Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman says the Hlocaust was not an historicalaberration or a moral anomaly.?

Question

Rather, he says, it was a somewhat predictable product of modern bureaucratic life. Can someone tell me how a bureaucratic society might be expected to produce immoral,even horrific,desicions and policies.

Answer 1

Human Nature

Answer 2

Watch the movie "Brazil."  In a highly bureaucratic society, there is danger of dehumanizing the individual.  People become cogs in the bureaucracy or irritants to efficiency.  Once you start dehumanizing others, it is easy enough to think of their lives as having little value, particularly if they interfere with some grand bureaucratic goal.  As they say about Mussolini - he got the trains to run on time.

Answer 3

Bureaucracies are based on the idea that a large task can is more manageable if specialized jobs are preformed by different people.

Example:

If you run a pencil making factory.  One man is in charge of the task of making the erasers, one guy is in charge of painting the pencil yellow, one guy is in charge of filing the graphite.  Instead of one man doing all the tasks and making one pencil, you have many different people contributing to making many pencils.

As for the holocaust:

- one group of people was in charge of making sure the trains had an adequate number of cars to hold people

- one group of people was in charge of making lists of names for certain people to be put on trains, on a certain date

- one group of people was in charge of categorizing and cataloging items from suitcases and clothing after the train had left

Bureaucratic duties remove a person's sense of connectedness with what they are doing.  In bureaucracies people become names on a list, so the human aspect is taken out of the equation.

Also, if you notice in my example, none of the jobs these people are doing seem like bad things.  (They are just routing time sheets for trains, making sure trains have enough cars, itemizing things in suitcases.) It is only when you put all of them together that you see what is happening.