Managerial ecology: Zygmunt Bauman and the gardening culture of modernity.

Abstract:

Certain lines of inquiry raised by the philosopher-sociologist Zygmunt Bauman are germane to critical perspectives on environmental management. This paper provides an introduction to these potential crossovers, in particular, with regards to control of humans and nature. This is not the place to present a detailed account of Bauman's interpretation of a causal link between the Holocaust and modernity, however, Bauman's thinking provides historical and philosophical dimensions, which may enrich the arguments of thinkers who choose to question various forms of control-oriented managerial thinking -- including environmental management. Bauman's reading of modernity as a control-obsessed "gardening culture" provides a metaphoric departure point from his primarily sociological thinking into the realm of the more-than human, a theoretical linkage that may open up some of Bauman's wide-ranging and incisive critical thinking to a wider, and in this case, environmentally-attuned audience.

Certains domaines d'etudes proposes par le philosophe et sociologue Zygmunt Bauman ont des liens avec certaines perspectives critiques de la gestion environnementale. Cet article est une introduction a ces possibles croisements. Cet article ne propose pas un compte-rendu detaille de l'interpretation de Bauman concernant un lien de causalite entre l'Holocauste et la modernite, mais la pensee de Bauman presente neanmoins des dimensions historiques et philosophiques qui peuvent enrichir les arguments des penseurs qui ont fait le choix de questionner divers types de gestions axes sur le controle - y compris la gestion environnementale. L'interpretation de Bauman de ce qu'est la modernite, c'est-a-dire une << culture de jardinage >> obsedee par le controle foumit un point de depart metaphorique pour aller de la pensee d'abord sociologique de Bauman vers le royaume du plus qu'humain: un lien theorique qui pourrait faire connaitre la pensee critique vaste et incisive de Bauman aupres d'un public plus large et, dans ce casci, interesse par la question environnementale.

Keywords:

Enlightenment, Holocaust, control, gardening, chaos.

Introduction

Bavington (this volume) identifies three paradigms that have been utilised in the field of environmental management/managerial ecology: management as control, management as careful use, and management as coping. Due to fundamental changes in ecological thinking, current eco-managerial thinking shifts the focus of environmental management away from wildly unpredictable ecological systems onto the realms of human and human-ecosystem interaction -- where some propose "control is viable" (Holling and Meffe, 1996: 335). However, despite evolving managerial paradigms and a shift of the managerial focus from ecosystem to social system, Bavington observes that the underlying equation 'management = control' remains essentially unchallenged, with obvious political and ethical ramifications.

The political and ethical costs of social-engineering or social management have been explored in some detail by the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. He pinpoints the Enlightenment as the principle source of control-oriented science and philosophy, which validates and endorses modern calls to 'manage' (i.e. control or order) human beings for the sake of the environment, or, indeed, the environment for the sake of human beings. The chief insight offered by Bauman's thinking viz. managerial ecology may be an elaborated understanding of order in two senses: Firstly, Bavington's paper considers how certain control-oriented aspirations of managerial ecology have disturbing implications when transported to the human realm. Via a little re-ordering, Bauman offers a similar insight in reverse: already tested forms of managing human beings have ominous implications for humans, non-humans, and the wider environment alike. Secondly, within any management programme, irrespective of intended targets -- humans, ecosystems, both simultaneously or others -- control/ordering remains a central motif. Via the managerial application of these twin concepts, a variety of issues regarding ethics, power, and politics emerges.

If the control/order problematic and the Enlightenment thinking that aggrandizes the concepts of control/order require unpacking, then Bauman provides a body of work that addresses these very issues. Using the simple and easily grasped image of the garden (society) and gardener (social-engineer/manager), Bauman highlights the interrelated concepts of order and control. These are perennial concerns of the gardener, whether s/he is a real gardener pulling up weeds or a metaphorical social gardener rounding up human beings in the interests of a managerial plan. Drawing upon and extending the thinking of Hannah Arendt (1951) and Adorno and Horkenheimer ([1944]1997), Bauman's critique also warns us that attempts to equate society and nature and to manage the former according to the principles of the latter, have yielded catastrophically cruel results in the past. Bauman's thinking -- and my own resultant research -- is primarily concerned with the philosophical and ethical implications of the gardening metaphor. T he imagery has obvious crossovers to the realm of (critical) environmental management/managerial ecology, and this paper discusses few of these possibilities.

Modernity and the Holocaust

The leitmotif of Bauman's book Modernity and the Holocaust is that the Holocaust and the Soviet Gulag were not caused by a breakdown in Enlightenment values, nor did they represent a relapse into pre-modem or 'pre-civilised' barbarism. Rather, the efficiency and vision required to kill and dispose of so many people in such a short space of time was an application of processes more usually accepted as both normal and necessary components of a well-managed, modern society:

[a] The two most notorious and extreme cases of modem genocide did not betray the spirit of modernity. They did not deviously depart from the main track of the civilizing process. They were the most consistent, uninhibited expressions of that spirit...They showed what the rationalizing, designing, controlling dreams and efforts of modern civilization are able to accomplish if not mitigated, curbed or countered . . . [b] Like everything else done in the modern -- rational, planned, scientifically informed, expert, efficiently managed, coordinated -- way, the Holocaust left behind and put to shame all its allegedly pre-modern equivalents, exposing them as primitive and wasteful by comparison ... It towers above the past genocidal episodes in the same way as the modem industrial plant towers above the craftsman's cottage workshop, or the modern industrial farm . towers above the peasant farmstead (Bauman [a]1989:93, [b] 1989:89).

Having dropped his bombshells, Bauman is careful to point out that while the Holocaust was a manifestation of modern technics being taken to an extreme end, living in the modem world is generally not a Holocaust-like experience. Rather, the Holocaust is one of various possibilities that modernity offers. Industrialised genocide represents one 'shadow' of modernity which cannot be divorced from its more celebrated triumphs. As Beilharz observes:

[Modern] civilization both creates and destroys. This contradiction, however, is exactly what is missing from most of the sociology of modernity, which identifies either dynamic progress or barbarism but not both, together (Beilharz 2000:91).

Bauman's point is that many of the processes synonymous with modern social structuring are Janus-faced. Along with mass industrialisation, modernity also enabled industrial-scaled genocide to happen. While the impulse to corral or kill ethnic groups is hardly a new turn of events, the ability to follow such plans through to a previously undreamed of scale, with equally unprecedented levels of orderly efficiency, is a relatively recent (modern) phenomena. However, Bauman qualifies this broadside against industrialization by arguing that for genocide to take place, advances in technology must be coupled with an "ideologically obsessed power elite" that can realise its will by harnessing the most efficient means of social engineering available at any given time, if -- and it is a big if -- unchecked by effective opposition. Hence for industrial-scaled genocide to happen, various factors need to be aligned in a particular constellation:

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. Most of the time, modernity is prevented from doing so. Its ambitions clash with the pluralism of the human world . . . When the modernist dream is embraced by an absolute power able to monopolize modern vehicles of rational action, and when the power attains freedom from effective social control, genocide follows. A modern genocide -- like the Holocaust. The short-circuit . . . .between an ideologically obsessed power elite and the tremendous facilities of rational, systemic action developed by modern society may happen relatively seldom. Once it does happen, however, certain aspects of modernity are revealed which under different circumstances are less visible (Bauman 1989:93- 94).