Project Modernity has failed. 

Tracing the wellsprings of the same to Western ‘Enlightenment values’, where reason, its handmaiden rationality, and individualism were harbingers of ‘progress’ and a new social order, the obverse seems to have happened. 

Wars of choice in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Iran, after the so-called post-Cold War peace dividend, the excesses of globalism, global inequality, poverty, uneven economic development, and so on, social disorder, dysfunction, and anomie in Western societies, unhinged capital flows that promote consumerism as the ultimate ‘value’, among other things, all point to this. 

While the irony is that the Global South is moving in this direction, lock, stock, and barrel, many across the West seem to be reclaiming their agency and autonomy. The overall trend, however, appears to have been toward conformism, a decidedly contra-Western ‘Enlightenment’ notion.

In the schemata of conformism, capitalism, its accoutrements, and proclivity, consumption and consumerism as the highest values, deviation from these normative ideals of capitalism engendered a divorce from Western democracy. 

In other words, the social order was being shaped by capitalism and its ideals. 

This percolated into political orders and systems in and across the West, with only a wee resistance offered by Scandinavian social democracies, despite all their other flaws. 

With the link between democracy, democratic individualism, individual agency, and autonomy that inhered in these being broken, capitalism, which morphed into globalism, became the dominant ideology of a post-Cold War world. 

All its perversions, including the fraying of the social........

© Kashmir Observer