The Fatal Conceit: Elisions of Materialism

Abstract

The Enlightenment offered the world the arid, and seemingly ineluctable, gifts of science, materialism, and progress (i.e., Modernism, in a nutshell). Indeed, today, it is almost impossible to believe in any one of these elements without swearing fealty to the triad as a whole. Science was the instrument of deliverance of material wealth, and progress was measured by the incremental growth of that very wealth: as such, materialism was simply the grand ethos that legitimized the banal process shackling human labor, in perpetuity, to the wheel of endless accumulation. From the industrial revolution onwards, this omnipotent ideology of the Enlightenment gathered steam and grew in confidence and power with Political Economy as its Great Propagator, enshrining, in most of its variants, this unholy triumvirate of mistaken ideas in its entirety.