Modernist myth use grounds secular values known to lack foundations

Evidence

Anthropologists who identify the sacred character of the modern state often resort to a rationalist notion of myth to sharpen their attack. They take myth to be “sacred discourse,” and agree with nineteenthcentury anthropologists who theorized myths as expressions of beliefs about the supernatural world, about sacred times, beings, and places, beliefs that were therefore opposed to reason. In general the word “myth” has been used as a synonym for the irrational or the nonrational, for attachment to tradition in a modern world, for political fantasy and dangerous ideology. Myth in this way of thinking stands in contrast to the secular, even for those who invoke it positively. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 90 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Enlightenment does not eliminate myth but re-enters it as secularized domination — Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, 46; Myth is conventionally opposed to the secular even by myth’s defenders — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 90; Secular modernity paradoxically claims to have produced the religion it excludes. (+5 more)

Broader Connections

• Myth is conventionally opposed to the secular even by myth’s defenders #complicates (0.78) — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 90