Modernity is a deliberate power project, not a natural unfolding

Evidence

Modernity is a project – or rather, a series of interlinked projects – that certain people in power seek to achieve. The project aims at institutionalizing a number of (sometimes conflicting, often evolving) principles: constitutionalism, moral autonomy, democracy, human rights, civil equality, industry, consumerism, freedom of the market – and secularism. It employs proliferating technologies (of production, warfare, travel, entertainment, medicine) that generate new experiences of space and time, of cruelty and health, of consumption and knowledge. The notion that these experiences constitute ‘disenchantment’ – implying a direct access to reality, a stripping away of myth, magic, and the sacred – is a salient feature of the modern epoch. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 375

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines modernity as an agent-driven project rather than an autonomous process, and repositions disenchantment as a constructed belief rather than an achieved reality.
• XREF: connects to: Modernity’s disaster is not backwardness but the domination machinery itself.; Modernity should be defined as the civilization capitalism built. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 162; Civic engagement traditions precede and enable socioeconomic modernization, not the reverse. — Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: America’s Declining…, 14 (+2 more)