Modernity’s admired and genocidal faces belong to one inseparable body

Evidence

The unspoken terror permeating our collective memory of the Holocaust (and more than contingently related to the overwhelming desire not to look the memory in its face) is the gnawing suspicion that the Holocaust could be more than an aberration, more than a deviation from an otherwise straight path of progress, more than a cancerous growth on the otherwise healthy body of the civilized society; that, in short, the Holocaust was not an antithesis of modern civilization and everything (or so we like to think) it stands for. We suspect (even if we refuse to admit it) that the Holocaust could merely have uncovered another face of the same modern society whose other, more familiar, face we so admire. And that the two faces are perfectly comfortably attached to the same body. What we perhaps fear most, is that each of the two faces can no more exist without the other than can the two sides of a coin. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 54

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The two-faces-of-the-same-coin formulation is the chapter’s load-bearing thesis, stated at its most compressed and philosophically taxing — repayable in every subsequent Islamophobia reading.
• XREF: Connects to the ‘banality of evil’ tradition via Arendt and to the chapter’s own Janus/factory-system passages as Bauman’s core modern-civilization critique. — connects to: Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 270; Totalitarianism is inherently, not just contingently, connected to modernity — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 401; Genocidal thinking requires race imagery, medicine, and engineering modernity — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 210 (+1 more)

Related

• The Holocaust must be read as integral to modernity, not as its aberration. (similarity 0.85)
• Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit (similarity 0.84)
• The Holocaust is a possibility modernity contains, not its paradigm (similarity 0.83)
• Normalizing the Holocaust as one genocide among many also defuses its challenge to sociology (similarity 0.83)
• All Holocaust scholarship is ultimately a debate over modernity’s self-image. (similarity 0.83)
• Both dominant readings of the Holocaust leave sociology’s theory of modernity unchallenged (similarity 0.82)
• Exceptionalist Holocaust readings let the rest of the world off the hook. (similarity 0.82)
• Modernity’s institutions actively enabled and supplied the Holocaust (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust is a product of modern rational society, not a Jewish problem alone (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust was a product of modernity, not pre-modern barbarity. (similarity 0.81)
• The Holocaust is a by-product of runaway modernist design (similarity 0.81)
• Genocide is a normal potential of modernity, not its malfunction. (similarity 0.80)
• Manipulating Holocaust memory threatens the future’s human habitability (similarity 0.80)
• Modern antisemitism is a learned theoretical product, not raw experience. (similarity 0.80)
• The Holocaust combined long-festering social tensions with the rational instruments modernity created (similarity 0.80)

Broader Connections

• Nazi and Stalinist genocide expressed rather than betrayed modernity’s spirit #exemplifies (0.95) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 270
• Totalitarianism is inherently, not just contingently, connected to modernity #expands (0.90) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 401