Liquid Love by Bauman Zygmunt

Author:Bauman, Zygmunt
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Half a century later, when pressed by Leslie Stahl of CBS television about half a million children who died because of the US’s continuous military blockade of Iraq, Madeleine Albright, then US ambassador to the United Nations, did not deny the charge and admitted that ‘this was a difficult choice to take’. But she justified that choice: ‘we think that the price was worth paying.’

Albright, let us be fair, neither was nor is alone in following that kind of reasoning. ‘You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs’ is the favourite excuse of the visionaries, the spokespeople for the officially endorsed visions, and the generals acting on the spokespeople’s behest alike. That formula has turned over the years into a veritable motto of our brave modern times.

Whoever those ‘we’ are who ‘think’ and in whose name Albright spoke, it is exactly the cold cruelty of their kind of judgement which Wittgenstein opposed and by which Korczak was shocked, outraged and revolted, resolving to make a whole life out of that revulsion.

Most of us would agree that senseless suffering and senselessly inflicted pain can have no excuse and would not be defensible in any court; but fewer are prepared to admit that to starve or cause death to just one human being is not, cannot be, a ‘price worth paying’, however ‘sensible’ or even noble the cause may be for which payment is made. Neither humiliation nor denial of human dignity can be such a price. It is not only that the dignified life and respect due to the humanity of each human being combine into a supreme value that cannot be outweighed or compensated for by any volume or any amount of other values, but all other values are values only in as far as they serve human dignity and promote its cause. All things valuable in human life are but so many different tokens to purchase that single value that makes life worth living. The one who seeks survival by murdering humanity in other human beings survives the death of his own humanity.

Denial of human dignity discredits the worth of any cause that needs such denial to assert itself. And the suffering of just one child discredits that worth as radically and completely as does the suffering of millions. What may be true for omelettes becomes a cruel lie when applied to human happiness and well-being.

It is commonly accepted by Korczak’s biographers and disciples that the key to his thoughts and deeds was his love of children. Such an interpretation is well grounded; Korczak’s love of children was passionate and unconditional, complete and all-embracing – enough to sustain a whole life of uniquely cohesive sense and integrity. And yet, like most interpretations, this one stops short of the completeness of its object.

Korczak loved children as few of us are ready or able to love, but what he loved in children was their humanity. Humanity at its best – undistorted, untruncated, untrimmed and unmaimed, whole in its childish inchoateness and nascence, full of as-yet-unbetrayed promise and as-yet-uncompromised potential.

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