How Modernity Alienates Us from Nature and from Ourselves

Individualism and the downside of secular progress

To be alienated from something is to take the thing to be foreign or “alien” to you, and in that respect, religions have often been based on feelings of alienation.

Western monotheism, for instance, sprang largely from the Jewish experience of being of being politically dominated, and thus from the existential sense of being an outsider culture. The talk of Yahweh’s “transcendence” and “almighty glory” was a euphemism for saying he was alienated from his creation. Moreover, that conception mirrored the Jews’ conceit that they were pure and righteous in their defeats, as well as their aloofness from dominant cultures, and their lack of cosmopolitanism.

Indian religions take a metaphysical turn in positing that the underlying reality is foreign to its illusory manifestations, and that the sage’s enlightenment conflicts with the bestial ignorance of the duped masses.

But do religions have a monopoly on alienation, or do secular and specifically modern (scientific, capitalistic, industrial, democratic, individualistic) cultures adopt a similarly elitist sense of disgust?

In fact, alienation is a theme of modern art and of existential philosophy, and it crops up in the malaise of consumer life. The key to modern alienation, however, seems to lie in individualism.

Secular humanism

What distinguishes modernity is the secular recognition of universal rights that derives ultimately from the inward turn of Axial Age spirituality. Polytheistic societies were typically class-based, hierarchical, and therefore resistant to progress. By contrast, modern societies are liberal in awarding rights to everyone in virtue of our psychological properties of personhood. Instead of white males being credited with inherent superiority, as in medieval Europe’s patriarchal traditions, women and minorities were deemed to have worth simply because of their common humanity. Even the poor and the criminal class have value because personhood itself is deemed sacred.

People therefore replaced angels, the gods, and other supposedly supernatural sources of divinity. Or rather, self-consciousness sufficed as an apparent miracle calling for a system of exclusive moral rights. That humanism is extended in the most liberal cases to animals since their consciousness, too, is anomalous in nature. But the personhood that runs the Anthropocene is an anomaly within the anomaly, rather like how the 0.1 percent of the world’s wealthiest people, the billionaire class, is in a league of its own within the oft-touted top 1 percent.

So-called modern people, then, are quick to think that everyone has human rights, and that judgment is supposed to be secular now rather than religious. While the assignment of value itself can hardly follow just from psychology or anthropology, and is therefore grounded at best on philosophical extrapolations, the point is that secular humanism is at least not overtly theological, which is to say it’s not half-baked and grossly prejudicial. Secular humanism isn’t supposed to be a crass excuse for the tribal hoarding of material privileges.

Yet secular humanism in that case entails two kinds of alienation.

Modern alienation

First, by positing a dichotomy between the personal and the impersonal, or in broader terms between life and nonlife, humanists are implicitly alienated from nature in so far as the latter seems like a wasteland in comparison to the privileged side of that division. If people have rights, rocks have none. On the contrary, rocks — and earth, water, solar rays, and everything else in nature — amount to so much grist for our mill. The wilderness consists of raw materials that have no right to be left alone; rather, they’re “given” to be exploited, like the givenness of what empiricists used to call “sense data.” (Martin Heidegger spoke similarly of how things are conceived of as “standing reserves,” thanks to the social impact of technology.)

This is the Faustian, Luciferian ambition of secular humanists, which is to investigate nature to dominate that which is foreign to us, and ultimately to humanize the latter, to replace impersonal, natural processes with intelligently designed, artificial ones. That is, our manifest aim is to extend civilization to cover as much of the wilderness as possible — and that includes outer space.

That first point is familiar and perhaps even self-evident. The second kind of alienation, however, is more intriguing because it threatens to undermine the first one and indeed to destabilize secular humanism.

The problem is that while humanists proclaim that people (and perhaps also plants and animals) have inherent rights, the effects of modern progress don’t always respect them. On the contrary, modernity can be degrading rather than dignifying. We say, for instance, that people are precious, yet we act as though societies were progressing when they’re driven by machines and by computer programs that increasingly addict, enslave, and replace people. Regardless of our official, civic ideals, we participate in societies that work not towards human glorification, but towards the elevation of artificial intelligence. Call this the paradoxical transhuman upshot of secular humanism.

Besides which, we disappoint our humanist convictions by succumbing to neoliberal forms of economic enslavement and imperialism. The wealthy few still rule over the poor many, as materials goods aren’t, of course, equally distributed in line with our so-called human rights or with what liberal philosophers call our “positive liberty,” with our right to fulfill our potential. In short, secular humanism doesn’t entail socialism, in practice.

Finally, there’s the destructive side of modern progress, such as our impact on the biosphere. Obviously, the replacement of the wilderness with the technosphere is bound to be destructive, but it’s not supposed to be self-destructive. If people are so godlike and therefore deserving of rights and privileges, you’d have expected us to progress in a sane, prudent fashion, with long-term planning, infrastructural redundancies, and so on so we don’t end up destroying ourselves like blundering, myopic clowns.

As a result of modernity’s dark side, then, we suffer a second form of alienation, which is self-alienation. We’re estranged from ourselves, which is to say we lack faith in the humanist project after all, in our secular aspirations, and thus in the first dichotomy between nature and people. In so far as we appear not to know what we’re doing, despite our high-minded secular philosophies and social systems, we may view humanism cynically as just another form of self-serving propaganda. That is, indeed, an axiom of what used to be called the “postmodern” condition, or of what’s now more neutrally known as the relativism of “late modernity.”

In summary, even in secular society which has overcome religious sources of estrangement, we’re still often alienated from the world and from ourselves.