(same chapter on Modernity)

… all manner of violations of humanism under the banner of secular humanism seemed to have an intellectual justification —the redoing of all the ills of religion without its tricks and heuristics. The state was now like a corporate balance sheet: one does not care of what happens outside of it, politicians are like corporate managers. Close to a decade ago, during the early 2000s, my eye caught at the health-club a TV advertisement by Democrats attacking George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq by stating that close to four thousand people died there. Was the number that low? Then I realized that they meant U.S. soldiers. They omitted to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis –lest the Republicans question their patriotism. These foreign casualties do not seem to count because the nation-state establishes clean income statements: countries are only responsible for their own citizens. For all the criticism one can levy at it, and all its denial of the “other”, the Catholic church would have never, done that –they believed in the fraternity of races. The state creates the “I and thou”, with a virtual redrawing of family trees.

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