Marriage contract has lost its binding character; the growing incidence of divorce adds to the instability of family life. Sex has become divorced from relationship and commitment.
Robert Putnam argued in Bowling Alone (1995) posits that the stock of “social capital” or aggregate amount of trust in a community, city or state, facilitates interpersonal cooperation. (“Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital”, Journal of Democracy.) He examined social capital among homogeneous groups across varying interests and among heterogeneous individuals with a common interest and found that both types of trust are beneficial for society and both have been in decline since the 1960s. Social capital enables cooperative efforts that benefit the greater society. Social capital is an essential ingredient for democratic processes to work. He found that this stock has been declining since the 1960s, due to television, urban sprawl, increasing pressures of time and money, and generational succession. A dirth of social capital produces alienation and undermines aggregate social wellbeing.
Centripetal and centrifugal forces pull human society together and apart. Individualism and the individual resistance against conformity and alienation pulls us apart while material incentives draw us to conform in pursuit of career and financial reward. But within these broad categories, social norms of tolerance and conformity play an overriding role. Dress and appearance codes have greatly relaxed since the mid-20th Century, and tolerance for ethnic, religious, racial and gender diversity has greatly expanded. Social norms are evolving in a positive response to feelings of alienation. But the underlying problem still remains, because most people work for the paycheck rather than out of their inherent freedom to contribute to society. The terms of wage contracts generally proscribe the field in which work is to be performed, and unless that job description perfectly conforms with the employee’s personal makeup, they become alienated, regardless of cultural tolerances and acceptance. Work is still a job, performing tasks that others have defined and direct.
Alienation is thus related to the absence of spiritual freedom, the freedom to use one’s time as one sees fit. We are generally free to spend our resources as we choose, but our time is often not our own. Our time becomes obligated to job and family responsibilities, many of which we have chosen not out of freedom but out of necessity. Family has become optional for many, with a consequent dramatic rise in single-family households since the mid-20th C, replaced by obligations of relationship with friends, obligations which are less insistent and demanding and more easily revoked than family obligations. And work responsibilities now often incorporate flexible hours and work from home options, granting freedom of time scheduling. These forces pull apart families and work communities, but reduce feelings of alienation with respect to our work and family lives.
On the other hand these forces leave of floating without anchor in work and family, bringing about another type of alienation, that of being uprooted and floating, alone in a sea of merely digital connections. Addressing this alienation from liquification and rootlessness is a matter of digital technologies. Given the multiple ways of connecting digitally, from phone, to email to Facebook to Instagram, etc., we can be as connected as we choose, but none of these connections and the relationships they enable are of the physical type we generally require to be affirmed at our deepest level of soul.