Pure Profanity

Modernity, says Zygmunt Bauman ( Life in Fragments: Essays in Postmodern Morality , 139-40), is a “civilization of transgression .” Citing Krzysztof Pomian, he says that in modernity “borders are there sole to be transgressed” and “does not just tolerate transgressions as far as they remain marginal; it provokes them.”

This transgression of boundaries arises from a desire to force things into new shapes, an impulse that always tries to stay a “step ahead of reality: having always more means of acting than the ends of the present action require.” To transgress, modern societies have to use violence: “Modernity can live without coercion about as well as a fish can live without water.” Modernity is profane: It breaks through every boundary.

At the same time, Bauman says, modernity is an aspiration to purity.

He quotes John Law’s observation that modernity “spawned a monster: the hope or expectation that everything can be pure; the expectation that if everything were pure it would be better than it actually is; and we have concealed the reality that what is better for some is almost certainly worse for others; that what is better, simpler, purer, for a few rests precariously upon the work and, very often, the pain and misery of others.” This is the source of what Bauman identifies as a silent Holocaust that revives “the Nazi vision of cleaning the world of useless or poisonous or morbid categories of humans” (159). Modernity is a purity movement.

The apparently contradictory aims of modernity come together, Bauman implies, in the modernity’s aim to civilize. Modern societies seek ever new lands to conquer, “ever new invitations to, or pretexts for, transgression” (140). It has to break through old boundaries to establish a pure world in which it makes “the course gentle, the cruel benign, the uncouth refined” (141).