The metamorphosis of the world and nostalgia for an ideal past: Beck and Bauman’s last works

Metamorphosis

In his book, Beck claims that the world we live in is not just fast-changing, it is metamorphosing. The fundamental distinction Beck makes between change and metamorphosis emphasizes his belief in the power of radical transformations in which the old truths and authorities of modern society are declining and the new beginnings are emerging. To give a better understanding of the concept of metamorphosis, Beck offers the quintessential example of climate change. He is not afraid to name climate change as a chief agent of metamorphosis. According to Beck, the cardinal importance of climate change lies in the changes in confronting global climate risk. In particular, global climate risk has created a new way of conceptualizing the world, a mode of being in the contemporary world and chances of survival within it. He believes that global climate risk has drawn new world maps that show the necessity of looking beyond traditionally defined boundaries between nation-states. As Beck notes, neither government authority nor state institution is decisive enough in confronting global climate risk. His concept of metamorphosis includes an appeal for a cosmopolitan outlook.

Metamorphosis implies a complete transformation into a different reality. In Beck’s words, ‘the world is not circulating around the nation, but the nations are circulating around the new fixed stars: “world” and “humanity” ’ (p. 6). He propounded methodological cosmopolitanism as a convincing explanation of the major change of seeing the world – and doing politics – differently. Beck was persuaded that the national frame of reference blinded people to the metamorphosis of the world and, hence, to taking action towards a cosmopolitan logic of cooperation. He blames the national framework for its limits to particular interests and geopolitical contests of power. In particular, from a climate change angle, the nationcentric world picture appears false and fatal. Methodological nationalism can be justifiably criticized for apparently legitimizing national egoism and unsustainable economic development. For instance, it has an impact on differing interpretations of scientific data regarding the rate of pollutants entering the atmosphere because of national selfishness, and the ability of the air to absorb those pollutants before irreparable harm is done. Therefore, Beck attacks the national worldview as short-sighted and wrong, because with its focus on self-centeredness it has lost sight of the complete picture of the world.

For Beck, the anticipation of climate catastrophe to humankind is the point of reference for a better world. He wants to believe that climate change will take on an immense significance in how humans today apprehend the world. Beck reiterates his credo several times: the emancipatory potential of climate change will open up new perspectives on cosmopolitan climate policy, because global climate risk contains a sort of navigation system for this threatened world. In order to grasp this, he points out that today nobody can escape the global. In other words, globalized reality constitutes everybody’s strategic lived reality. People are interlinked through communications technology, migratory experiences, transnational corporations, etc., which means that they all are affected by global risks in one way or another. In this way, Beck argues that the concept of ‘the world’ has become familiar to everyone. He even advises the reader, ‘if you want to be successful you need to discover yourself as an actor in cosmopolitized spaces of action.’ He adds, ‘in times of climate change, those who just want to breathe local air will suffocate’ (p. 11).

At the most basic level, Beck declares the beginning of the cosmopolitan realism of successful action. To understand the gist of his claim, he suggests we must distinguish between doctrines and spaces of action. He does not deny that many doctrines could be designed to teach fundamental anti-cosmopolitan orientations, but the essential point of his argument lies in the recognition that it does not matter what people think and believe, but that they act in a cosmopolitan manner. Beck calls it ‘the paradox of metamorphosis.’ In many ways, people who want to defend their nationalistic or religious fundamentalism need to take action in a globalized world (e.g., terrorism). He notices that ‘they foster what they originally set out to fight against: the metamorphosis of the world’ (p. 11).

The concept of cosmopolitized spaces of action plays a crucial role in exploring the notion of the metamorphosis of the world. The idea of cosmopolitized spaces of action refers to unexpected opportunities of action for actors (e.g., governments, business, religions, civil movements, individuals). Cosmopolitized spaces of action include transnational resources for action, such as differences among legal systems in different countries, global inequalities, and cultural traditions. According to Beck, the differences among societies create structures of opportunity in a globalized world. He gives considerable importance to the notion of action. He explains that actions are the effects of the historical process of learning by doing. They are not routinized, but reflexive. In other words, actors need to be ready and able to use existing borders and differences as structures of opportunity for successful actions. For instance, individuals can buy organs in a country where such sales are not illegal and people are so poor that they have to sell their organs. In this way, individuals justify their right to flout official rules in their own country and seek solutions somewhere else.

The focus on cosmopolitized spaces of action gives Beck the green light to announce that individuals strategically internalize the world as a condition for successful action while they overcome hindrances behind the national façade. However, at the same time, he admits that individual actions might not imply a move to follow a cosmopolitan doctrine, although cosmopolitized spaces of action offer tremendous opportunities for successful action compared to state- and religious-bounded action in a globalized world.

Actually, the belief that the sources of chaos and current problems lie in the world outside has given new life to populist and anti-cosmopolitan doctrines. Beck, on the contrary, believes that accusations about the failures throughout the world could awaken the consciousness of the world. For Beck, images of the everyday consternation over state-institutionalized actions in the world lead to emancipatory catastrophism, but people need to recognize that they have been subjected to horrendous events that violate the norms of human existence. The anticipation of global catastrophe with dire consequences provides favorable conditions for a social catharsis to occur. It means that undivided attention must be paid to important global events, instead of focusing on their effects on particular nations. Beck concludes that as long as people are trapped in a sanctimonious vision of an autistic national world with its fear of outsiders, the emancipatory effects of global risk will remain unseen or misunderstood. But he also believes that global risk will create a cosmopolitan moment. This moment will bring about a social catharsis that breaks down the nationalistic worldview and unlocks various normative, legal, and technological potentials, which will provide global perspectives on political action. For Beck, this is critical.

Retrotopia

In Retrotopia, Bauman claims that contemporary utopian dreams and ideas were invented to idealize an imaginative past rather than construct a better future. In his view, the future is bracketed together merely with the prospect of impending catastrophe. In other words, for many people, the future has never looked more frightening, and the more attractive past stands in contrast. Moreover, an overwhelming sense of collective nostalgia for the past acts as an antidote to a bewildering and annoying present. The humiliating failures of the present are tied with a nostalgic yearning for becoming great again. Abandoned/stolen but not forgotten, the past offers a recognizable point of reference to create a vision of things that occurred in an earlier time. As Bauman explains, our nostalgic fantasies are not exactly the past. He quotes University College London professor David Loventhal: ‘the past is more admirable as a realm of faith than of fact’ (p. 59). The past provides a convenient and tempting comfort zone that is separate from an erratic present and a dangerous future. The past is believed to preserve the remains of stability amid the chaos.

Bauman was skeptical about the hope of constructing a defensible comfort zone out of elements of the past. According to him, an imaginative past is merely a negation of classic utopias in which the future looks impossibly perfect. However, Retrotopia is not limited to a description of an unholy alliance of modernity with nostalgia. Bauman raises an alarm over the global challenge of our time: a troubling tendency to react to insecurity and violence by building barriers and walls. In response to a world defined by its instability and incompleteness, visions of the future are trapped in a new form of tribalism. It brings together a bizarre mix of individual narcissism with an upsurge of (mostly ethnic) communalism. In other words, the place and the community-bound imagination of belonging has been intensely flavored with the individualized, privatized, and personalized. As a result, the retro-utopian impulse towards the collective memory of the past appeals to the individual aspirations of the privatization of happiness and wellness. As Bauman notes, a nostalgic description of the past flatters anyone that his/her heritage is both genetic and unique. To maintain that we were the first or the best, to celebrate both distinction and exclusion, is what heritage gives us.

Bauman believed that a retreat to a tribal politics of identity is a product of the insecurities and uncertainties that increased with the emancipation of power from territory. National borders no longer work as impenetrable barriers that protect us from our deep-seated fears of the stranger who lurks at the frontier. Nation-states with porous borders are no longer able to fulfill their traditional functions (defined by the prerogative of setting us apart from them). Bauman points out that a neighborhood filled with strangers is a visible sign of certainties evaporating and drifting out of control. The images of the stranger mirror the central disturbances in a tribal classification scheme in which being homogeneous is essential for symbolically sustaining unity. Homogeneity brings legitimacy to watching over familiar morality and punishing defectors. Strangers are thus classified as instances of chaos, abnormality, and danger. They pose a threat to the integrity of a tribe.

In contemporary society, a return to the safety of tribalism is the logical conclusion of transferring identity politics to the space of collective memory. As written above, according to Bauman the past offers a haven of imagined stability because it can be remodeled at will, hence providing a blissful omnipotence lost in the present. Moreover, for Bauman, ‘the principal aim of the politics of historical memory is justification of the entitlement of the group to territorially delineated political sovereignty’ (p. 62). Furthermore, it means that the purpose of the politics of historical memory is also to determine who to include and who to exclude. In his well-known article ‘The Stranger,’ published in American Journal of Sociology, Alfred Schütz (1944) noted that the stranger may be willing and able to share the present and the future with the approached group in vivid and immediate experience; under all circumstances, however, he remains excluded from such experiences of its past. The stranger is thus perceived from the group perspective as a man without a history. The politics of historical memory offers a particular brand of communality, acting as a membership filter.

In times of chaos, the politics of historical memory, defined as it is in such a narrow way, shows its dark side. With the contemporary insecurity of our world and the anxieties of our individualized liquid lives, the return to a tribal attitude and indifference towards global inequalities seems to be increasingly accepted as rational. The precepts of rational interest and self-preservation flourish because people are put into situations of believing they are threatened and endangered by strangers. At best, they believe that they owe them nothing. Bauman cited an acknowledged inequality expert Branko Milanovic: ‘it is forgotten by the Establishment in the rich countries that you have to pay attention to the losers’ (p. 91). Bauman concludes that the system of welfare, which should foster people’s sense of solidarity and pride, has degenerated into a system of suspicion and shame. The existence of poverty and inequality has been increasingly rationalized into proof that some categories of people are less entitled to human rights and welfare.

Bauman perceived indifference as an engine of a dangerous trend (called by him as ‘back to inequality’), which legitimates zero-sum game visions of contemporary society and the world. The feeling of deprivation has become an almost universal. According to him, the condition of liquid modernity has pushed people towards a dismal pursuit of instant and short-lived gratifications, leading to the belief that private happiness and general well-being can be purchased and that comes with serious consequences for humanistic ideals: solidarity does not pay. In Bauman’s words, ‘instead of gestating solidarity, the present-day existential condition is a factory of mutual suspicion, antagonism of interests, rivalry and strife’ (p. 98). Bauman diagnoses contemporary crises and dangers in the epidemics of indifference towards the fate of other human beings and the refusal to have open dialogue between people, regardless of their divisions.

As a remedy against growing casual indifference, Bauman promotes dialogue. He believes that dialogue is the most convincing response to these life-and-death challenges for humanity. At a basic level, he expresses hope in the art of dialogue, in which people play with ideas, in which they are ready to be fully present, and are able to interact with others. This is the art of dialogue, in which human empathy flourishes and social action gains strength. After all, humanity has never invented a more powerful tool in dealing with difference, for celebrating the present and shaping a common future, than dialogue. The capacity for dialogue is the cornerstone of democracy and faith in better angels of our nature is the bottom line.

Conclusion

Bauman and Beck strongly believe in the core declaration that in the contemporary world of insecurity and unpredictability, nobody can solve its problems on their own, because global problems create transnational interdependency. However, interdependency is not the scourge of humankind, but the precondition of our survival in the complex world. For them, the narrative of a controllable world has become purely fictional, existing only in populist stories. The current emphasis on solutions based on barriers and walls blinds people to seeing beyond the national frame towards a cosmopolitan outlook.

Bauman suggested that the pervasive power of retrotopia comes as a result of sins of omission in developing a cosmopolitan consciousness, regardless of the fact that people are living in an irrevocably multicentric and multicultural world. The concept of metamorphosis draws from Beck’s academic passion and his hope of changing a national-territorial mindset caught in the trap of methodological nationalism into a more cosmopolitan-oriented frame of mind. For Beck, the metamorphosis of the world forces people to change a horizon. At the beginning of this process, both sociologists suggest seeing the world through the eyes of others because they believe that the problem of inequality is the key issue of the future.

The logical conclusion of contemporary reactionary trends around the world would take people back to a world of weakening social bonds, a globalization of indifference and tribalism. Lifting human integration up to a level in which equality is been promised for all is likely to be claimed a Sisyphean task. However, the emancipatory power of global catastrophe will create an entirely different way of conceptualizing the world and the chances of survival within it. As Bauman concludes, ‘More than at any other time, we – human inhabitants of the Earth – are in the either/or situation: we face joining either hands, or common graves’ (p. 167).

In their quest to write a sociology, Bauman and Beck want to show why people no longer understand the world they inhabit, but more importantly, they want a sociology that contributes to the creation of a cosmopolitan consciousness, a sociology that offers explanations and solutions, and last but not least, a sociology that is not indifferent to people and our common future as humankind.