By occupation, Zygmunt Bauman (1925-2017) was a professor of sociology, but by inclination, he was a philosopher in the original sense of the word. His ideas encouraged lives of reflection that led to lives of positive action. Bauman’s ideas have influenced the Occupy and anti-globalization movements for his penetrating critique of a privileged world order fueled by the industrialization of desire.
Bauman was a Polish Jew who fled the Nazis for the Soviet Union as World War II began. As he tells his story in Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, he did not become a Communist out of interest in Marxist theory but because of “a romantic, rebellious vision of history and the role we, the young people, had to play.” Returning to Poland after the war, he became a minor functionary in the new regime but got in trouble for thinking too freely. The Communist authorities expelled Bauman to Israel, a country he found uncongenial, and he moved on to the UK, where he taught at the University of Leeds.
Making the Familiar Unfamiliar reveals Bauman’s wisdom on many subjects, including love and relationships. He fears that we are losing the capacity for love because we treat each other—and ourselves—as commodities. “Human beings are only considered valuable as long as they provide satisfaction,” he said, ruefully. Bauman discusses the circumstances that shape who we are as individuals—our fate, those situations we cannot control—and our character, which helps determine the choices we make when faced with those situations.
Some of his reflections may surprise readers because Bauman is better known for his thoughts on societal rather than individual formation. He coined the resonant term “liquid modernity” to describe the contemporary movement of capital across borders, labor outsourced to faraway places and life, in all aspects, continually transformed at the speed of a click. The lack of stability—of resolute values and social solidarity—benefits the status quo. As a result, we’re all on our own, navigating an uncertain environment. As anxiety spreads, the desire to find a strongman who claims he has the answers, a Donald Trump, grows stronger.
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In Making the Familiar Unfamiliar, Bauman insists that no one can be a Renaissance man nowadays because there is too much information, too much to know. And yet, he had the curiosity of a Renaissance man with the will to ask questions across many fields including psychology, literature and history as well as politics and sociology. Reality is too rich and diverse to be confined or explained by any one discipline or seen through only one lens. Making the Familiar Unfamiliar could have been the opening episodes of one of the world’s greatest podcasts—if Bauman had lived long enough to continue his conversation with Swiss journalist Peter Haffner.
