Modernity’s paradigmatic structures have failed the consumers of the good life

Evidence

Thus the subjectivity of moral value is not to be confused with unintelligible abstractness. When all else fails, a moral system can be judged and adjudicated on less abstract grounds than metaphysics, whether in its coherent or blurred (unacknowledged?) versions. If the structures of technology/technique, industrialism, science, rationality, instrumentalism, capitalism, and, no less, the nation-state are admitted to be paradigmatic, defining in the most decisive of ways the contours and substantive content of modern life, then it may not be implausible to regard them as having failed the consumers of the good life who live in and with the world rather than above and against it, be these consumers human, animal, or insentient (this last being determined as such, like much else, by the constrained forms of modern knowledge). — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 463

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Dense, layered argument: moral value judged on concrete grounds, the verdict on modernity delivered from within, and an ecological/posthumanist angle (animal and insentient consumers) compressed into one paragraph.
• XREF: connects to: Modern efficiency erases the ceremonious generosity that once defined luxury travel; First modernity’s own successes eroded its authority and created self-directed individuals — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 111