Modern order-making denies existence any right that is not justified by a projected design

Evidence

What may lift that possibility to the level of reality is, however, the characteristically modern order-making zeal; the kind of posture which casts extant human reality as a perpetually unfinished project, in need of critical scrutiny, constant revision, and improvement. When confronted with that stance, nothing has the right to exist just because it happens to be around. To be granted the right of survival, every element of reality must justify itself in terms of its utility for the kind of order envisaged in the project. This is, as I have suggested elsewhere (in Bauman 1987), an ambition which can be grasped best with the help of the “gardening” metaphor (uprooting the weeds to enable useful plants to grow and preserve the elegance of overall design). Medicine (cutting out the diseased parts to secure the health of the organism) and architecture (eliminating from the design everything out of place and redundant) offer equally useful metaphors. — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 428

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly parallels the ‘On Sacrifice’ piece’s account of sacral kingship and ritual violence as stabilizing order — Bauman’s gardening metaphor treats genocide as pruning human reality to a projected design, the same order-making logic.
• DEFINE: Defines the ‘gardening metaphor’ as the core of Bauman’s account of modern genocide — order-making as weeding, medicine, architecture.
• XREF: connects to: the MOC “The Violence That Builds: How Modern Order Is Forged, Not Broken, by Force”