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 that can only be remedied by the restoration of all that he has lostùfamily, friends, job, home, and his connection to a loving God.
Another element bound up in the estrangement of modern man is the composite of principles identified by Arne Naess in his Deep Ecology Movement that have destroyed the fabric of modern life: ôdiversity, complexity, autonomy, decentralization, symbiosis, egalitarianism and classlessnessö (Palmer 166).
Estrangement ...