modernization as a form of Mary Douglas's dirt : as invasive non-natives 'out of place'

In the era on both sides of the 1880s, modernization was seen mostly as a particularly marked revolution in (externally-oriented) transportation and communication, rather than in (internally-oriented) manufacturing.

This modernization worked to greatly ease the former immense difficulties from the danger, time and expense of moving people, material and ideas from a safely distant there to an dangerously intimate here.

This lets us see why the 1880s was also the start of a time of Moral Panic, as a great many people feared this sudden and massive incoming as overwhelmingly disruptive to their hitherto staid lives.

They also came to see the products of modernization as literally 'invasive' and yet almost invisibly so - *expanding upon the equally brand new 1880s idea of invisible germs invading a body to cause fatal diseases.

Soon they chose to see modernization as dirt, dirty, impure in the Mary Douglas sense of those terms : the invasive injection of non-native peoples, ideas, material into their native space.

Modernity (racial purity, purity of food and drink, purity nationalism and its immigration restrictions, purity eugenics, et al) was thus a virulent reaction against modernization - yes it grew 'out of it' , as is always claimed - but it was a powerful revulsion to it, not a celebration of it......

* No accident that Hitler repeatedly publicly proclaimed himself as the modern day Robert Koch, the person most associated with 1880s Germ Theory, and that he chose to mark the centenary of Koch's birth in December 1943 with much fanfare - it serving as a veiled public justification for the semi-secret Holocaust, then nearing its depths of evilness.