“It is very remarkable that we should be inclined to think of civilization – houses, trees, cars, etc. – as separating man from his origins, from what is lofty and eternal, etc. Our civilized environment, along with its trees and plants, strikes us as though it were cheaply wrapped in cellophane and isolated from everything great, from God, as it were. That is a remarkable picture that intrudes on us.” (50e)
It is indeed a remarkable picture, but upon further reflection it is not intrinsic to modernity but rather appears more strongly Christian in character. Humans as alienated from God appears regularly in the Church Fathers. It led some of them into the Egyptian desert to live like animals and find God again. I remember visiting such a site, Deir el-Baramus, back in 2002 as part of an archaeology project. Outside the monastery you could find scores of very simple habitation holes in the desert. Only the wind to kept you company. A good place for an alienated man to find God again. It strikes me that, come to think of it, this idea of alienation has always been part of Western spiritual culture. Should we then be very surprised that it recurs in the modern world that we have made? As Marshall Sahlins recently observed:
“Here was a clear injunction to expand structuralism to the infrastructure. Rather than a discontinuity, temporal as well as ontological, wherein culture appears as the symbolic afterthought of a material practice that has its own rationality, what is entailed in infrastructuralism is the realization of encompassing conceptual schemes in the particular material function of provisioning the society. Economy, one might even say, is the objectification of cosmology.” (Sahlins, 2010: 375-6)
This brings me to my main point. If one wants to overcome alienation, how can one achieve it? The Soviet example was to try to develop a new kind of culture, to achieve a radical break with the past. Theirs was what is now called the 'communist hypothesis'. Recently this has been elaborated by Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek in a number of books, as an alternative to the contemporary version of modernity in crisis. While I am interested in alternatives to the present, their hypothesis contains some very peculiar elements. Apparently they think Paul of Tarsus, the founding father of the Christian church as an institution, is a central inspiration in their quest for a different world. I don't know, maybe they are ironic, but how can you use the originator of much of the problem as its solution? Both men seem to act like dogs who are chasing their own tails. No wonder both never yield from embracing violent action, for how could one expect reason to come from such a basic contradiction. It can only be overcome by unreasonable violence, I would observe. Very much in line with Paul, btw.
This ought to leave one concerned in a world that will become more polarized between mindless alienated capitalism and the violence implied by the communist hypothesis. The latter, possibly in a kind of brew with other fundamentalism, could well be seen as the only alternative. And alienation is something very real, creating harm in people:
http://medicalhypotheses.blogspot.com/2007/07/alienation-and-animism.html
I feel there must be other ways. Ones that should proceed from a more anthropological perspective, realizing that we can make our own world to a considerable extent. Realizing, with Nietzsche, that alienation is something we have made ourselves by objectifying a certain cosmology (Paul's).
Sahlins, M., 2010 ‘Infrastructuralism.’ Critical Inquiry, vol. 36, pp. 371-386.
Besides these thoughts, I'm busy with my thesis, work and relocating, so I do not always post here as frequently as I would like.
