ABSTRACT
This chapter is about the interlocking connections that modernity as a form of life has enabled through our different social and political practices. If we categorize modernity through scientific progress and the lessening of unwanted pain, there is also the obverse side to it, which includes the possibility of large-scale destruction through technically perfect weapons of mass destruction. I make two claims in this chapter. One, the condition of modernity engenders an instrumental epistemology. Two, this form of rationality is responsible, apart from other historical reasons, for the possibility of the large-scale violence that the modern world has witnessed over the past century. Both law and lawlessness are immanent to our modern form of living.
