Vanessa Andreotti likes to show how modernity has stunted our imaginations with its single story of progress by asking us to imagine a corn harvest and laying out all that corn in front of us. Then she shows us pictures of multi-coloured corn from Peru. How many of us would have imagined corn in such colours? ![[corn.png]] The vast majority of us can only imagine yellow corn. For a variety of political and economic reasons, that is the only type of corn we have been exposed to. Andreotti uses this as a metaphor for the way in which modernity holds up its story of progress as the norm by which everything else is measured. It affects all of our institutions such as education, science, justice, health, governance, etc. >Modernity is a single story of progress, development, human evolution, and civilization that is omnipresent. Modernity is full of paradoxes: of war and humanitarian support, of ongoing colonialism and reconciliation, of imperialism and education, of poverty creation and alleviation, of exponential growth and sustainability. Whether you and I identify with or are critical of it, it still conditions what and how we think, feel, desire, relate, hope, and imagine. This has profound implications for how we understand ourselves and others: > Those in the "developed world" are represented as intelligent, benevolent, clean, capable, deserving, and entitled to leadership and to dispense rights, while those in the "developing world" are constructed in deficit and pathologizing terms such as inadequate, ignorant, unsanitary, violent, helpless, and lacking knowledge, information, manners, work ethics, education, and rights. The result of this one-eyed distortion has been disastrous for cultural diversity. Schools in developing countries try to catch up to their peers in developed countries, happy to receive their discarded and outdated textbooks, when their own native wisdom, built up over generations, is left neglected. Villages rush to install the latest in modern plumbing, thinking it is superior to what they have, when in fact modern plumbing is an incredible waste of water and fails to recycle valuable nutrients back into the soil.