Modernization of traditional cultures always requires political coercion

Evidence

In an interdependent modern world, “traditional cultures” do not spontaneously grow or develop into “modern cultures.” People are pushed, seduced, coerced, or persuaded into trying to change themselves into something else, something that allows them to be redeemed. It may not be possible to stop this process; it may be a wonderful thing that the process takes place as it does because people really are redeemed through it. I do not argue for or against such directed changes here. I merely emphasize that they are not possible without the exercise of political power that often presents itself as a force for redeeming “humanity” from “traditional cultures.” Or—and this comes down in the end to the same thing—as the force for reclaiming rights that belong inalienably to man in a state of nature. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 743

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘redeeming humanity from traditional cultures’ as secular-political-power move maps precisely onto Cooper’s account of how welfare-state retrenchment was legitimated in moralized Christian terms. — connects to: The traditional-modern dichotomy obscures the pathologies of modernization. — Alex Callinicos, Against Postmodernism: A Marxist…, 156; Expanded state administration destabilizes cultural traditions and raises legitimation demands — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2710
• QUESTION: Asad collapses ‘redeeming culture’ and ‘reclaiming natural rights’ into the same operation — worth chasing whether Cooper’s subjects likewise conflate these.
• DEEPTHINKING: Compact and unsettling: modernization is not growth but directed self-transformation under power that presents itself as redemption — and Asad declines to condemn it, only to point at its coercive machinery.
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular:…, 743