The new moral responsibility to face the repercussions of modernization

Abstract

Great hopes were attached to the fact that the Western modernization project would in fact establish a state of freedoms that would end all forms of theological control and exclude all myth and legends, which had chained traditional societies for a long period of time. However, this project turned against its purpose, especially after the two world wars, and the expansion of the modern state increased. With its secularism, bureaucracy, and capitalist economy with its huge companies, which produced a kind of domination that claimed the lives of man and nature alike. This necessitated the intervention of a group of thinkers such as Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm and a group of ecological philosophers such as Hans Jonas, Michel Sir and others to address the crisis and propose solutions. Through the foregoing, we raise the following problem: How did Western modernization turn from a liberation project into a hegemonic reality? Its repercussions on man and nature? Are there ways to break free from this domination?