In 2020, the US Department of Defense elicited research that “would look at audience vulnerability to suasory discourses, as delivered by a variety of authentic and inauthentic actors and at methods to improve audience resilience to malign and deceptive information attacks” (DoD 2020, 48). This chapter argues that malign and deceptive information fosters pathological belief systems. Why are pathological beliefs still a modern problem after centuries of the Enlightenment project?

Enlightenment thinkers, such as French Revolutionary leader Nicolas de Condorcet, predicted that progress would lead to reason's triumph, benefitting all humanity. Condorcet claimed that human beings would perfect their reasoning abilities and abandon their prejudices (Condorcet 1795). But the Enlightenment project fell short for two reasons: (1) it contained significant blind spots; and (2) It didn't go far enough.

Condorcet's most significant blind spot was his belief that human progress was a natural law. He wrote, “that no bounds have been fixed to the improvement of the human faculties; that the perfectibility of man is absolutely indefinite; that the progress of this perfectibility, henceforth above the controul of every power that would impede it, has no other limit than the duration of the globe upon which nature has placed us.” He added that human progress was not only inevitable, but also irreversible; “The course of this progress may doubtless be more or less rapid, but it can never be retrograde” (11–12).

This article aims to question the complex reading of modernity in the Kurdish space and its critical decolonial approaches to the power and “knowledge”1 of “colonial modernity” in the Middle East, but especially in Turkey. The colonially-constructed entity known as Kurdistan involves a certain intellectual contradiction among the dominant societies in the Middle East (Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria) which contributes to the practice of coloniality (Vali 2011, introd. and 1–25, and Hawzhen Rashadaddin, 2015). The intellectual thought of colonial modernity in the Middle East in regard to the Kurdish region follows and has one thing in common with the thought of colonial practice: an act of concealment and ignorance of Kurdish existence. Jacobin intellectuals of the dominant society regard the Kurds as a part of those dominant societies (Beşikçi 2013a; Eagleton 1963; Bozarslan 2001b; Henning 2018; Yeğen 2014 and 1999). In this approach, the reflection of dominant and colonial modernity lies in the political and cultural authoritarianism which marks racial relations and the balance of power over the Kurds and their territory. Indeed, using the terms “subaltern modernity” and “decoloniality” calls into question this expression of colonialism. That is to say, this questioning gives us another possibility by encompassing the past and present of a colonial racial power system in the Middle East based on a political-cultural denial and an epistemic interiorization of the “Other society” and its knowledge (the knowledge of aboriginal people).

Despite Mills’ (2010 [1956]) clear-cut examination of “lords of war,” militarism and modernity have been largely neglected in sociology avoiding any investigation of military power and modern industrialization (Giddens 1990, 9). Max Weber, disagreeing with militarism, looked at war and imperialism as suitable instruments of modernity (Mann 2018, 39). Studies on militarism highlighted how it is inherent to modernity, contributing to the consolidation of Western countries and to building post-colonial statehood in the twenty-first century. This chapter addresses some theoretical and empirical aspects of militarization and modernity by considering specifically the militarization of islands as the outcome of a colonization process undertaken by Western countries, culminating in the US and NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) policies of geopolitical control of extended territories. Within the limits of our contribution, we aim to problematize the meanings, representations, and effects of the military bases in geographically and economically isolated territories.

In the first section, we address the issue of modernity and the military, how modernity progressed by acquiring the monopoly of violence, and established social control over time, notably and progressively since World War II; thus, in late modernity the spending on technological weaponry became one of the more relevant factors. In the second section we present the case of Sardinia as a case study of the militarization of a peripheral territory, an example of many subjugated islands (Vine 2009) and as reflexivity on modernity.

Technology is not an outer condition or external factor for social life but pervades every activity, often as an iterative, collective, and continuous process of social and material change (Mongili and Pellegrino 2014, xxxvi; Suchman 2009, 1). Modernity has been closely associated with technological development and innovation; indeed, modernity is unthinkable without modern technology and its standardization across different use and handling patterns. In this chapter, we will analyze the radical intertwining of modernity and (modern) technology and how their relevance can be thematized. Proceeding from the distinction between traditional and modern technology, we go on to analyze standardization as a crucial feature of contemporary technologies, the role of the ubiquitous diffusion of devices in producing a practical texture across different social worlds, and the overlap between modern technology and innovation as ideology, practice, and politics.

The claimed distinction between traditional and modern technology is a classical theme in social studies and is perhaps best delimited by two contrasting positions. In We Have Never Been Modern, Bruno Latour (1993) spoke of this distinction, noting how the modern availability of standardized data ensured a certain robustness and coherence while circulating in different use sets. Latour (1987) also introduced the idea that technology can exist only within a network or collective of different elements that include materiality, functional mechanisms, scientific knowledge embedded in devices, funding and economics, juridical framing, discursive interpretation, task series delegated to humans, power and authority, and a history of diffusion (or, in his own terms, translation) of a single device in multiple use and handling sets, along with corresponding ongoing transformation of those same devices.

What is a good society? How do we measure progress toward a more fulfilling and healthy life? From the early stages of the Western philosophical tradition in Greece every society has sought to define goals and criteria to answer these questions as the basis for an intellectual and spiritual framework that can give meaning to their collective social experience. Historical context and first principles handed down by an ideological or religious tradition inevitably constrain the metrics that are used, and those metrics are in turn subject to endless debate and revision. Population health has unique advantages when choosing the critical measures of a good society and the basis on which to assert that progress is being made. Accepting for the moment a division between physical and mental health, a very substantial proportion of all public health outcomes that are considered desirable across cultures are objective and universally accepted. Successful reproduction, low infant mortality, long life expectancy, and freedom from disability are prized above all of life's other gifts. Of course, there is more to human self-actualization than good physical health, but the desire for a “sound mind in a sound body” has been articulated under some guise in all cultural traditions. This chapter will focus on physical well-being. While this focus is not intended to dismiss the importance of mental and spiritual health, an assessment of the hierarchy of metrics that should be given to the needs of the spirit and the mind, and a comprehensive definition of good mental health and emotional fulfillment would take us far beyond the intended limits of this discussion.

Mathematics has always been part of Western history and tradition, and it has always been closely linked to its culture and its philosophy. We shouldn't forget Plato's Republic, for instance, where it is strongly suggested that philosophers study mathematics in order fully understand the ever changing world. In the sixteenth century, the Tuscan polymath Galileo Galilei claimed that “the book of nature is written in the language of mathematics; without its help it is impossible to comprehend a single word of it.” (Pinker 1997, 359). Galileo's greatest contribution was, indeed, the “mathematization” of science. On the other hand, Dutch philosopher Benedict Spinoza wrote “Ethics, Demonstrated in Geometrical Order” (in Latin: Ethica, ordine geometrico demonstrata, 1677), perhaps the most ambitious attempt to apply the rigorous method of Euclid to philosophy.

The end of the eighteenth century, the age of the Enlightenment, is a dark and pessimistic period for the future of mathematics, though it has been claimed that the entire project of the Enlightenment was to achieve the rigor and the methods of mathematics and apply these everywhere by means of “analytic thinking.” Later, German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who sharply criticized science, believed the character of truth is purely mathematical.

Since the last quarter of the nineteenth century, many scholars and researchers in the Arab and Western worlds have been involved in the controversy around whether (political) religion/Islam is compatible with (political) modernity, democracy, secularity, etc. While some suspect that this question is posed incorrectly or refuse to answer it (Bishara 1994, 57–8; 2013, 7–9), there are generally speaking two camps in this respect: (1) those who deem that the compatibility of Islam with modernity is possible to the extent that one can talk about modern, democratic and secular Islam (Hanafi and al-Jabri 1990, 38); and (2) others who completely disagree and say that Islam is hostile to modernity, because Islam is – in its core, and necessarily – incapable of separating religion from politics (Lewis 2002). Against this background, it could be argued that most of the basic concepts – including secularity, secularism, Islam and modernity – invoked in this debate have been objective sources of (mis)understanding when addressing this topic in the Arab and Islamicate world. For example, the concepts of secularity and secularism, as “thick normative concepts,” include description and evaluation (Kirchin 2017; 2013; Väyrynen 2013). This duality, between descriptive and evaluative, creates distinct theoretical and methodological problems, leading to misunderstandings or to a greater differentiation between understandings.

It is also important to note that the terms “secularity,” “secularism” and “secularization” refer to different concepts, as clarified in the third section (pp. 000–00, “Secularity/Secularism between al-ʿAzmeh and el-Messiri”).