I think about this a lot, actually.

[ahorbinski]

Let no one forget modernity's appalling wounds--the achievement of economies of scale in officially sanctioned slaughter, the induced hatreds and ignorance, the profligate and systematic waste (and neglect) of human skills and good faith. It is an open question whether they can be healed by modern people, using the instruments of modernity alone. Perhaps these instruments--of production in all spheres, but especially the institutions and technologies of communication and representative democracy--will someday be surpassed in a postmodern revolution that enhances "local humanities," cushions societies against the vicissitudes of the market, and discloses a new form of political community beyond the simultaneously integrative and atomizing force of the contemporary state. Perhaps, one must always hope.
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The modern world, therefore, makes two contradictory promises to those who live in it. First, its fundamental processes--processes specific to itself--can be grasped via abstraction, but second, once so grasped these processes assume license to rule over those who created them. Thus the "contract" at the heart of modernity is not only between people, that is, a matter of institutional arrangements, but also between people and their own ideas. Abstraction is leviathan.

--Andrew E. Barshay, The Social Sciences in Modern Japan: The Marxian and Modernist Traditions (6, 9)

It was really nice to come across this passage while reading this book, because this is exactly the attitude I wanted in my professors at graduate school. My fellow grad students and I, however, and even my undergrad advisor and I, continue to go around about modernity and its discontents and its undeniable benefits--antibiotics and vaccines, to be precise; even as a fairly healthy kid, I can think of several occasions on which I probably would have died without modern medicine, and I suspect most other people can say the same about themselves or about a family member. This doesn't mean I don't fundamentally endorse Barshay's view of "modernity's appalling wounds," because they're all true; but it's always more complicated. And if we ever do manage to get beyond post- and modernity, we should not then forget their (limited) good along with all their manifest ill.