Today we’re taking a look at modernity, which gave us organ transplants and nuclear weapons, indoor plumbing and school shootings, amid much else.
Sources and Notes:
Both these examples are simplified to make the dignity/disaster point, and each, I know, opens itself up to “robust” debate. Nuclear arsenals have acted for a while as deterrents to the use of nuclear weapons, but not as deterrents to violence, war, and crime in general.
For more about modernity as a “who” as opposed to just a “what” see Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, in Hospicing Modernity (2021).
Postmodernity—essentially a critique of modernity’s disasters—has its own dignities and disasters, but our concern here is with modernity.
Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism, (North Atlantic, 2021), 66-67.
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No one is responsible for what others did in the past. Each of us is responsible for how we choose to live. And yes, some of us have more, and better choices than others.
Some of the dignities carry disasters with them as well, which we’ll get to.
“Middle income” is an admittedly vague term, and despite available average and median income information, family size, geography, lifestyle choices, and perspectives on how much is enough vary.
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