Modernity Produces the Alienation It Claims to Cure

September 15, 2021

The modern project of liberating individuals from tradition, community, and constraint has succeeded and the result is not flourishing but a pervasive sense of dislocation, meaninglessness, and vulnerability to extremism.

"Thus, individuals with very different pasts find themselves herded by capitalism and technology into a common present, where grossly unequal distributions of wealth and power have created humiliating new hierarchies. This proximity, or what Hannah Arendt called 'negative solidarity', is rendered more claustrophobic by digital communications." Pankaj Mishra

Pankaj Mishra, John Gray, and Alasdair MacIntyre converge on a diagnosis that cuts against the self-image of liberal modernity. The Enlightenment promised that freeing individuals from the constraints of tradition, religion, and local community would produce autonomous, flourishing human beings. What it actually produced, at scale, is atomized individuals exposed directly to the forces of global capitalism with no mediating institutions to absorb the shocks. The old buffers family, village, guild, church, welfare state have been progressively dismantled in the name of freedom, efficiency, and progress.

Gray argues that the illusion haunting us since the Enlightenment is "thinking we are in the driver's seat of history to begin with." Modernity was not a conscious project but a set of socio-technological feedback loops that cohered in Western Europe over centuries, largely outside human control. The intellectual leaders of the Enlightenment mistook a process that was happening to them for a process they were directing. This misunderstanding has produced two centuries of utopian projects from the French Revolution to Soviet Communism to the Iraq War each grounded in the humanist faith that society can be rationally redesigned, and each producing catastrophic unintended consequences.

MacIntyre adds that the loss of shared moral frameworks is not a side effect but a central consequence of the modernizing process. Without a community that defines what a good life looks like, moral discourse becomes interminable people wield the vocabulary of rights and justice but cannot agree on what those words mean, because they no longer share the teleological context that gave them meaning. The result is not moral progress but moral confusion dressed up in the language of liberation.

Takeaway: The cure for modernity's discontents will not come from more modernity it requires rebuilding the local, communal, and institutional structures that modernity systematically destroyed.