Zygmunt Bauman on the ideologies that keep us from seeing the world
He finds the cure in Don Quixote
The social theorist Zygmunt Bauman, best known for inventing the idea of “liquid modernity,” left Poland as a dissident in 1968, and three years later became a professor of sociology at Leeds University, and eventually one of the most influential thinkers of the last fifty years. This comes from his address on receiving a Prince of Asturias award for communication and humanities in 2010, published in This Is Not a Diary.
Cervantes was the first to accomplish what we all working in humanities try, with only mixed success and within our limited abilities, to do. As another novelist, Milan Kundera, put it: Cervantes sent Don Quixote to tear up the curtains patched together of myths, masks, stereotypes, prejudgments and pre-interpretations, curtains that cover up tightly the world we inhabit and which we struggle to understand — but are bound to struggle in vain as long as the curtain is not raised or torn up.
Don Quixote was not a conqueror — he was conquered. But in his defeat, as Cervantes showed us, he demonstrated that “all we can do in the face of that ineluctable defeat called life is to try to understand it.” This was Miguel de Cervantes’ great, epochal discovery; once made, it can’t be ever forgotten.
To tear up the curtains, to try to understand life . . . What does this mean?
We, humans, would prefer to inhabit an orderly, clean and transparent world in which good and evil, beauty and ugliness, truth and lie are neatly separated from each other and never mix, so we can be sure how things are, where to go and how to proceed; we dream of a world in which judgements and decision can be made without the arduous labour of understanding. It is of this dream of ours that ideologies are born — those dense curtains that stop looking short of seeing.
It is to this incapacitating inclination of ours that Etienne de la Boetie gave the name of ‘voluntary servitude.’
And it was the trail out and away from that servitude that Cervantes blazed for us to follow — by presenting the world in all its naked, uncomfortable yet liberating, reality: reality of the multitude of meanings and irreparable shortage of absolute truths. It is in such a world, in a world in which the sole certainty is the certainty of uncertainty, that we are bound to attempt, ever again and each time inconclusively, to understand ourselves and each other, to communicate, and so live with each other and for each other.
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