A striking impression I've received at the beginning of Theology and Social Theory is that of the very set way modernity is popularly explained. The rise of modern is seen as the fruit of the Enlightenment and its love of knowledge and of the human. Yet told from another perspective, a neglected yet undeniably convincing perspective, the rise of modernity is not philanthropia but philmammon and phildynamis (to make up words: the love of capital and the love of power). For the rise of the modern is in historical fact the rise of unbridled capitalism, the rise of the power of the nation-state, and the startling collaboration of the two sans virtue or a virtuous end. Modernity's parents are therefore wealth and power, and the love for these two as an end. If the human, if knowledge and science and the artistic can be used by these two to further themselves, then indeed they are supported and celebrated. But one would be a fool to assume that these are considered worthy of celebration in and of themselves. Not, at least, by the ones calling the shots.
Milbank notes another interesting fact in that the aristocracy threw away their actual weapons and tendency towards engaging in warfare for the "playful agon" of the marketplace. The rich no longer were to fight on fields of battle, but rather in skyscrapers. Waterloo became Wall Street, so to speak. Yet this was not the whole story, for the rich only managed to escape actual combat by the actual combat of the poor. The Wall Streeter or the Senator (and is there now a difference?) was allowed to enjoy playful combat because the young boy from Arkansas was actually being shot at somewhere far away. And yet the proponents of such a system of government and commerce would call it the greatest system for peace and security and wealth that the world had ever seen - and many of the poor on whose backs it was built and by whose blood it was financed believed them, and voted for them and died for them.
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