Debunking modernity is a luxury only affluent detached intellectuals can afford
Evidence
Those who live within the consequences of that ‘long past’, good and bad, and in places where a majority of the population has been denied access to such benefits of ‘modernity’ as hospitals or better health insurance or even basic literacy; can hardly afford the terms of such thought. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 108
Categorization
- SEED: An essay angle: postcolonial theory’s debunking of ‘progress’ and the ‘long past’ as a class-and-location privilege — who gets to afford skepticism about modernity.
- XREF: Connects to Bourdieu’s notion that critical distance itself is a form of cultural capital, and to the ‘complaints about immodesty’ genealogy of class signaling in discourse. — connects to: Intellectuals discovering they must earn money produce exactly what they once abjured — Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from…, 24