Modernity and the Holocaust

Once in a while you find a thought provoking book, that provides you a leap in your thinking about things, in this case about sociological and organizational theories. My belief is that Zygmund Bauman’s book Modernity and the Holocaust neatly fits that category. The delicate subject of the Holocaust is scrutinized by Polish sociologist Bauman, to advance our understandings, and to plea for (re)consideration of the Holocaust as an immanent – yet latent – feature of modernity,  despite the common view as the Holocaust as an aberration. The latter is needed to create an epistemic practice that recognizes and understands the  structuration efforts that blind morality in favor of rationality.

In academic terms Modernity and the Holocaust (Bauman, 1989) revolves around the relation between the moral indifference and the social configurations of modernity, being essential pointers in the fertilizing and occurrence of the Holocaust. His elaboration stands out because of its sociological Weltanschauung. Although its publication date – 1989 – might suggest obsolescence, I strongly recommend this briljant book to those interested in explanatory studies into the mechanisms of social engineering and organization. It also provides a critical – and perhaps healthy – stance against the general lauding of the heirs of Scientific Management. Even contemporary literature remains praiseworthy towards the bureaucratic configurations for yielding rationality and efficiency (see for instance Boisot, 1999 on entropy minimization and value maximization and Mintzberg, 1989).

In his treatise Bauman opposes to the social scientists that visit the Holocaust is a failure of modernity, not a product, of modernity, by arguing that the fertile soil needed to foster the genocide, is inherent to the characteristics of modernity. To substantiate the latter, Bauman holds that the Holocaust should not be seen as a temporal aberration by civilized society, but the Holocaust is the ‘hidden face’ of civilized society. The hidden face, is the apparently deviant behaviour, that manifests itself under stressful events, like kidnappings, that is essentially part of the same face.  In combining Wenger (1998) and Goffman’s (1959) terms it can be seen as a imbalanced duality, where the natural behaviour is automatically front-staged, at the expense of the deviant behaviour, that is back-staged, while natural and the deviant behaviour are essentially part of the same identity. Modern society did not cause the Holocaust, but certainly it did not prevent it. As Bauman puts it, the Holocaust was “a legitimate resident in the house of modernity” (Bauman, 1989, p.17).

Modern society was the advocate and guardian of the bureaucracy, being the rational instrument to maximize the efficiency of a ‘judenfrei’ Reich. Bauman projects the rationalization and its consequences of bureaucratic organizing on Weber’s theoretical analysis of the rational bureaucracy (Weber, 1978). Weber defined this organizational configuration as “a hierarchical organizational structure designed rationally to co-ordinate the work of many individuals in the pursuit of large-scale administrative tasks and organizational goals” (Weber, 1968 cited in Fairclough, 1989, p.212 from Janssen, 2009). Weber regards bureaucracy as the most the most efficient and technically superior form of organisation, precisely because it relies on rules not men, on a hierarchy of offices, not on a network of personal relationships. The execution of bureaucracies is essentially a perpetuum immobile, which also implies that it ensures it continuity by recreating an ever swelling appetite for administrative ‘fueling’. And while Hitler necessitated his objective of an Aryan Reich, implicating the cleansing of all impurities, especially the Jews, it was up to the bureaucratic apparatus the devise the means. At the start the bureaucratic apparatus formalized distinctions, subsequently it engineered the segregation of Jews, thereafter it designed deportation of the Jewish people across the borders of the Reich, while in the end the bureaucratic apparatus rationalized the extermination of the Jews. The bureaucracy recreated its own functional means. This latter also contests the so called ‘internationalist views’ of Hitler, while favouring the ‘functionalists view’, in explaining the Holocaust.

Although Weber’s appraisal of the bureaucracy appears to be positive, he also envisioned the negative consequences of bureaucratic perfection. Its property of alienating worker’s from ‘their’ final end product, because of the specialization of work, leads to moral indifference (even by ‘normal’ workers). This characteristic is also known as mediating action, relating to how each link in a long chain of events allows the person on one end to distance him/her self from the final outcome. The moral context is related to your action, but by the authorization of your superiors. With regard to this case Bauman refers to Milgram’s experiment, in which subject is authorized by the scientist to gradually intensify the administration of an electrical shock to the a victim that can only be heard, with the legitimacy that administering shocks serve the victims learning capabilities (Milgram, 1963). Milgram discovered that subjects would continue to administer (lethal) shocks, as long as  physical proximity was eliminated, actions were routinized and shocks were authorized by higher rankings.

We already introduced on the numbing forces of authorization, the other two routines and proximity are elaborated next. Routinized practices ensure cutting out the ‘choice’ part of a situation where a moral choice should normally be made. The ability to choose an appropriate action can be considered as learning, distinguishing routinized practices from epistemic – or, learning – practices (see Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Von Savigny, 2001). By doing the same thing, over and over again, one is able to act without thinking and moral conundrums gradually fade away.

Proximity needs not only to be physical, but can also be instigated by classification or objectification. Identification and objectification of participation and non-participation leads to the erection of ‘communal’ boundaries, leading to the emergence of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ identities. Medical metaphors, like germs, cancer, slimy and pests, as employed by the Nazi regime, related the Jewish identity to something harmful to the German community, subsequently structuring the perceptions and understandings (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) of those fitting the Aryan category. These steps (ultimately) build images of groups that are supported by the system and groups that are less fortunate within the system (e.g. Übermensch versus Untermensch and the system is off course the Nazi regime). Visible reifications, like stars of David, ensured instantaneous categorization – and thus segregation – by the supported groups.

The combinative effect of routines and proximity is substitution of moral responsibility with technical responsibility, in that action is considered isolated and standing on its own and the prime judgement of that action becomes a measurement of efficiency. This effect can also be recognized in contemporary organizations that use Balanced Score Cards. ‘In case of Balanced Score Cards localized meanings are aggregated into objective steering mechanisms for organization’s management (or as Wenger likes to call them: constellations). To accomplish these corporate aggregates relentless data-shredding is necessary to simplify and objectify complexity. What becomes of these aggregates then are rather restricted representations of communal activities, and do not provide insight about the practices that took place’ (Hoogenboom, 2009).

The fact that the Jew was ‘figurated’ as ‘a disruptive slime to be removed from societies aspiring an ordered structure’ is not solely related to the absence or presence of anti-Semitism during the reign of Hitler, because the latter was omnipresent. Jews were a group that was treated differently during the ages. Also the Diaspora, implicating that Jews were a non-national nation, and therefore considered as boundary spanners within various communities or nations, or seen as a ‘foreigner inside’, proposing a threat for nationalistic idealists (like Hitler). Note also the transition from Jews as indicator for Judaism (being a religion) to ‘the Jew’ as inherent property of people, that is genetically determined and thus can not be cured, but only removed. Herein lies the essence of racism, “It posits undesirable characteristics of a group of people as an essential element of their being – and completely unchangeable” (Moody, 2007).

The image of categorizing groups under command and control, selecting superiorities while removing deficiencies, to socially engineer the materialization of the perfect society, is also known as the gardening society, or denotes as ‘design as a process’ (Jones, 1992). Paradoxically this goal fuels fertilizes both modernity and racism. And once the belief sets in that ‘the Jew’ could not be cured, the realization of a Judenfrei Reich moved from expulsion to extermination. Although racisms can feed natural hatreds, instigating riotous pogroms against outsiders (as coordinated during the Kristallnacht), rather general resentment against Jews existed in Germany, decelerating the materialization of a Judenfrei Reich. Without modern civilisation, there would be no Holocaust… it was a by-product of a modern drive  to a fully designed, fully controlled world.

‘The bureaucracy’ or ‘the market’ is often seen as a metaphor for an organization or an organizational structure (like the government), however it can also be projected on societies, to explain their inner workings, as Bauman shows. The bureaucratic apparatus of the Nazi regime also made sure to firmly insert its tentacles into the existing Jewish communities, while – at the same time – sealing off these communities by cutting through all lifelines with the outside, ‘healthy’, world as illustrated above with the acts of participation and non-participation. These tentacles existed of direct ‘save what you can’ orchestrated predominantly by the Nazi officials and ‘their’ marionettes from the Judenräte. In order to control their victims, the nazi’s need to make sure that the Jews would behave predictable. Within this sealed off Jewish communities members from the Judenräte were forced to create a ‘predictable market for survival’. In order to predict behaviour, intentional stratification was carefully established within these communities, while privileges were designed to ensure movements to more privileged positions – or at least postpone demotive trajectories. “This led to the rejection of solidarity in the name of personal or group privileges (which always, albeit indirectly, meant consent to the principle that not all members of the marked category deserve to survive, and that differential treatment should follow the duly assessed ‘objective’ quality) was prominent not only in the inter communal relations” (Bauman, 1989, p.133). Apparently, the playground was designed as a zero sum game, aimed at provoking primal tendencies toward self-preservation; a choice favouring A, automatically neglected B, however only A matterd (which wryly paved the way towards the objective of efficient destruction of the Jews). In this system, the class structure mattered (while corruption and treason made sure that class structure would never function optimally, damaging those captured in that system). Although Bauman not explicitly mentions it, it appears that the moral objections as a result of proximity between killer and victim, were overcome by the Germans by forcing Jews to deal with this dilemma. After the inhumane and impossible selections were enforced, by an impaired the community’s leaders, the relentless and non-affective bureaucratic apparatus took over to rationalize all horrors, in the name of authority and technical responsibility.

I found myself literally captivated by Zygmund Bauman’s book, hours faded away and on many occasions I found myself postponing my night’s sleep, which is a rare quality for significant academic treatises. It is a realistic evaluation of the mechanisms of authority, rationality and modernity (especially with regard to the gardening society), that also have its relevance in contemporary society and organizations. The objectivistic approach to organizing, in which all intersubjective construction of meaning of human action is carefully stripped away, or its existence is perhaps (un)intentionally and (un)consciously left out of consideration. This leads to rationalistic views on organizing and coordinating, which also prevails in organizational design nowadays, which its focus on financial decision making, performance driven metrics, functional specialization and layering in competences.  Although associating these minor design fundamentals of contemporary organizations  with the horrendous atrocities that irrevocably stick to ‘design’ of the holocaust, yet, being able to recognize the patterns in an early stage and able to make a distinctive evaluation, is exactly what knowing and learning is about (see Huizing, 2007). Thus, a critical stance – which in not causally translates into a negative stance – towards bureaucratic and objectivistic organizing principles, heightens your perceptive – and perhaps cautious – senses to provocations of distancing proximity, of habitual routinization,  of gradual substitutions of moral responsibility for technological responsibility or of objectification and thus dehumanization within contemporary organization.

• Bauman, Z. (1989), Modernity and the Holocaust, Cambridge, Cambridge: Polity Press;
• Boisot, M. (1998), Knowledge Assets: Securing Competitive Advantage in the Information Economy, Oxford, Oxford University Press;
• Goffman, E. (1959), The presentation of self in everyday life, Garden City, New York: Doubleday;
• Huizing, A. (2007), “The Value of a Rose: Rising above Objectivism and Subjectivism”, in: Huizing, A. & Vries, E.J. de (eds.), Information Management: Setting the Scene, pp. 73–90, Oxford: Elsevier Science;
• Jansen, K. (2009), Bureaucratie en de Holocaust, verbonden in de geschiedenis, InfoNu.NL (last visited December, 31 2009);
• Jones, J.C. (1992), Design Methods: Seeds of human futures, 2nd edition, London, John Wiley & Sons Ltd.;
• Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980), Metaphors we live by, Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press;
• Milgram, S. (1963), “Behavioural Study of Obedience”, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, vol. 67, pp. 371–378;
• Mintzberg, H. (1989), Mintzberg on Management: Inside our Strange World of Organisations, Chicago, Free Press;
• Moody, J. (2007) Lecture Notes for Soc 138: Theory & Society, Undergraduate Social Theory, Duke University Department of Sociology (last visited December, 31 2009);
• Schatzki, Knorr-Cetina and Von Savigny (2001)
• Weber, M. (1978), Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Berkeley, University of California Press;
• Wenger, E. (1998), Communities of Practice: Meaning, Identity and Practice, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press

A special word of gratitude should be addressed to James Moody for his excellent reading notes (part 1 and part 2) on Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust.