Look who's alienated now

This essay at Aeon is a bit of a hard slog in the middle, but I think the basic argument sounds right.

It's about how the concept of "alienation" as an explanation or description of modern psychic malaise rose and then fell away over the course of the 20th century.

I think the argument can be summarised roughly as this:  the concept inherently put value, or assumed that people put value in, cultural unity and personal fulfilment through meaningful and creative work, which modern capitalism broke down.   However, in recent decades the Left (perhaps partly enabled by the wealth increasing success of capitalism) moved away from thinking that uniformity in community has inherent value - in other words, the rise of identity politics has meant that many people now (in a sense) seek or value "alienation".   Therefore, contrary to (say) the 1960's when people would say someone complaining of alienation was a Leftist hippy, those who feel alienated now are on the Right.

Here are the concluding paragraphs:

...For all its potential to sow division, identity politics might still reflect a justifiable search for roots and community. But it’s also true that many now celebrate the freedom to alter identities rather than meekly accept them, and that post-identitarian multiplicity is enjoying a renewal. Such discourses repudiate or at least complicate a simple denunciation of alienation from wholeness.

This change is most clearly registered in political terms. In the heyday of Marxist Humanism, alienation could be understood in terms of the capitalist mode of production, which thwarted the possibility of unalienated labour. But eventually the Left came to de-emphasise class, for better or worse, and substitute questions of culture for those of production. When Leftist politics embraced tolerance of difference, it grew wary of stigmatising the alien – including the alien within. Rather than yearning for ‘well-rounded wholeness’ or a comforting immersion in the warm bath of communal uniformity, this political shift meant recognising the virtues of protean personal identities and diasporic dispersion.

Hostility to the alien ‘other’, both without and within, has now migrated to the populist Right. Those who most loudly broadcast their alienation today, infusing it with rage and resentment, are likely to be from once-comfortable and hegemonic segments of the population. They feel threatened by the growing erosion of their status in a society that they remember – or at least claim to remember – as homogeneous, integrated and settled. Religious, ethnic, national and gender identities become more rigidly defended against perceived erosion. Many people panic when faced with fluid selves that embrace rather than bemoan the ‘alien’ within – expressed, for example, in their passionate resistance to transgender identity. And they are even more unnerved by the literal arrival of non-citizen ‘aliens’, legal as well as illegal, who threaten their alleged ethnic purity and cultural unity. For them, ‘hybridisation’ is really ‘mongrelisation’. Attempting to restore past ‘greatness’ or fend off ‘pollution’, they agitate for walls to keep dangerous others out, fearing that every newcomer is inherently a threatening intruder.

In short, alienation in the second decade of the 21st century has not actually faded away as a descriptor of human distress. Rather, it has become most visible in the anxiety of those who bemoan the transformation of a beloved homeland into an unrecognisable nation of aliens.

I think the argument, concentrating as it does on Marxist and other arty philosophers influenced society, does overlook the role of science from 1850 in changing cultural self understanding, at least in the West.

But it's still an interesting essay.