Well, that sounds somewhat reductive. Do you really think modernists were inspired to solve such practical problems, and not by their engagement with new ideas, such as ideas from ancient Greece or the New World (as The Dawn of Everything posits)?

They say that the US especially is a country based on an idea, not an ethnicity. World-historic modernity seems, then, quite ideological. At least, the humanistic ideology would have been implicit in the search for practical improvements. How would modernists even know what would count as an improvement unless they had some ideal in mind? Why else would they have wanted women's or homosexuals' lives improved unless they were implicit humanists?