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.
