Isolation and Estrangement in Modern Society

Modern society is in many ways an adverse environment for people to live in. Myriad factors assaulting the integration of man into society have resulted in isolation and estrangement, leaving man lonelyùan island unto himself. The globalization of the economy, while it should bring people around the world closer together, has focused attention and resources on the global picture, while leaving individuals disenfranchised. Cities destroyed by natural disasters, termed ôwounded citiesö by Jane Schneider and Ida Susser in their book Wounded Cities: Destruction and Reconstruction in a Globalized World, essentially leave people homeless and stranded, separated from friends and family, without a job or resources, without their belongings, and vulnerable to a hostile and uncaringùeven in some cases, predatoryùuniverse (1). Having lost their own home, to these people there is no longer any place that is home; ôhomeö was the life they had before, with family, friends, coworkers, and neighbors. What they have after leaving or being expelled from their city is mere existence, without any social integration. Furthermore, at the heart of societyÆs malaise is a spiritual disconnection. The isolated man tends to become disconnected from God and man. This disconnection is analogous to the girdling of a tree, in which its access to life-giving sap is severed and it weakens, eventually to die. ManÆs isolation has led him to an estrangement

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o that hell-dwellers are kept from entering heaven, much like KoolhaasÆs wall keeps people in the Bad Half from entering the Good Half (The Holy Bible, King James Version). The estranged man feels that he is trapped in the Bad Half but wanting to go to the Good Half. This typifies a spiritual wilderness in which the world seems larger and emptier than ever, but the individualÆs world is confined to the meaningless, the loveless, and the lonely. John Berger in Ways of Seeing argues that the invisible wall between the Bad Half and the Good Half is publicity. Publicity, or more precisely, advertising, convinces people that buying things will make their lives better. Advertising promises that we will be accepted by others if we buy the things that are being touted, yet all advertising delivers is rampant consumerism. People become driven to acquire things to satisfy a hunger that things can never satisfyùthe inner void that can only be filled by love, connectedness to other human beings and to oneÆs God. The existential phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty argues that: Form belongs at one and the same time to the world (it is a structure) and to consciousness (it is a meaning); and thus its proper locus is neither in-itself na
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Approximate Word count = 1588
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)

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