Alienation

As regular readers will know, it is some six months since I moved from my family's home in rural South West England to my nation's capital. Moving to London has certainly provided me with opportunities, both in furtherance of my career and in what I will, for the moment, term "social" activity.

What troubled me most about moving here, and what has continued to press upon my mind since, is the problem of social alienation which has been increasingly present in urban life since the nineteenth century. Even modern rural towns and villages maintain a sense of community (Gemeinschaft, according to Tönnies), in which individuals subordinate their own needs to that of the "greater good", believing this to be in their own self interest. Modern urban areas, by contrast, operate on a principle more accurately described as society (Gesellschaft) in which shared morality is replaced by an almost market-driven system of self interest.

In today's London, this manifests itself in a number of ways. There is a growing trend amongst young people to avoid long-term relationships, staying single in order to "enjoy life". What is troubling about this is that many consider it desirable to get drunk every night of the week and sleep with as many different people as possible. The result of this is a form of social alienation which commodifies people - whether as drinking companions or sexual playthings. This is to say nothing of the people who serve our coffee, sweep our streets and keep our transport system running - they often don't even merit acknowledgement.

Since the Industrial Revolution, many writers have sought to explain the causes of this phenomenon. Tönnies pointed out, rightly, that the loss of family bonds was a key factor (for instance, I can't remember the last time I saw any of my cousins). The fact that most people living in urban areas no longer live with, or even see their families regularly is surely a contributory factor.

Marx claimed that capitalism and commodification were to blame for the situation. There is some truth here; the fact that so many of our interactions with others are impersonal - buying coffee from a stranger in Starbucks, or asking for information from an unknown TfL worker - surely leads us to view such individuals in an almost mechanistic fashion, thus devaluing their humanity.

Georg Simmel comes perhaps closer to the truth. He argued that man has a natural "impulse to sociability", but that the nature of modern urban society led people to the creation of a defence mechanism to protect against the hostility of city life. This is, it seems to me, self-evident in London today; if one is approached by a stranger in the street asking for help or such like, the natural impulse is to avoid him, largely through fear for our safety, which subordinates concern for our fellow man.

The most obvious cause of this alienation, it seems to me, is our alienation from God and from faith in general. Feuerbach argued that the concept of God serves to alienate man from his own nature, and in an odd way he was half right. While Feuerbach (and others since, right up to modern day Objectivists) argue for a new morality based on the primacy of the human ego and self-interest, it seems to me that the breakdown of community has not achieved positive results. The alienation was never from our own nature; rather, it was from the portion of our nature which is interested only in the immediate requirements of the self. But this element of our nature has no regard for the human need for spiritual fulfillment. Objectivism and other such philosophies attempt to circumvent this by substituting human achievement as the ultimate route to such fulfillment. However, as anyone who, as a child, spent time building large towers of bricks will know, the tower just keeps getting bigger along with the ambition of its creator until it all comes crashing down.

I firmly believe that the human soul requires more than personal achievement for sustenance. While the anti-Christian theorists claimed that the spread of capitalism and egoism to all areas of society would eventually improve the human condition, in reality the personal happiness of the individual is suffering as a result. Terrible alcohol and drug related problems blight my generation, particularly in London, and more will be in store in ten or twenty years time. The answer, I believe, is not more wealth or more drunken sex; it is, rather, the love of God which binds us together in unity with Him.