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).

Bauman's bleak reading of modernity is, of course, unlikely to escape criticism. For example, although they do not mention Bauman's linkage of the Holocaust and technological progress in their polemical book, Heidegger and Modernity, Ferry and Renault (1990) read Heidegger's critique of modernity and modern technology (which, in some limited ways, resembles Bauman's (1)), as simplistic and anti-democratic. In other words, sweeping critiques of modernity as expressed by Heidegger and other postmodern/antimodern theorists who, they allege, have followed in his footsteps (Foucault and Derrida are named), may entail throwing out the progressive babies of Enlightenment humanism along with the amoral bath-waters of technoscientific rationality. Indeed, the very method of referring to one of humanity's darkest chapters in order to unveil more common mechanisms of power is, for some, a questionable approach to take from the outset. Birdsall adopts this position when he observes: "There are lessons to be learned from the most extreme cases of evil. But ... extreme cases are not representative of most human experiences. So far beyond the lives of most of us, extreme examples verge on the incomprehensible" (Birdsall, 1996: 619).

However, a different perspective arises in Arendt's definition of evil as banal, which is drawn from her first hand experience at the trial of the Nazi war-criminal Adolf Eichmann. Benhabib (2000: 66) observes that Arendt

was taken aback by what she later described as the sheer ordinariness of the man who had been party to such enormous crimes: Eichmann spoke in endless cliches, gave little evidence of being motivated by a fanatical hatred of the Jews, and was most proud of being a "law-abiding citizen." It was the shock of seeing Eichmann "in the flesh" that led Arendt to the thought that great wickedness was not a necessary condition for the performance of (or complicity in) great crimes. Evil could take a "banal" form, as it had in Eichmann (Benhabib 2000: 66).

Bauman provides a good deal of applied thinking regarding how such 'banal' "machinery of evil" may actually function at the mundane, everyday level (see Bauman, 1994). He argues that the Holocaust was largely enacted by regular people rather than ideologically driven, 'evil monsters'. As Bauman (1989:26) points out, many of the "'moral sleeping pills' made available by modern bureaucracy and modern technology," as harnessed by the Nazis, were not invented by the Nazis. Rather, they were -- and still remain -- structuring features of all modern societies, features that many people utilise and are affected by every day of their lives. Beilharz highlights the everyday quality of modernity's "moral sleeping pills" by posing a moral question that such anaesthetics are intended to by-pass or quash:

The Holocaust forced upon us this universal message: faced with a morally impossible question, what would / do? Fascism did not result from chaos, from the heat of madness, but was administered through an impeccable, faultless and unchallenged rule of law and order. The good Nazis were, after all, those who like you and me, did what was expected of them, followed orders. If they did it, so could we (Beilharz 2000: 98).

Beilharz's comments reveal one of the central themes that permeates a good deal of Bauman's work: the response of the individual actor to socially approved norms that the individual may find morally unacceptable. In a regime such as Nazi Germany, where acting as a 'good citizen' resulted in an immoral end, the tactic of always placing institutionally constructed ethics over individual moral feelings becomes dangerously flawed. Note the distinction applied here to ethics and morality. The term 'ethical' is being used to represent systematic forms of normative, institutionalised, legally-enshrined rules and laws, which primarily rely upon reason/rationality for foundational authority. I use the word morality to refer to the element of personal action/choice involved in personal dilemmas which may draw upon emotions, personal ties, and intuition as well as so-called 'reason' in way of guidance (see Bauman 1993 for background). The Holocaust and Gulag serve as warning examples of where societies guided by institu tionalised rational-legal ethics at the expense of individual moral responses may potentially lead. If actions which seem morally repugnant to the individual are endorsed by the powerful, then the goalposts of moral authority are justifiably moved away from the jurisdiction of the State or corporation or whoever, and into the hands of individual moral actors or groups thereof. To cite Beilharz:

With a slight shift of emphasis, Bauman argues, the challenge of the Holocaust to law or right is deafening ... The good citizen may henceforth be he or she who stands against the diktats of compulsory Gemeinschaft. As Hannah Arendt argued, in effect, it now became incumbent upon us to contemplate the problem of moral responsibility for resisting socialization (Beilharz 2000: 102-103).

The Holocaust therefore serves as a focal point for Bauman's arguments regarding the danger of modernity's privileging of institutionally derived ethics before and over the moral impulses of individuals or civic (i.e. non-state) social groupings. As Beilharz goes on to observe, a basic sense of right or wrong -- which Bauman (1993) aligns with innate moral capacity as opposed to institutionally constructed ethics -- may well precede socialization. However Beilharz, a sociologist, shies away from exploring the implications of this essentialist potentiality, or considering what this acknowledgement of non-social factors implies for social-constructivist thinking in general. Instead Beilharz insists that morality is invariably grounded in the social realm, his point being that the social construction and mediation of morality/ethics can mean completely different things depending on the motivations of the determining social group in question:

The ordinary relativism in morality generated by communal difference does not apply to the human capacity to differentiate between right and wrong. Something must on this account, precede socialization or the conscience collective; and this is why solidarity as such is not a good thing, but can be good or bad, as social solidarities can be constructed for different reasons and put to different ends ... Moral capacity, in this sense, must be located in the social, but not the societal sphere; or it must be practised in the realms of civil society rather than in the state. Morality results from being with others, not from rote instructions or code lists; we may find morality acted out within institutions, but it does not originate within the loci of such structures (Beilharz 2000: 103).

At this point, the reader may quite reasonably ask: What have these ethical observations got to do with gardening or managerial ecology? One point from whence to begin penetrating Bauman's modernity-Holocaust thesis -- and understanding its implications for environmental theory -- is Bauman's metaphoric portrayal of modernity as a "gardening" culture. The imagery could not be simpler:

Modern culture is a garden culture. It defines itself as a perfect arrangement for human conditions. It constructs its own identity out of distrust of nature. In fact it defines itself and nature, through its endemic distrust of spontaneity and its longing for a better and necessarily artificial, order. The order, first conceived of as a design, determines what is a tool, what is raw material, what is a weed or pest. .. From the point of view of the design, all actions are instrumental, while all the objects of action are either facilities or hindrances (Bauman 1989: 92).

Evidently, a good deal of social comment is tied up within the apparent simplicity of the gardening metaphor; however, the concept of a societal-scale gardener works on many levels, including the most literal -- such as the human attempt to tame and transform wild nature into a resource that serves anthropocentric ends. 'Weeds' or 'pests' in a real garden may, according to the vagaries of definition, be any unwanted plants, animals, or insects. In each case, such threats of disorder pose a challenge to horticultural order, hence they must be managed or eliminated according to the policy of the gardeners in question. Clearly, troublesome weeds could represent any number of things when taken as social metaphors. The ultimate terminus of this argument equates unwanted weeds with unwanted groups of human beings -- Jews, gypsies, Palestinians, illegal immigrants, Iraqis, Kurds and so on. Bauman pursues this line of thinking by referring to the most extreme destination social gardening may reach:

Modern genocide, like modern culture in general, is a gardener's job ... All visions of society-as-garden define parts of the social habitat as human weeds. Like all other weeds, they must be segregated, contained, prevented from spreading ... Stalin and Hitler's victims ... were killed in a dull, mechanical fashion with no human emotions -- hatred included -- to enliven it. They were killed because they did not fit, for one reason or another, the scheme of a perfect society ... They were eliminated so that an objectively better human world -- more efficient, more moral, more beautiful -- could be established. A Communist world. Or a racially pure, Aryan world. In both cases, a harmonious world, conflict-free ... orderly, controlled (Bauman 1989:92).

Three ideas broached in the last quotation need to be highlighted as they inform a good deal of critical thinking from Bauman's 'postmodem-period'. (2) Firstly the observation that victims of the Holocaust "were killed in a dull, mechanical fashion with no human emotions" opens an entry to Bauman's critique of the wisdom that lies behind the Enlightenment eulogising of cool, detached reason as the cardinal narrative by which to navigate individual and societal ethics (Bauman, 1989, 1993). Bauman argues that the divorce of morality from 'irrational' or personal sentiments and feelings is not the only thing served by a strict application of rationality. Its antithesis immorality may also benefit from the logician's touch, leaving the individual's moral conscience and resulting behaviour a poor second best to whatever actions seem rational or rationalizable in any given ethical quandary. Secondly, the critique of a Hobbesian model of enforced control and order as the primary basis for a "harmonious world" permea tes much of Bauman's writing. Such "social-engineering ambitions of the new state" (1991:27) -- along with the privileging of reason -- also crystallised in the Enlightenment era. Thirdly, the process of classifying society into sub-groups of weeds and non-weeds betrays another process synonymous with the modern obsession with control: the drive to order/control/manage human society and nonhuman nature alike via bifurcating codes of scientifically coded taxonomy.

The Historical Roots of the Gardening Metaphor

The imagery of society-as-garden is rooted in Enlightenment sensibilities and ambitions. Bauman (1991: 27) quotes Frederick the Great, "the monarch most closely approximating les philosophes ideal of the enlightened despot," to illustrate his point:

It annoys me to see how much trouble it takes to cultivate pineapples, bananas and other exotic plants in this rough climate when so little care is given to the human race. Whatever people say, a human being is more valuable than all the pineapples in the world. He is the plant we must breed.., for he is the ornament and the glory of the Fatherland (Frederick the Great, cited in Bauman 1991: 27).

Bauman argues that while Frederick the Great was merely picking up on the philanthropic zeitgeist of the Enlightenment era, the modern evolution of the managerial capacities of the modern state, coupled with advances in biological science, eventually transformed the vision of Frederick the Great into the real-world eugenic experiments of the 20th Century. As the future Nazi minister of Agriculture, R.W. Darre observed in 1930:

He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rules of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who . . . carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds . . . a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very centre of its culture (Darre cited in Bauman 1991: 27).

Bauman goes on to quote various 20th Century scientists who made the connection between gardening and the potential improvements offered to society by a marriage of eugenics and social engineering (1991: 27-29). It is the common drive towards instrumental control rather than a shared politics that unifies the various protagonists cited, and, crucially, it is the ubiquity of such controlling visions within 'well-intentioned' scientific and political thinking generally -- the application of results-driven scientific methodologies to the social realm -- that motivates Bauman's broader critique:

Let us emphasize that none of the above statements [from various scientists] was ideologically motivated; in particular, none of them was aimed specifically at the Jews. . .The quoted scientists were guided solely by proper and uncontested understanding of the role and mission of science -- and by the feeling of duty towards the vision of good society; a healthy society, an orderly society. In particular, they were guided by the hardly idiosyncratic, typically modern conviction that the road to such a society leads through the ultimate taming of the inherently chaotic natural forces, and by systematic, and ruthless if need be, execution of a scientifically conceived rational plan (Bauman 1991: 29).

The centrality of science within such narratives of control is perhaps indicative of science's traditional philosophical orientation -- the Baconian and Cartesian directives of mastery over nature. Also, the role science plays as the provider of the technics (Mumford: 1934) necessary to realize abstract political goals inevitably places it at the very centre of recent social-engineering projects - regardless of their ideological motivations. As Bauman observes, it was the advance of technology in tandem with the evolving managerial capacities of the modern state that transformed Frederick the Great's metaphors into 20th Century eugenics. Obviously, a mass of contestable and highly controversial historical baggage lies between these readings of gardening as a managerial metaphor and gardening as applied biological science. Bavington's (this volume) concerns about the implications of a shift from managing nature to managing humans makes this baggage especially salient for a critique of managerial ecology.

Bauman begins unpacking this volatile baggage in his 1985 paper -- "On the Origins of Civilisation" -- a paper which takes us back to the courtly sophistication of 18th Century France, a period when the word civilisation (which we now understand to be a noun) was then understood, by utilising the suffix - iser, to be a verb of active intervention -- Civiliser:

... the 18th Century was marked by significant innovations in French vocabulary. One of the most thought-provoking novelties was a sudden proliferation of verbs ending with '-iser': centraliser, federaliser, municipaliser. . . etc. Like all verbs they mean action. An action, however, turned upon an outside object; an action which aims at transforming the said object. . .Civiliser was one of these new verbs . . . the verb civiliser (to civilise) and the corresponding participle civilise (civilised) had become linguistic currency well before . . . the derivative noun, civilisation, was invented...the sages and politicians of the 18th century had no use for the idea of 'civilisation'. Their job was not the contemplation of the world as it was, but making it as it ought to be ... lifting fellow human beings to a new level of existence (Bauman 1985:7).

Bauman argues that the project civiliser had a semantic antecedent in the word civilite -- translatable as courtesy -- or, behaviour fit for the royal Court. According to Bauman's interpretation, civilite began as a system of affectation which served as a veneer over one's 'wild' or 'natural' impulses. Civilite was a camouflaging of the "killer instincts" via the smiles and gestures of Court-etiquette. By emphasising the shallowness of civilite however, Bauman suggests that nothing much is changed in the process of becoming 'civilised' -- the killer instincts are merely masked. This tid-bit of historical information partly informs the deep-seated mistrust Bauman displays toward Eurocentric, modern civilisation; a mistrust which finds its ultimate expression -- and justification perhaps -- in Bauman's thinking on the Holocaust:

There are two antithetical ways in which one can approach the explanation of the Holocaust. One can consider the horrors of mass murder as evidence of the fragility of civilization, or one can see them as evidence of its awesome potential. One can argue that, with criminals in control, civilized rules of behaviour may be suspended ... Alternatively one can argue that, once armed with the sophisticated technical and conceptual products of modern civilization, man can do things their nature would otherwise prevent them from doing. To put it differently, one can, following the Hobbesian tradition, conclude that the human pre-social state has not yet been fully eradicated, all civiliszing efforts notwithstanding. Or one can, on the contrary, insist that the civilizing process has succeeded in substituting artificial and flexible patterns of human conduct for natural drives, and hence made possible a scale of inhumanity and destruction which had remained inconceivable as long as natural predispositions guided huma n action (Bauman 1989: 95).

Civilite and the project civiliser can be read as first steps on the modern road which, along with instrumental rationality, bureaucratisation, and the distancing effects of technology, contributes toward what Bauman (1993, 1994) dubs moral-distance: the spatial and emotional gulf between the perpetrator and recipient of any given action. Bauman argues that modern societies actively create moral-distance via the sublimation of 'troublesome' personal, moral impulses to institutionally managed ways of doing, which systematically remove the individual's moral impulses from the ethical rule-book according to the distinctions noted above. Hence Bauman's thesis that the sublimation of personal moral sentiments to universal, institutionally-enshrined ethical codes is a potential abuse of power which creates as many moral dilemmas as it purportedly sets out to relieve.

It is the extension of civilite -- and therefore, the thinking that precedes and enables moral distance to take root -- from the "gardens of Versaille" to the "wilderness of society" that suggests the wider implications of gardening culture as a metaphor for wide-scale social engineering. Initially, the lofty social-standing of the proponents of gardening culture itself comes in for criticism from Bauman. Somewhat ironically, despite the emancipating intentions of the Enlightenment visionaries, the methods chosen to achieve their programme of societal improvement seem to have followed an older and inexorably elitist trajectory; a trajectory pre-determined by a mix of Renaissance humanism and esoteric speculation about the human soul:

What the elite emancipated itself from was the 'animal' or not-sufficiently-human, ignorant, dependent, 'other side' of their selves -- which became immediately projected upon le menu peuple, the coarse and uncouth 'masses' that in the eyes of the self-liberating elite epitomized all these hideous and repugnant marks of the animality in man. As Robert Muchembled, the incisive analyst of the 'great schism' put it. . . The masses, like the inner demons which the self-shaping elite wished to exorcize, were 'judged to be brutal dirty, and totally incapable of holding their passions in check so that they could be poured into a civilized mould' (Bauman 1993:23 emphasis in original).

Gardening culture, remember, is built upon a fundamental distrust of unordered nature (1989: 82). Bauman contends it is the extension of the same mistrust of nature -- viewed as the epitome of disorder -- to elements of human society who behave in a natural manner that seems to validate the Enlightenment assumption that an elite class of teachers -- or, more contemporaneously, managers -- can and should exercise dominion over the misguided 'masses'. While the former class has emancipated itself from base natural instincts and erroneous forms of knowledge via an application of reason, the latter group is still wallowing in the "animality of man," and awaits the enlightening touch of civilite.

The Intellectuals' Bid for Power

The schism between a guiding elite and the needy masses ultimately manifests as a dichotomy between those in need of education -- moral or otherwise -- and a controlling group of gardeners able to promulgate and guide the beliefs and changes requisite for creating a universally civilised society. According to Bauman's account, the gardening mentality of the Enlightenment also reflected a budding alliance between the Enlightenment intellectual elite and the concurrently evolving powers of the state; both camps shared similar beliefs and both camps had their respective 'weeds' to contend with. Bauman traces this "Intellectualist bid for power" (1985: 13) back to Descartes and Kant, suggesting that the wellmeaning proponents of Enlightenment critical philosophy were happy to court power in the promotion of reason -- theoretical and applied:

To legislate and to enforce the laws of reason is the burden of those few, the knowers of truth, the philosophers... Kant had little doubt as to the nature of the task; to explain it he drew his metaphors profusely from the vocabulary of power. . . There was a genuine affinity between legislating ambitions of critical philosophy and the designing intentions of the rising modern state; just as there was a genuine symmetry between the tangle of parochialisms the modem state had to uproot to establish its own supreme and uncontested sovereignty, and the cacophony of 'dogmatic schools' that had to be silenced so that the voice of universal and eternal. . . reason could be heard (Bauman 1991:23 - 24).

The gardening technique, then, represents an alliance of utopian vision and rationally applied statecraft. It seemed that a universal embrace of good manners, right-thinking and civilized behaviour was best achieved by orderly enforcement; in other words the velvet gloves of civilisation contained iron fists of law and order. According to Bauman's narrative however, the hand and glove were perfectly matched, for, as he puts it:". . . there was a certain Wahlverwandschaft -- elective affinity -- between the strategy of legislative reason and the practice of the state power bent on imposition of designed order upon obstreperous reality" (Bauman 1991:26).

Once the gloves of civilite were removed then, the intellectuals' bid for power was largely about wielding ideological influence: "At stake is the right to rule over the thoughts of the people... Thus the power struggle is first and foremost about education" (Bauman 1985: 9). If Bauman's account is accurate, this rationale ultimately entailed the progression of ideological control from the level of state education, onward and upward toward controlling the state directly (1985: 9). Back at the grassroots level, State-endorsed education was not merely about promulgating the illuminating messages of reason however, it was also about forcibly removing the 'wrong' ideas as perpetrated by those out of step with the emergent Enlightenment values. The latter included the Church, which posed both an ideological and political threat to the power base of the emerging modern state, (3) and the 'folk' wisdom of lay --people in general -- what Bauman (1985:10) describes as" the lore of popular culture and community -- supp orted life wisdom -- common sense in general, with its irritating propensity to self-reproduction." This two-edged reading of the Enlightenment educational project may recall Beilharz's earlier comments regarding the shadow of modem progress. According to Bauman's critical account, for the flowers of reason to blossom in the extended garden of civilite, various weeds -- both philosophical and cultural -- first had to be physically and ideologically uprooted. In other words, the process of Enlightenment civilisation involved the use of physical and ideological violence against its adversaries, violence which could of course be justified in the name of a higher, state endorsed, goal.

Ambivalence and Order

A not-so-tenuous link should now be emerging between Bauman's thinking upon the events of the Holocaust and Gulag, the extension of civilite from the gardens of Versailles, and the moral and educational crusades of the Enlightenment. Although in hindsight the Holocaust appears to be an abomination and the other factors listed necessary steps toward globalizied 21st century civilisation, all the narratives manifest modernity's relationship with the intertwined narratives of order, control and progress to varying degrees. They each exemplify the ordering of human society and nature alike via a planned, rational framework in order to progress towards a perceivably better world. The challenge Bauman's thinking poses to this project is the realisation that a thin line stands between 'well intentioned' social-engineering and Weber's dystopian image of instrumental rationality gone awry -- the iron cage. Such a reading implies that the Holocaust and Gulag, rather than being blips in the smooth ascendance of modernit y, were eventualities -- not accidents waiting to happen. The philosophical thread that binds together modern genocide, modern ethics, modern education and modern notions of civilisation is itself a product of modem thinking and consists of two interrelated tenets:

1. The assumption that humankind creates order out of chaos must presume a state of permanent natural disorder. Hence ...

2. The removal of disorder or ambivalence -- physical and mental -- demands the imposition of man-made order upon the prevailing condition of natural disorder.

Bauman is not proposing that concepts of order and disorder were 'invented' in the Enlightenment, rather, early modernity was the era when physical and mental ordering became paramount concerns for both intellectuals and the emerging state apparatus alike (Heatherington and Lee, 2000). Both camps were seeking to justify the governmental narratives of order-building and intrusive, applied reason hence, what better way to frame such activities than by pitting them against the metaphysical fabric of the universe? This, of course, meant revising medieval concepts of a divinely ordained 'great chain of being' and reassigning the authority to order the world to humankind alone. Under the new conditions, order could no longer be extrapolated from the book of nature via religion or hermetic magic (Baigent and Leigh, 1997), but had to be actively created by man. Within these new philosophical parameters, the natural state of disorder becomes a challenge, a threat even, to the ordering rationale of les philosophes and the political aspirations of the emerging 'Leviathan' state. Bauman cites Stephen Collins' study of Hobbes to illustrate this point:

[a] Hobbes understood that a world in flux was natural and that order must be created to restrain what was natural...order was coming to be understood not as natural, but as artificial, created by man and manifestly political and social...

[b] The raw existence, the existence free of intervention, the unordered existence...become now nature: something singularly unfit for human habitat -- something not to be trusted and not to be left to its own devices, something to be mastered, subordinated, remade so as to be readjusted to human needs ([a] Collins cited in Bauman 1991: 5, [b] Bauman 1991: 7).

Bauman argues that similar sentiments were also apparent -- nay, rampant -- in the science and moral philosophy of the Enlightenment era. It is the unification of all three voices under a common, rubric of control which binds ostensibly independent discourses -- philosophical, political, and scientific -- together in a common alliance geared-up for control. The human weeds of the Holocaust, the spiritual weeds of the Church, and the communal weeds of lay-wisdom, were all waste-products or victims of bifurcating systems of ordering classification, or, to return to Bauman's metaphor, gardening. Each of the respective weeds exists within a dualistic framework which assumes a dichotomy between approved elements for inclusion and disapproved elements for exclusion: healthy plant and weed, good rational thoughts and bad irrational thoughts. According to Bauman's master-key, all the preceding dichotomies can be collapsed into one fundamental cleavage: order and disorder. The ordering procedure creates or 'discovers' disorder via the process of classification. Furthermore, order utilises this production of disorder to justify its own definitive standing as order i.e., order requires a binary opposite to confirm its own status. The voice of ordering procedure inevitably becomes a voice of power in that it must decide where to draw the boundary between who or what is acceptable and who or what needs to be controlled or erased.

The logic of modern ordering is, to use Weston's terminology (1996), a process of "self-validating reduction" that simultaneously generates its own victims and justifies its defining role via the logic of its own unfolding. The attempt to order the world follows the pattern of positive feedback: the only way to control ever increasing levels of uncertainty is by the application of ever more complex taxonomies of reference; as the taxonomy of order grows however, so does the amount of ambivalence or disorder that it sets out to contain. For Bauman then, Modernity's chief flaw is not so much an escalation in power per-se but an exponential growth in the control-oriented thinking and technology that all forms of modem power -- regardless of political hue -- utilise for various ends. Controlling, or more euphemistically, managing ethics, the economy, education, and, of course, the environment, is taken for granted, even if the role and political orientation of power that mediates the mechanics of control is more closely scrutinised. But the quest for control seems to continuously create its own supply of self-validating material. Indeed, for Bauman, "The Quest for Order" (1991:1-17) is unlikely to end until that collective moment when the "primal state" of chaos which permeates multiple dimensions of existence is embraced and accepted, rather than perceived as an ongoing threat to human security and a challenge to the ordering tendency of the human intellect. It is this postmodern 'truce' with ambivalence that seems to inspire Bauman in the passage below:

It is, we may say, a pristine and brute fact that human beings exist in the never-ending, since never fully successful, effort to escape from Chaos: society, its institutions and their routines, its images and their compositions, its structures and their managerial principles, are all facets of that forever inconclusive and relentless escape. Society, we might say, is a massive and continuous cover up operation. And yet the best the escape ever succeeds in coming up with is a thin film of order that is continuously pierced, torn apart and folded up by the Chaos over which it stretches...

It is reasonable to suppose that the flattening out of the power differential between the West and the rest was among the principal reasons of the history-, progress-, project-oriented version of self-occultation running out of steam; of the crisis of modernity; of the advent of postmodernity: of the growing willingness to admit that not only is Being underpinned by Chaos and Absurdity rather than preordained Order and Meaning, but it is going to stay that way for the duration (Bauman 1995:13-14, 23).

Conclusion: From Chaos to Control or Control to Chaos?

It seems that les philosophes did a good job when they redirected control of the great chain of being from God to humankind, and, perhaps Bauman's critique of control implies an equally bold leap of the managerial imagination. In other words, until the grand-narrative of control is challenged at the first stages of metaphysical definition, then intellectual endeavours that question management/control in and of the physical world are liable to be pulled back into orderly line at the first hurdle. Bavington's analysis (this volume) suggests that in the context of managerial ecology, Bauman's call for a philosophical reconciliation with Chaos seems to have partially been made inasmuch as natural systems are now understood to be complex, uncertain, and for now at least, beyond human control. There remains however the question of shifting the focus of managerial control away from seemingly uncontrollable ecological systems and onto seemingly controllable social systems, where managerial intervention boasts a 'time-proven' track record.

At this point the question shifts from questioning managerial efficacy to questioning managerial legitimacy. Although many facets of the environment may benefit massively from managerial intervention in human activities, ethical and political questions now come to the fore irrespective of whether eco-managerial interventions in the social realm are successful or otherwise. Bauman's analysis of gardening culture and the Holocaust provides one place to examine the worst case scenario such interventions may potentially obtain. It also suggests that elitist narratives of control (or management) often manifest as self-serving and self-affirming dichotomies of good and bad, Included and excluded, plant and weed, etc. Irrespective of the managerial target then -- human systems, ecological systems, or a hyper-complex weave of both -- Bauman's analyses suggest that proponents of human-focussed managerial ecology may be well advised to critically consider the Enlightenment lineage, which overarches and validates contem porary calls to manage humanity for the sake of Gaia (or indeed, the reverse); a lineage that includes tautological assumptions and potentially over-rigid ethical assumptions. If control and order remain unquestioned managerial values, then the shifting political motives that guide such values, and the ethical, social and ecological freedoms potentially curtailed by such values, need to be considered in equal measure if we wish to avoid replicating some of modernity's most infamous chapters in the pursuit of instrumental rationality.

(1.) This is not to say that Bauman's postmodern perspective, or, more importantly, his political leanings, are analogous with Heidegger's anti-modern stance. Heidegger's brush with Nazism is impossible to tally with Bauman's Jewish origins, intellectual work, and personal experiences during and after W.W.2. See Beilharz (2000) for autobiographical insight into the war-time experiences of Bauman and his wife Janina -- a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto. Rather, both thinkers highlight the role of technology in the evolution of modernity and both take a critical view of technology's and modernity's instrumentalising tendencies. For example, there seems to be an echo of Bauman's reading of the Holocaust as the ultimate terminus of gardening culture within Heidegger's statement that "motorized agriculture is ... in essence the same thing as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps ... the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs" (Heidegger, cited in Ferry and Renault, 1990: 88) . For a discussion of this potential crossover between Bauman's postmodern perspective and Heidegger's anti-modern perspective (see Beilharz 2000:170-173).

(2.) Bauman has written over 30 books in English, ranging from 'straight' Marxist analysis through to the post-postmodern or -- "liquid modern" perspective of his most recent work. Although it is an arbitrary and subjective observation, Bauman's postmodern period, as I interpret it, begins in the mid 1980's and ends in the mid 1990's.

(3.) As Bruno Latour observes, the acceptance of theocratic power (or for that matter, any source of power that defies the state -- be it clerical, civic or pagan) threatens the secular state's monopoly of power, a point not lost on Hobbes: "For Hobbes Power is Knowledge which amounts to saying that there can exist only one Knowledge and one Power if civil wars are to be bought to an end. It behaves us to avoid at all costs the possibility that the factions may invoke a higher Entity -- Nature or God -- which the sovereign does not fully control supernatural entities that citizens feel they have a right to petition when they are persecuted by the authorities of this lower world" (Latour, 1991:19).

References

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Bauman, Z. 1985. "On the Origins of Civilisation: A Historical Note." In Theory, Culture and Society. Vol 2. 1985: 7-14.

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Holling, C.S. and Meffe, G. 1996. "Command and control and the pathology of natural resource management." Conservation Biology 10(2): 328-337.

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Mumford, L. 1934. Technics and Civilization. London: Routledge.

Weston, A. 1996. "Self-Validating Reduction: Toward a Theory of Environmental Devaluation." Environmental Ethics. 18: 115-132.

Author Biography

Matt Szabo is from Matlock, Derbyshire, U.K. He is a final-year PhD student in Geography at The University of Manchester, UK. His research interests crosscut various disciplinary boundaries including environmental philosophy, sociology and moral philosophy. In particular his current studies focus on developing the dichotomy of meaning between morality and ethics. He can be reached through the School of Geography, Mansfield Cooper Building, University of Manchester M13 9PL, U.K. or at mattszabo@yahoo.com.