The garden metaphor made eliminating ‘weeds’ seem a normal administrative task

Evidence

Second – from the Enlightenment on, the modern world was distinguished by its activist, engineering attitude toward nature and toward itself. Science was not to be conducted for its own sake; it was seen as, first and foremost, an instrument of awesome power allowing its holder to improve on reality, to re-shape it according to human plans and designs, and to assist it in its drive to self-perfection. Gardening and medicine supplied the archetypes of constructive stance, while normality, health, or sanitation offered the archmetaphors for human tasks and strategies in the management of human affairs. Human existence and cohabitation became objects of planning and administration; like garden vegetation or a living organism they could not be left to their own devices, lest should they be infested by weeds or overwhelmed by cancerous tissues. Gardening and medicine are functionally distinct forms of the same activity of separating and setting apart useful elements destined to live and thrive, from harmful and morbid ones, which ought to be exterminated. — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 202

Categorization

• DEFINE: The gardening/medicine archetype is a central analytic tool for understanding modern social engineering’s eliminatory logic.
• SEED: The ‘gardening state’ concept is a strong angle for an essay on how managerial metaphors license exclusion and cleansing.
• XREF: Connects directly to biopolitics/necropolitics scaffold: the administration of life legitimizes elimination of ‘morbid’ elements. — connects to: Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 171

Related

• Modern order-making denies anything the right to exist without utility. (similarity 0.80)
• Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• Modern societies adopt a gardener’s stance of engineered order over nature #exemplifies (0.92) — Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, 171