind of person today and a different the next day. On the other hand, there is little pressure to include the ethnic identity or religious identity into this mechanism, because now everybody is in a kind of Diaspora today.Collection: Religious
Jews and Gypsies were well-nigh the only Diasporas in 19th century Europe. Now go to London, it is a collection of Diasporas.Collection: Europe
Jews are no longer pressed and obliged to fight, hide or deny their Jewishness. What for? No one actually requires today to abandon the idiosyncrasy of some other culture or ethnic tradition. The great achievement of this last period is that we have been slowly, sometimes reluctantly, yet steadily, learning the art of living with differences.Collection: Art
There were no "unemployed" in the impoverished Polish countryside before the Second World War. Not a single unemployed. Every child that was born in the peasant family had his room at the table and his job in the field, stable or pigsty... If there was not enough food, everybody got less. If food was plentiful, everybody ate better. In such a setting, we may say, the problem of security couldn't even arise... One was born with life-long rights; the only thing that one could not do was to change them. A setting good on the side of security, though bad on the side of freedom.Collection: Jobs
In Celan's words a Jew is "a man with a little book under the shoulder." We are the keepers of tradition.Collection: Book
Once upon a time, when I was young, people saw a wedding as an event that determined the rest of their life. For a rising number of people today, it is quite normal to "try and err", marry, divorce, marry again.Collection: Divorce
I guess I am doomed to remain an outsider to the end, lacking as I am the indispensable qualities of an academic insider: school loyalty, conformity to the procedure, and readiness to obey by the school-endorsed criteria of cohesion and consistency.Collection: Loyalty
State governments seek local remedies for the globally fabricated deprivations and miseries in vain - just as the individuals-by-the-decree-of-fate (read: by the impact of deregulation) seek in vain the individual solutions to the socially fabricated life problems.Collection: Fate
With my tongue in one cheek only, I'd suggest that were our palaeolithic ancestors to discover the peer-review dredger, we would be still sitting in caves.Collection: Would Be
A reliable assurance of the right and ability to dismantle the constructed structure must be offered, before the job of construction starts in earnest.Collection: Jobs
The visual does seem to me the most thoroughly grasped and recorded among my impressions; sight seems to be my principal sense organ, and "seeing" supplies the key metaphors for reporting the perception.Collection: Keys
We already have plenty of fundamentalism and fundamental sects like for instance Rabbi Schneerson and Chabad Lubavitch. They feel more secure because they are in the warm, caring/sharing community. This is the difference between community (Gemeinschaft) and what Ferdinand Tönnies called Gesellschaft: a kind of setting in which you have no rights to do anything unless you pay for it, and no right to get anything unless you prove that you are 'credit worthy'. In a Gemeinschaft, however, you have a place at the table guaranteed whatever happens.Collection: Caring
It is easy now to break the vows. It is even easier to part your ways if vows haven't been taken.Collection: Taken
We are living at the moment in revolutionary times. Argentineans probably are more aware of it than anybody else, because they tasted it several years earlier - but now the whole world is in trouble.Collection: Years
The inequality between the world's individuals is staggering.Collection: World
"Once there, always there", would give you less freedom than you recently enjoyed, but more security. Security not in the sense of safety from terrorists, burglars, or pickpockets... but security in the sense of knowing where you are, who you are, on what kind of future you can count, what will happen, whether you will preserve your position in society or whether you will be degraded and humiliated - this sort of security. This sort of security for many, many people - a rising number of people - looks at the moment more attractive than more freedom.Collection: Numbers
Life purpose may be shifted from achieving a 'steady state' (an equilibrium between desires and plausibilities) to the excitement of running after novelties. In other words, be guided by new desires, not by extant needs.Collection: Running
The descent of Israel from the morally towering position of a 'light for the nations' to the lowest of the low and one of the last relics of bygone shameful times of merciless imperialism, conquest, exploitation is on the cards.Collection: Light
Throughout early modernity there were very strong pressures on Jews to assimilate. Assimilating meant cutting your ties with the community of origin.Collection: Strong
The secret of every durable ... social system is the recasting of 'functional prerequisites' into behavioral motives for actors.Collection: Secret
Attempts to tame the wayward and domesticate the riotous, to make the unknowable predictable and enchain the free-roaming - all such things sound the death knell to love. Eros won't outlast duality. As far as love is concerned, possession, power, fusion and disenchantment are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.Collection: Love Is
What is assumed to be the materialisation of the inner truth of the self is in fact an idealisation of the material - objectified - traces of consumer choices.Collection: Self
Once upon a time there were the Pampas in Argentina, that people could treat as "empty lands" and where they could run away from their problems from problem-ridden homes. That eventuality is no longer available.Collection: Running
Marcus Aurelius appoints personal character and conscience the ultimate refuge of happiness-seekers: the only place where dreams of happiness, doomed to die childless and intestate anywhere else, are not bound to be frustrated.Collection: Dream
At the turn of the twenty-first century, the richest 5 percent of people receive one-third of total global income, as much as the poorest 80 percent.Collection: People
Every interpretation is but an introduction to another interpretation, and that is how Talmud pages are printed.Collection: Pages
Security is the slogan for people who feel unable to function by their own means.Collection: Mean
Freedom is the slogan which speaks to the ears of people who feel strong enough to manage on their own using their own resources, who can do without dependency because they can do without others caring for them.Collection: Strong
Cornelius Castoriadis, the great French social philosopher of Greek origin, was asked once by an exasperated interviewer: "What do you want, Mr. Castoriadis - to change humanity?" He answered: "No, God forbid, I only want humanity to change itself, as it has done so many times in the past." I would be inclined to answer the same way.Collection: Past
What is happening now is that the number of people who are not strong enough or do not feel strong enough to decide to live without the security provided by the community or the state, is going up.Collection: Strong
As long as being a stranger and surrounded by strangers was seen as a temporary irritant, a smallest departure from the binding rules of conduct by a member of a minority, was taken for a major crime justifying deportation.Collection: Taken
I worry about the Israeli moral standard, Israeli humanity.Collection: Worry
The question of identity has separated from the issue of 'assimilation', having lost much of its drama and become, so to speak, a secular problem.Collection: Drama
Christ could not create a codified 'Christian ethics'; such a thing would be a contradiction in terms.Collection: Christian
People do not choose a government that will bring the market within their control; instead, the market in every way conditions governments to bring the people within its control.Collection: Government
After many years of thinking, reading and writing and looking, I came to believe that there are two basic, essential values which are indispensable for humane, decent, dignified life: one is freedom, and the other is security.Collection: Believe
Our vulnerability [to ressentiment] is unavoidable (and probably incurable) in a kind of society in which relative equality of political and other rights and formally acknowledged social equality go hand in hand with enormous differences in genuine power, possessions and education; a society in which everyone "has the right" to consider himself equal to everybody else, while in fact being unequal to them.Collection: Rights