Uldis Tirons

In his influential book Modernity and the Holocaust, Polish-British sociologist Zygmunt Bauman draws attention to the Holocaust as a possibility that still exists in European society: “The Holocaust is a by-product of the modem drive to a fully designed, fully controlled world, once the drive is getting out of control and running wild.” The functional division of labor in modern industrial society has almost completely eradicated any moral judgment from human action; action and its consequences are mediated by a seemingly infinite series of causal links, narrowing the scope of human moral responsibility to an extreme. Such social alienation leads to the treatment of others as impersonal creatures, destroying the will to defend them in the event of violence. These considerations are particularly important for Eastern European societies, which are striving to integrate into Western Europe, thereby building the same highly rational society of bureaucratic irresponsibility that directly made the Holocaust possible.