Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature

Evidence

No less was involved than the designing of previously unpractised mechanisms, and acquiring of hitherto unthought-of skills – both necessary to produce artificially what was in the past given naturally. In pre-modern times, Jews were a caste among castes, a rank among ranks, an estate among estates. Their distinctiveness was not an issue, and habitual, virtually unreflective, practices of segregation effectively prevented it from becoming one. With the rise of modernity, separation of the Jews did become an issue. Like everything else in modern society, it had now to be manufactured, built up, rationally argued, technologically designed, administered, monitored and managed. Those in charge of pre-modern societies could assume the leisurely and confident attitude of gamekeepers: left to its own resources, society would reproduce itself year by year, generation after generation, with scarcely a noticeable change. Not so its modern successor. Here, nothing could be taken for granted any more. Nothing should grow unless planted, and whatever would have grown on its own must have been the wrong thing, and hence a dangerous thing, jeopardizing or confounding the overall plan. The gamekeeper-like complacency would be a luxury one could ill afford. What was needed instead was the posture, and skills, of a gardener; one armed with a detailed design of the lawn, of the borders and of the furrow dividing the lawn from the borders; with a vision of harmonious colours and of the difference between pleasing harmony and revolting cacophony; with determination to treat as weeds every self-invited plant which interferes with his plan and his vision of order and harmony; and with machines and poisons adequate to the task of exterminating the weeds and altogether preserve the divisions as required and defined by the overall design. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 171

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The gamekeeper/gardener distinction is one of the most cited formulations in the entire modernity literature — it operationalizes the move from natural reproduction to engineered order that underlies everything from biopolitics to administrative violence.
• DEFINE: Defines the pivotal conceptual frame: pre-modern society as gamekeeper, modern society as gardener with toxic weed-control.
• XREF: Directly feeds the Islamophobia toolkit: the gardener fantasy of a pure social body maps onto the ‘Other’ as weed that must be extirpated. Connects to Foucault’s biopolitics and Said’s Orientalism. — connects to: The idea of progress was born when society gained rational control over nature; Societies can be controlled through engineered pleasure rather than coercion — , The Braided Reading EPUB: 5-Year…, 1253; Modern dangers are produced by socially organized knowledge, not nature — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 262 (+7 more)
• ADDENDUM: The gardening metaphor for social order complements ‘On Sacrifice’ by reframing targeted elimination as planned cultivation rather than ritual — the rationalized, administered form of expulsion.

Related

• The idea of progress was born when society gained rational control over nature (similarity 0.81)
• The garden metaphor made eliminating ‘weeds’ seem a normal administrative task (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Modern dangers are produced by socially organized knowledge, not nature #expands (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 262
• Societies can be controlled through engineered pleasure rather than coercion #complicates (0.72) — , The Braided Reading EPUB, 1253
• Disciplinary order blends artificial regulation with natural normative processes #complicates (0.72) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 277