Who is Zygmunt?

Only this past week did I discover Zygmunt Bauman whom sadly I never knew earlier.  Who is he? 

Well he died only this month and that is why I discovered him as Aljazeera was repeating an interview with him in his honour.  Zygmunt was a sociologist and philosopher.  He was a Polish Jew, born in 1925.  In his lifetime, he suffered two totalitarian regimes.  One he fought against.  The other of which he was a part persecuted him.

His life story is amazing as during World War II he went into Russia to fight with the USSR against the Nazis.  After the war, he returned home only to depart yet again in the late 1960s not for being Jewish but due to a political purge against academics and Polish Jews and others seen as a threat to the State.  He went to the UK and there worked at Leeds University. 

He knew what it was to lose everything including one's home and country.  So he could speak with conviction when he said -
"See the world through the eyes of society's weakest members and then tell anyone honestly that our societies are good, civilised, advanced, free."

What grabbed me on hearing Zygmunt speak in an interview made in mid-2016 was his take on the present refugee crisis facing Europe.  He explained it basically in terms of how those supposedly in control and with power, living their everyday lives in Europe, were being personally threatened in their very existence when faced with this flood of refugees.  Life is so fragile, so precarious.

So he named those being threatened in Europe as the precariat, coming from the French word meaning to be standing on vanishing sands.  It is, of course, the same root for the word in English - precarious.  The phenomenon we are seeing then is one of those who see themselves as being in control now living in fear for they feel threatened by what they see before them.  This tide of refugees represents for them all their fears as they see that they too could become like these desperate and vulnerable people, losing everything, losing control.  If it could happen to happy and successful Syrians, it could happen to the precariat as well.  The supposedly strong and in control are being faced with a reality they do not want to face - they too could become like these refugees trying to come into their homeland.   Those living a successful existence were actually living a precarious existence, being under threat of losing control.

As I so dearly hold, control does not work.  It just doesn't.