Modern sacralization

Still on Bauman: “In most of its descriptions, modernity is presented as a time of secularization (‘everything sacred was profaned,’ as young Marx and Engels memorably put it) and disenchantment. What is less often mentioned, however, though it should be, is that modernity also deified and enchanted the ‘nation,’ the new authority – and so by proxy the man-made institutions that claimed to speak and act in its name. ‘The sacred’ was not so much disavowed as made the target of an ‘unfriendly takeover’: moved under different management and put in the service of the emergent nation-state. The same happened to the martyr: he was enlisted by the nation-state under a new name of the hero.”