A Podcast where we ponder the paradoxes of modernity.
Why is the “best of all possible worlds” driving us off a cliff. How did the promises of universal liberty, justice, and prosperity curdle into rising authoritarianism, crumbling faith in institutions, and intensifying ecological and social crises. We root around in the civilizational undergrowth in search of the rhizomatic roots of a durable planetary flourishing. In other words, we contemplate what parts of modernity are worth preserving and what parts must be composted.
gregorymengel.substack.com (https://gregorymengel.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)
In this episode, the third in our trilogy about how and why the Enlightenment has not been able to deliver on its promise of universal liberty and equality under the law, Raven and Gregory take aim at colonialism. They use Social Contract theory as a lens to understand how “enlightened” liberal democracies sanctioned the domination, displacement, and dispossession of many millions of indigenous people around the world. Drawing on the insights of Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, we’re calling this framework the Colonial Contact. In the same way that the Sexual Contract modernized gendered subordination and the Racial Contract modernized human hierarchy, the Colonial Contract modernized imperialism by casting the appropriation of land and resources as progress. Please give a listen and let us know what you think.
References:
The Racial Contract (https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801484636/the-racial-contract/) by Charles Mills
National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition (https://boardingschoolhealing.org/)
Project MUSE - Elimination as a Structure: Tracing and Racing Zionism with Patrick Wolfe (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/663325/summary)
Manifest Destiny and Zionism, a legacy of ethnic cleansing – Mondoweiss (https://mondoweiss.net/2025/03/manifest-destiny-and-zionism-a-legacy-of-ethnic-cleansing/)
Zionism as settler colonialism - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zionism_as_settler_colonialism)
U.S. immigration legislation since 1776 (https://news.unm.edu/news/u-s-immigration-legislation-since-1776)
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3 Mar 2026
Modernity and the Racial Contract
Despite its promise of universal liberty and equality under the law, the Enlightenment confined democratic citizenship exclusively to white men based on racist presuppositions about who could be counted as full persons. Last time, Raven and Gregory drew on Carole Pateman’s theory of the Sexual Contract to explore how the original social contract that established the modern political economy denied women full citizenship. This time we are looking at Charles Mills’ concept of the Racial Contract, to see how race was used in an analogous way to deny basic freedom and equality to people of color. The Racial Contract, like the Sexual Contract, is not a "real" contract. It is, however, a structural feature of the social order that must be confronted directly in order to be transformed.
References:
The Racial Contract (https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801484636/the-racial-contract/) by Charles W. Mills
The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/564989/the-sum-of-us-by-heather-mcghee/) by Heather McGhee
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America (https://www.epi.org/publication/the-color-of-law-a-forgotten-history-of-how-our-government-segregated-america/) By Richard Rothstein
Bacon's Rebellion - Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bacon%27s_Rebellion)
Linnaeus and Race | The Linnean Society (https://www.linnean.org/learning/who-was-linnaeus/linnaeus-and-race-easy-read)
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24 Nov 2025
Modernity and the Sexual Contract
The typical high school textbook describes the American Revolution replacing the old hereditary aristocracy with a liberal democracy that guarantees all people protection of their natural rights to life and liberty. It turns out, however, that those vaunted Enlightenment principles excluded women, systematically and intentionally. Contemporary champions of American democracy often insist that when the founders wrote “all men are create equal,” they really meant all people, that the word “men” was simply linguistic habit. Some concede the nominal sexism but cast it as an incidental bias, long since transcended. This is revisionist propaganda, and we have the receipts. Join Raven and Gregory as they discuss how the exclusion of women from the social contract has played out in US history and, how, despite the real gains women have made, this exclusion continues to haunt the very structure of the modern world.
References:
The Sexual Contract (https://www.sup.org/books/politics/sexual-contract) by Carole Pateman
Caliban and the Witch (https://pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1575) by Silvia Federici
Erased: What American Patriarchy Has Hidden from Us (https://www.mahoganybooks.com/9781250876690) by Anna Malaika Tubbs
Whiteness and the Logic of Corporate Personhood (https://cosmologyofwhiteness.blogspot.com/2011/01/whiteness-and-logic-of-corporate.html) - Gregory Mengel
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29 Oct 2025
Introducing After Progress
How are the ideas that shaped the modern world implicated in the crises that now threaten human civilization? In this inaugural episode of After Progress, Raven and Gregory begin to unpack the revolutionary ideas that helped make the modern world and ponder whether and how these ideas – which have been integral to so much of what we consider progress – have led to the tangle of intertwined crises facing humanity at present. What are the paradoxes and double-binds that have troubled the modern project from its inception? After Progress is a podcast about how we’ve been betrayed by modernity’s stories of endless improvement and what might come next.
Get full access to Gregory Mengel at gregorymengel.substack.com/subscribe (https://gregorymengel.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4)
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