This book renders an uncompromising verdict on the 'scourge' of our millennium: modernism, itself the artifact of certain late Eurocentric propensities. Kanth argues that while modernism is possessed of some virtues, they are purchased at far too high a cost--indeed a cost that neither the species nor the planet can, on any scale, find affordable. Given the imminence and the gravity of this threat, he further suggests that no other posture is at all ecologically responsible. We must, Kanth suggests, break with the manifold paradigms of European expansionism or find ourselves, soon enough, living on a planet damaged beyond recovery.

PART ONE: THE MODERNIST REVOLUTIONS - The Ascent of Europe - The Modernist Problematic: The Crossing of the Rubicon - The Utopian Response: Mnemonics of Affective Society - PART TWO: AGAINST MODERNISM: THERAPEUTICS, SALVES, AND ANTIDOTES TO THE MODERNIST DISTEMPER - The Fatal Conceit: Elisions of Materialism - On Human Emancipation: The Archaeology of Discontent -