#modern

No idea is so antiquated that it was not once modern. No idea is so modern that it will not someday be antiquated. ↗

— Ellen Glasgow

#idea #modern #no idea #once #someday

The construction of civilizational difference is not exclusive in any simple sense. The de-essentialization of Islam is paradigmatic for all thinking about the assimilation of non-European peoples to European civilization. The idea that people's historical experience is inessential to them, that it can be shed at will, makes it possible to argue more strongly for the Enlightenment's claim to universality: Muslims, as members of the abstract category "humans," can be assimilated or (as some recent theorist have put it) "translated" into a global ("European") civilization once they have divested themselves of what many of them regard (mistakenly) as essential to themselves. The belief that human beings can be separated from their histories and traditions makes it possible to urge a Europeanization of the Islamic world. And by the same logic, it underlies the belief that the assimilation to Europe's civilization of Muslim immigrants who are--for good or for ill--already in European states is necessary and desirable. ↗

— Talal Asad

#eurabia #europe #european #islam #modernity-tags-civilization

The modern minds in each generation are the critics who preserve us from a petrifying world, who will not leave us to walk undisturbed in the ways of our fathers. ↗

— Edith Hamilton

#each #fathers #generation #leave #minds

I incline to an aristocratic republic. This would satisfy the ambitious spirit among our people. We shall learn from the historic mistakes of others in the same way as we learn from our own; for we are a modern nation and wish to be the most modern in the world. ↗

— Theodor Herzl

#among #aristocratic #historic #i #incline

We have always been taught that navigation is the result of civilization, but modern archeology has demonstrated very clearly that this is not so. ↗

— Thor Heyerdahl

#archeology #been #civilization #clearly #demonstrated