Modernity...

Khaldoun wrote:

"Many Jewish settlements, for instance, have open sewer
pipes that run and contaminate Palestinian farms and
villages.  Now when the Jewish settler talks about the
Palestinians, in many instance he/she complains that
Palestinian villages smell and are unkept, insanitary,
and not as modern as ours, failing to see how the
apartheid system has choked and destroyed these same
villages.  This is the power of modern discourse: we
are so interconnected that to speak of modernity here
and backwardness there makes no sense.  But yet that
is exactly the discourse of modernity: they can deal
with the non-modern only as the absence of modernity. 
They refuse to see the defects in the plumbing,
until, of course, the plumbing problem begins to flow
into their homes.  This is not instrumental thinking."

Well put. I agree Khaldoun. 

Perhaps I did not appreciate your point in my last postings. The "development 
of underdevelopment" is surely a blind spot in all forms of Modernity, which is 
often explained away in racist/ethnocentric terms. It is in fact intriguing how 
often such issues are aestheticized into beautiful versus filthy... perhaps 
because our notions of the pleasing and the repugnant are so embedded as 
visceral "yuk" and "yum" concepts...

The British (and some members of the Indian middle-class) found Indian homes to 
be cluttered and filthy, to be explained either by our lack of good Christian 
values or "domestic science." So depending on the analysts we either lacked the 
right kind of tradition or we lacked the right kind of modernity.

Best
Krishnendu