“When elephants fight, pity the grass…” In other words, when the State and the market squabble, pity on you…

“Only very rarely in the liquid modern society do phenomena maintain their shape long enough to inspire confidence and solidify into reliability. Walking is better than sitting, running is better than walking, and surfing is even better than running.” The perfect storm unleashed by the current financial tsunami has battered the liquid consumer society that was simply waiting for a new wave to ‘surf’. What has been shattered is the dominant utopia of these years—that which saw the supremacy of a market capable of self-regulation, one in which the relationship between sellers and purchasers of goods was only ever harmonious. It was a kind of faith that assigned to consumer credit a ‘magical’ role, universal financing without the minimum precaution, declassifying the State to a mere guarantor of the fluidity of this exchange. The same happened for culture where the slogan became “maximum impact; immediate obsolescence”: ideas were transformed into goods to be stacked on the global supermarket’s shelves where they were meant to immediately attract consumers’ attention and be replaced almost as immediately. In the ‘solid’ phase of modernity, a cultural system was expected to provide rigid standards and coherent narratives with which to conform. In liquid times, it is expected to generate suggestions and emotions that seduce and do not imply obligations and responsibilities: a mass of information and of colourful and fascinating knowledge, ready to satisfy increasingly fragmented and individual needs, in which there is no hierarchy based on importance or quality. With his customary clarity and thanks to his use of powerful metaphors, Zygmunt Bauman shows how the current crisis does not only regard the economy but also the very ability of our society to transmit knowledge and values through education. This is a unique challenge compared with those we faced in the past and one that is destined to leave its mark on our future: “the art of living in a world that is more than saturated with information still needs to be acquired. Even more so, the much more difficult art of educating human beings in this life.”