Modernity

• Bauman 1989 - modernity causes complicity (Holocaust): 

  1. Division of labour - each person responsible for a small task and thus not personally responsible for the whole atrocity 
  2. Bureaucratisation - normalised the killing by making it repetitive, rule governed and a routine job. Victims dehumanised into units 
  3. Instrumental Rationality - rational, efficient methods used to achieved a goal, regardless of what the goal is 
  4. Science and Technology - railways transporting victims, to the gas that was used
• Bauman 1989: holocaust the product of a modern, industrialised mass production factory system. Holocaust was not the result of the breakdown of civilisation but of the very existence of modern rational, bureaucratic civilisation.  
• Not all genocides are a product of highly organised division of labour that allows participants to detach themselves from killing. Rwandan genocide committed by large maurauding groups
• Nazi ideology allowed people to see some ethnic groups as sub-human and thus not to be treated according to normal standards of morality
• Rational division of labour may have supplied the means for the holocaust, racist ideology supplied the motivation for the holocaust to occur.