THIS conversation between the still-Marxist sociologist Zygmunt Bauman and leftish liberal culturologist Rein Raud, who both hail from eastern Europe, is an engaging debate about the paths open to our understanding of ourselves in the rapidly changing world of today.

Their starting point is the writing of Ilya Prigogine, a natural scientist and Nobel prizewinner who postulated crucially that since the entire world “is in continuous construction, the future is no longer given,” and “uncertainty” has become the name of the game — what Bauman himself terms as “liquid modernity.”

The sociologist brings the classical observation “panta rhei” — everything keeps changing, attributed to Heraclitus — up to date. That world, as we know it, is in a state of continuous flux and Jorge Luis Borges hit the nail on the head when he declared: “Time is the river that sweeps me along but I am the river.”

At the beginning of the 20th century, Eduard Bernstein sensed this shift in perception when he argued that we had to make the best of the present and not aim for some distant ideal. “The final goal of socialism is nothing to me, the movement is everything,” he affirmed.

It’s an important view because it liberates us, in the practice of politics, from the now discredited tyranny of a priori assumed outcomes and instead emphasises creative interpretation of each moment.

Hence, the continuous readaptation of our responses should not be in line with 19th and 20th-century canons of individualist self-realisation, defined by levels of consumption, but by far more promising and spontaneous actions — the Greek referendum of a few weeks ago being a pertinent example.

Amartya Sen, also quoted here, believes that humans are “capable of doing more than schools, workplaces, civil organisations and political regimes allow for” and have “capacities for co-operation far greater and more complex than institutions allow them to be.”

The inescapable conclusion is that it’s time to shape the world to our needs rather than the other way around.
Bauman would have been heartened by one banner at the recent anti-austerity march which invoked the slogan: “We are not a loan.” Precisely.

Review by Michal Boncza