Zygmunt Bauman’s nine decades have been lived close to the marrow of history. Born in 1925 to non-practicing Polish-Jewish parents in Poznan, his family fled to the Soviet Union in 1939 as Nazi tanks rolled into Poland. Having served in the Red Army with distinction, he returned to Poland after the Second World War to study sociology at Warsaw University. But, with Communism having long since lost its lustre and his academic career impeded by anti-Semitism, he emigrated to the UK in 1968, where he took up a chair of sociology at the University of Leeds. But it’s after his retirement in 1990 that the probing intelligence, for which he is so renowned, started to generate book after book. Intimations of Postmodernity (1992); Liquid Modernity (2000); Society Under Siege (2002); Strangers at Our Door (2016)… The list goes on. In fact, over the past quarter century he has published some 40 books, not for the sake of it, but because the world as it is is not how he feels it ought to be. Or, as he put it in 2003: ‘Why do I write books? Why do I think? Why should I be passionate? Because things could be different, they could be made better.’

The exchange below took place earlier this year after an initial question about the significance of the EU referendum result (published in August’s spiked review) prompted the following conversation about the future, the past and the fate of the Enlightenment project. spiked review: You’ve spoken before of popular disillusionment with national politics in a globalised world, and people’s sense that national politicians are powerless to affect change. Have your views changed in light of the EU referendum and the prospective Brexit?

Zygmunt Bauman: I believe that the collapse of trust in the capability of all (I repeat all) parts of the territorially sovereign state’s political establishment across the developed world to deliver desired change (or indeed any promised change) is precisely what, paradoxically, has sedimented the Brexit phenomenon. With voters’ frustration with the political elite complete, and their total refusal to invest trust in any part of the political elite, the referendum provided an unprecedented opportunity to match the polling choices with the sentiments struggling for expression. It was a unique occasion, in that respect, and so very different to routine parliamentary elections!

At a General Election, you may express your frustration, your anger against the most recent in a long line of power-holders and promise-givers. But the price you pay for this emotional relief is merely to invite Her Majesty’s Opposition, an inseparable part of the political establishment, to enter ministerial offices as Her Majesty’s Government. In this endless game of musical chairs, you come nowhere near to expressing the total, comprehensive nature of your dissent. The occasion offered by the Brexit referendum was completely different. With nearly all sectors of the political establishment positioning themselves on the Remain side of the division, you could use your single vote for Leave to release your anger against all of them in one go. The more all-embracing your frustration, the more tempting it becomes to do just that — to grasp that once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to vent your anger.

review: You’ve written of the end of progress, the loss of belief in the idea that the future will be better than the past. Is there anything in the Brexit phenomenon (and, indeed, other populist movements on the continent) that promises a new, perhaps even better era for Europe? Bauman: We still believe in ‘progress’, but we view it now as both a blessing and a curse, with the curse part growing steadily, while the blessing part is getting smaller. Contrast this with the attitude of our most recent ancestors – they still believed the future to be the safest and most promising location for hopes. We, however, tend to locate our fears, anxieties and apprehensions in the future: of growing job scarcity; of falling incomes and so also of the decline of our and our children’s life chances; of the increasing frailty of our social positions and the temporariness of our life achievements; of an unstoppably widening gap between the tools, resources and skills at our disposal and the grandiosity of life challenges; of the control over our lives slipping from our hands. It’s as if we, as individuals, are being degraded to the status of pawns on the margins of a chess game being played by persons unknown. They are indifferent to our needs and dreams, if not downright hostile and cruel, and are all too ready to sacrifice us in pursuit of their own objectives.

What the thought of future tends nowadays to bring to mind, therefore, is the growing menace of being discovered and classified as inept and unfit for task, denied value and dignity, marginalised, excluded and outcast. A rising majority of people have by now learned from their own experience, and that of their nearest and dearest, to discredit the uneven, capricious, unpredictable and notoriously disappointing future as the location for investment of hopes. My latest book, Retrotopia, touches precisely on these issues. Let me quote a fragment from its introduction:

‘This is what Walter Benjamin had to say in his Theses of the Philosophy of History, written in early 1940, about the message conveyed by Angelus Novus (renamed Angel of History), a 1920 Paul Klee painting: “The face of the Angel of History is turned towards the past. Where we perceived a chain of events, he sees a single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. The storm is what we call progress.”

Were one to look closely at Klee’s drawing almost a century after Benjamin produced his unfathomably, incomparably profound insight, one would catch the Angel of History once more in full flight. What might however strike him or her most, is the angel changing direction – the Angel of History caught in the moment of a u-turn. His face is turning from the past to the future, his wings being pushed backwards by the storm blowing this time from the imagined, anticipated and feared-in-advance future towards the paradise of the past (itself retrospectively imagined after having been lost and fallen into ruins). And the wings are being pressed now, as they were pressed then, with equally mighty violence so that now as then “the angel can no longer close them”. Past and future, one may conclude, are in the process of exchanging their respective virtues and vices, listed – as suggested by Benjamin – a hundred years ago by Klee. It is now the future that is booked on the debit side, having been first decried for its untrustworthiness and unmanageability, with more vices than virtues, while it is the turn of the past, with more virtues than vices, to be booked on the credit side – as a site of still free choice and the investment of still undiscredited hope.’

I believe that the Brexit episode, as well as ‘other populist movements on the continent’, are manifestations of the above discussed ‘retrotopian tendency’. In the absence of effective tools of action capable of tackling the problems of our present situation, and given the rising number of disappointments brought by successive futures credited with developing these tools of action, it is hardly surprising that the proposition of the u-turn of exploration looks misleadingly attractive. The possibility of ‘a new, perhaps even better era for Europe’ emerging in the aftermath of Brexit, may yet appear, as its unanticipated yet plausible consequence. But that will be because we become frustrated with the use of antiquated tribalisms to deal with the present-day challenges generated by the emergent globalised human condition of worldwide interdependence. review: The idea of a retrotopian tendency does make sense, given the widespread fear of the future. But how do you account for the co-existing tendency to view the past as a negative moral absolute, a way, if you like, of morally orienting ourselves in the present by saying ‘we know we are against that’ or ‘never again’? I’m thinking here of the centrality of the Holocaust to contemporary political and historical discourse, which has really come to the fore over the past 20 years. And I’m also thinking of the recent but continued focus on historical sex crimes in the UK, where it often seems as if the relatively recent past is being turned into a site of barely believable corruption and immorality against which we affirm ourselves in the present. The future certainly seems discredited today, but is the past not equally so?

Bauman: Isaac Newton insisted that each action triggers a reaction… And Hegel presented history as a strife/friction between mutually prompting and reinforcing oppositions (the intertwined cancellation and absorption process known as ‘dialectics’). Were you to start from Newton or Hegel, you’d arrive at much the same conclusion: namely, that it would be indeed bizarre if the retrotopian tendency was not fed by and feeding the future’s enthronement and dethronement (your question above being, by the way, a good example of that dialectics). Retrotopia, just as the orthodox Future-utopia, refers to a foreign land: unknown, unvisited, untried and, all in all, un-experienced territory. This is precisely why retrotopias and utopias are resorted to, intermittently, whenever an alternative to the present is sought. Both are, for that reason, selective visions, and in both cases they are selective visions that are obediently and obligingly amenable to manipulation. In both cases, the floodlights of attention are focused on some aspects of, to quote Leopold von Ranke, wie es ist eigentlich gewesen [how it really was] but in a dense shadow. This allows both to be ideal (imagined) territories on which to locate the (imagined) ideal state of affairs, or at least a corrected version of the present state of affairs.