Citation

Best S. Sociology 2010; 44(4): 678-694.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2010, BSA Publications, Publisher SAGE Publishing)

DOI

10.1177/0038038510369355

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Liquid life is the name that Zygmunt Bauman gives to the experience of life within ‘liquid modernity’ — a form of modernity in which social frameworks and institutions experience a process of accelerating liquefaction. On the basis of a narrative analysis of martyr videos recorded by the 7 July 2005 London bombers and eight men who stood trial in the United Kingdom for planning to bomb transatlantic airliners with home-made liquid explosives, a core set of altruistic motivations were found to emerge. Liquid modernity appears to have no space for martyrs who reject the instant survival-and-gratification consumerism for other longer term communal goals. Such a stance is incomprehensible and irrational for the liquid moderns. Fundamentalism rooted in a form of Durkheimian altruism provides confidence, trust and self-assurance to people who would otherwise be stripped of human dignity and humiliated in the face of consumer revelry.