John Docker

The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life in the 1890s

A cultural history of Australia during the 1890s with emphasis on the remarkable creativity of the period in stories, novels, paintings, design, journalism, intellectual and political movements.

The Enlightenment, genocide, postmodernity

In the second half of the twentieth century and in the new millennium the Enlightenment has been indicted for initiating, providing, and lending its authority to the conceptual underpinnings of the Holocaust. The influential frame-story here is Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), with Zygmunt Bauman in the preface stating that he once thought the horror and inhumanity of the Holocaust was a momentary madness that grew like a cancerous growth on the body of civilization and modernity. Bauman hoped his book would contribute to Western self-awareness and self-questioning, that it was modernity itself, in its ordinary practices of passionless impersonal rationality, bureaucratic efficiency, and social engineering that enabled and was manifested in the Holocaust (pp xii–xiii); a point he felt had already been made by Hannah Arendt in her 1964 Eichmann in Jerusalem but which still needs insisting on and drawing out (Bauman, 1989, pp 20, 184). In implicating the Enlightenment in the Western “civilizing process” of which modernity and the Holocaust are outcomes and expressions (pp xiv, 68–69), Bauman draws on George L. Mosse’s Toward the Final Solution: A History of European Racism (1978), which argues that eighteenth-century Europe was the “cradle of modern racism.” The “major cultural trends” of the eighteenth century “vitally affected the foundations of racist thought,” in particular an entwining of science and aesthetics. Scientific endeavour, with its interest in observation, measurement, and comparison, was “directed towards a classification of the human races according to their place in nature and the effect of the environment.” The comparative physical measurements made in the new sciences like anthropology, phrenology and physiognomy relied on a resemblance to ancient beauty and proportion; such fusion of classificatory science with ideals of “Greek beauty,” embodying “order and harmony,” determined the “value of man”; henceforth racial judgements were to be based on a particular kind of