Community of the fearful

Postmodernity unleashes fear, Bauman says: "Modernity was a continuous and uncompromising effort to fill or to cover up the void; the modern mentality held a stern belief that the job can be done - if not today then tomorrow. The sin of postmodernity is to abandon the effort and to deny the belief." By pulling back the curtain on modern pretense, postmodernity propels people to fear of the voice, which is, Bauman says, a specifically modern fear. Yet, "postmodernity has done next to nothing to support its defiance of past pretence with a new practical antidote for old poison." Postmodernity specifically doesn't permit any of the modern solutions to modern fears: There is no universal reason or order to put the fears to rest. Fears are privatized, and, Bauman argues, postmodernity also offers only privatized solutions, the private solution of an imagined community:

"community is now expected to bring the succour previously sought in the pronouncements of universal reason and their earthly translations: the legislative acts of the national state. But such a community, like its predecessor, universal reason, does not grow in the wilderness: it is a greenhouse plant, that needs sowing, feeding, trimming and protection from weeds and parasites. Even then it leads but a precarious existence and can wither away overnight once the supply of loving care runs out. It is precisely because of its vulnerability that community provides the focus of postmodern concerns, that it attracts so much intellectual and practical attention, that it figures so prominently in the philosophical models and popular ideologies of postmodernity."

These are not traditional communities, but imagined communities that exist only because of "belief in their presence." They exercise authority only to the extent that the members of the community impute importance to them. An imagined community "acquires the right to approve or disapprove in the consequence of the decision of the approval-seeking individual to invest it with the arbitrating power and to agree to be bound by the arbitration." In other words, it has no authority at all. But at least it appears to offer some protection from the abyss.

posted by Peter J. Leithart on Wednesday, November 01, 2006 at 04:24 PM

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