Enlightened progress remains entangled with domination and cruelty

Evidence

The liberation of citizens from the injustice of the feudalistic and absolutist past served to unleash modern machinery through liberalism, just as the emancipation of women led to their development into a military force. The spirit and all that is good in its origins and existence are inextricably caught up in this network of horror. The serum which a doctor gives a sick child is obtained by attacking defenseless animals. The endearing words of lovers and the holiest symbols of Christianity contain traces of the pleasure felt in devouring the flesh of a kid, just as this pleasure itself reflects an ambiguous respect for the totem animal. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 200

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The dense claim that emancipation itself (liberalism, women’s rights) is inextricably enmeshed in a network of horror — with the serum-from-animals and the loving words/cannibal-totem pairing — is a paradigm-defining dialectical insight that rewards long sitting.
• XREF: This is the core dialectic Burns inherits — connects to Adorno’s culture industry thesis and the broader critical-theory lineage this reader is tracing. — connects to: Enlightened thought itself contains the seed of its own reversal into domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 21; Enlightenment-era cruelty shifts from rulers onto the ruled.; Bourgeois ideology conceals that domination persists beneath the rhetoric of productive work. — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 130 (+10 more)

Broader Connections

• Adorno rejects mastery of nature as progress because domination entangles humanity in nature #expands (0.88) — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1585
• Progress discourse divides suffering into punishable gratuitous pain and necessary pain #expands (0.82)
• Torture persists alongside rather than giving way to modern discipline #exemplifies (0.80) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 502
• Enlightenment can be redeemed from blind domination by self-critique #qualifies (0.78)
• Domination in advanced capitalism is masked as neutral administration and objectivity #exemplifies (0.75) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 186
• The theology of progress normalizes structural genocide while exceptionalizing the Holocaust #exemplifies (0.72) — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 422