Alienation had a wide variety of earlier uses, including the transfer of property, estrangement from God, a mental disorder, and an affectionate discord. Theologians and philosophers from Augustine to Rousseau mulled over its metaphysical and spiritual implications. Later, modern sociologists worried that alienation was a by-product of a post-industrial society. It could be seen in widespread ‘anomie,’ and the ‘iron cage’ of bureaucratic rationalisation. It was taken to define the fundamental pathology of modern life. 

 

Moving further from its history, how did this broad consensus lose its hegemonic power in the 1970s? was it fatigue with a concept whose explanatory power and emotional charge had been spent? Had alienation become a self-indulgent luxury, now that living standards were not rising from one generation to the next?  

 

Hidden in the word itself is an anxiety about the power of the other, the foreigner, the stranger – in short, ‘the alien.’ This figure, invades, pollutes, and disrupts the purity of the homogenous group. And this, at a time of global migration on a massive scale – by political unrest, economic desperation, or natural disasters – arouses fears that are never far from the surface of most enduring communities. Alienation suggests not only the loss of control over what one has produced or the exile from one’s traditions; it also denotes the corrosion of a coherent, autonomous self, a strong and sovereign entity that has mastered or objected its otherness. It implies the superiority of the domestic over the foreign, the earthling over the space-monster, the friend over the stranger, the settled over the vagabond.  

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Of course, in an increasingly unsettled world, it would be foolish to claim that literal displacement should be celebrated as inherent values. There is simply too much suffering caused by forced migration and assimilation of those who have lost their homes under duress. For all its potential to sow division, identity politics might still reflect a justifiable search for roots. But it is also true that we celebrate the freedom to alter identities rather than accepting the meek enforcements. 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 liberalism came to de-emphasise class, 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 a comforting immersion in the warm bath of communal uniformity, this political shift meant recognising the virtues of personal identities and diasporic dispersion.  

 

Hostility to the ‘other,’ both without and within, has now been 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 hegemonic segments of the population. They feel threatened by the growing erosion of their status in a society that they remember as homogenous, integrated, and settled. Religious, ethnic, 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. And they are even more unnerved by the arrival of non-citizen ‘aliens,’ legal and illegal, who threaten their alleged ethnic purity and cultural unity. Attempting to restore past ‘greatness’ they agitate for walls to keep dangerous others out, fearing that every newcomer is inherently a threatening intruder.  

 

Alienation, today, 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 to an unrecognisable state of aliens.  

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Written by Samaah Noor Sheikh

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