The ideological power of the concepts of ‘modernization’ and ‘development’ comes from their use of retroactive teleology. Put bluntly, this means redefining something so that what you are about to do to it appears as its predetermined destiny. For example, we call a certain kind of stone ‘iron ore’, which means that if we crush it to powder and subject it to intense heat, it will yield iron. It wasn’t ‘ore’ until this technology was discovered. But once we have the technology, we redefine the stone such that extracting iron from it is seen as the actualization of its latent potential, its fated end, its telos. Not only that: the … Continue reading C. Douglas Lummis