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1. Angelico Nguyen, Esq., OP says:

   April 26, 2012 at 12:10 am

   (a) Because life in the 21st century is saturated with technology that discourages interpersonal communication — even, ironically, so-called ‘communications technology’.

   (b) Because not only technology, but also the 21st-century economy, has reduced man from a member of deep-rooted local communities into a unit, uprooted from time to time whether he wills or no by the invisible hand of the marketplace and brainwashed into defining himself through purchases of consumer goods and identification with his employment, rather than enjoying, e.g., time with his family.

   (c) Because traditional religion, which bound the members whole societies together at some profound level — in communion with God, if you believe in God; and with each other, whether or not you believe in God — is on the decline in the developed world the 21st century — a downward trend which will eventually reach the developing world, quite possibly within the 21st century.

   (d) Because the 21st century has seen the fullest development to date of the Enlightenment project of liberating man from all unchosen bonds — not only of creed, but of of caste, clan, and class, giving him the power to choose, to a greater degree than his ancestors ever enjoyed, who and what to make of himself — a project that has reached so advanced a stage that Justice Anthony Kennedy, writing for the Supreme Court in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, could say in 1992, ‘At the heart of [Constitutionally-protected] liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life’ — a degree of individualism that tends to undermine community and isolate the individual: 21st-century man, who has the power to choose, chooses, even at the price of loneliness, to avoid the hell that is other people.

   (e) Because man is man, a being with a mind contained in a skull and an ego encapuslated in a skin, by his very nature a lone wayfarer in the Cosmos, a creature so inescapably caught within his own selfhood that he can never, in the 21st or any other century, have mathematical certainty that he and his neighbor enjoy the same experience of seeing the color they both call ‘blue’ while looking at the sky, or even that his neighbor exists as something other than a figment of his own imagination — a state of affairs in which, even absent any philosophico-religious mumbo-jumbo about alienation of man from neighbor, society, nature, God, etc., the more interesting question is not why man is lonely in the 21st century, but rather how he is lonely in the 21st century, and, relatedly, why he is lonely in that way at that time.

   (Check one)

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   • Quin Finnegan says:

     April 26, 2012 at 12:26 am

     Best comment ever.

     Reply

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