ALIENATION AND EXCLUSION IN MODERNITY by Wayne Martin Mellinger, Ph.D.
ALIENATION AND EXCLUSION IN MODERNITY
For Rev. Jon Lemmond
“And the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine.”
—Mark 5:12
This essay reflects on what it means to live at the margins of modern society. It is a meditation on alienation and exclusion—not only as structural processes but as existential conditions. I offer here only a beginning, a few scattered thoughts stitched together with the hope of making some sense of the dislocation so many experience in the contemporary world.
Emile Durkheim, one of sociology’s founding figures, recognized early on that modern life brought with it a profound transformation in the glue that holds society together. In traditional societies, what he called mechanical solidarity bound people through sameness—shared norms, religious beliefs, kinship ties. A village or tribe was unified by likeness and conformity. But modernity, shaped by urbanization and industrialization, ushered in organic solidarity: a new social bond based not on similarity but difference, on the interdependence of specialized roles and divergent life paths.
This shift was not merely structural—it was psychological and emotional. The transition from mechanical to organic solidarity marks not only a change in how society is organized, but in how people feel: about themselves, about others, and about the world.
As the pace of social change accelerates, it often feels as though we are unmoored. Traditions dissolve. Community erodes. And in the place of solidarity, alienation seeps in. A striking study by Duke sociologist Lynn Smith-Lovin, cited in a 2006 USA Today article by Janet Kornblum, found that one in four Americans reports having no one with whom to discuss important matters. In just two decades, Americans had lost nearly a third of their close confidants. These are not trivial losses; they speak to a culture of isolation.
Are we witnessing the emergence of a new form of solidarity—what we might call anomic solidarity? That is, a society so suffused with alienation and disconnection that the very idea of “us” begins to fracture. A society where the ties that bind are not bonds of mutual recognition but threads of shared estrangement. Where aloneness becomes normalized, and meaning becomes harder and harder to grasp.
Zygmunt Bauman, the late sociologist and philosopher of postmodernity, described contemporary life as liquid modernity—a world in which nothing holds its shape for long. Careers, relationships, identities: all are subject to rapid change and impermanence. We are urged to remain flexible, mobile, ever-adaptable. Yet this constant reinvention comes at a cost. It fragments the self and hollows out our relations. We no longer build lives; we curate experiences. As Bauman wrote in Liquid Love, even our intimacies have become disposable, like the high-tech gadgets we so easily replace.
Little wonder, then, that so many find solace in the fictional worlds of Seinfeld reruns—a show populated by stable friendships, comic intimacy, and a steady rhythm of life. It’s a world so unlike our own that it now feels like nostalgia.
Alienation is not merely a feeling; it is a structure, a relation, a historical process. Karl Marx, the great critic of capitalism, saw alienation as rooted in labor. Under capitalism, he argued, workers become estranged from the products of their labor, from their own creative capacities, from one another, and even from themselves. Work is no longer a means of self-realization but a means of survival—dictated by the interests of capital, not the needs of the human spirit.
I first encountered the concept of alienation on a train ride from Nice to Florence in 1980, through the writings of Erich Fromm. In The Sane Society, Fromm wrote:
“By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become… estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world… but his acts and their consequences have become his masters. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person.”
Fromm, a humanist and a voice of compassion amid modern despair, reminds us that alienation is not an abstract condition—it is deeply personal and spiritual.
Modernity, I have argued elsewhere, is an age of the Other. We fashion identities by expelling those whom we label different, dirty, or dangerous. We define ourselves through exclusion: “I am clean, industrious, rational—you are lazy, dirty, emotional.” These are not merely insults; they are symbolic operations of boundary maintenance.
Mary Douglas, in her classic Purity and Danger, showed that “dirt” is not an objective category but “matter out of place.” What we deem impure or polluting often reveals what a society fears. Dietary laws, rituals of cleansing, taboos about bodies—these are ways we maintain symbolic order. They reflect our need to keep categories pure, to know who belongs and who does not.
The passage from Mark’s Gospel that opens this essay may also be read as a ritual of boundary enforcement. Jesus confronts a possessed foreigner and casts the unclean spirits into swine—animals already deemed impure in Jewish law. The act is one of healing, but it is also one of symbolic purification. The foreigner is restored only after the pollution has been expelled.
This raises difficult questions: Who do we cast out in modernity? Who bears the mark of exclusion? In what ways do we construct “difference”—racial, gendered, sexual, economic, or otherwise—in order to marginalize others? And how are these exclusions institutionalized—through the criminal justice system, the labor market, the education system, and the very fabric of everyday interaction?
In the global North, many of us live in comfort because others have been pushed to the margins—geographically, economically, and symbolically. Race is one axis of exclusion, but not the only one. Gender, sexuality, age, ability—each is used as a tool of division. These hierarchies wound us all. They not only degrade the marginalized; they corrode the possibility of true solidarity.
What results is a world of fracture, suspicion, and despair. A world where we are strangers not only to one another, but to ourselves. A world in which the dream of community is eclipsed by the shadow of exclusion.
And yet, perhaps the fact that we can see these patterns—can name them, trace them, write about them—suggests the possibility of something different. If alienation is historically produced, then it is not inevitable. If exclusion is structured, it can be dismantled. If our identities have been forged through expulsion, they can be reimagined through recognition.
To live differently is to act differently. To make room for the excluded. To resist the pull of purity and embrace the messy solidarity of a shared world.
Emile Durkheim (1858-1917), the founder of modern sociology, saw that the then emerging urban industrialized social world, which sociologists now call "modernity", creates different types of social bonds between people. A different "social cement" now hold us together--an "organic solidarity" as Durkheim called it-- one that is based upon individuals being different from each other and having different tasks and roles.
In traditional pre-modern (agricultural) societies a "mechanical solidarity", as Durkheim dubbed it, held societies together, one that was based upon kinship and shared norms, values and ways of acting. The social cement that kept every one together was based upon uniformity and sameness--people in a tribe or village all shared the same religion and beliefs, shunned the same outsiders, spoke the same language, etc.
Sociologists study how modernity is changing the ways that our societies are structured and organized--its social organization. A common theme is that social change is increasing at an exponential rate. In fact, in today's fast-paced world it can seem as if traditions are slipping away SO rapidly and that alienation is slipping in SO quickly that we risk loosing any sense of meaning at all.
What type of society have we become? What type of social bonds are these? Have we gone from mechanical solidarity to organic solidarity to an "anomic solidarity" (I define anomic solidarity as a social system in which alienation is so diffuse and in which aloneness and isolation are so pronounced that there is not much to hold the system together. This can result is a decreased sense of "us-ness" and as well as increases id social disorder)
Primitive foragers living in pre-agricultural societies (about 8000 BC and earlier) had roughly 60 to 80 people in their nomadic bands that they knew better than we probably know any body at all.
Zygmunt Bauman (born in Poland 1925), the great British sociologist says that we have become a "liquid society" in which things change SO fast that our lives are disjointed, fragmented, and virtually meaningless. We have to be flexible and adaptable in this type of social world and willing to change tactics at short notice.
But who cares about careers any way--let's go shopping!
Consumerism is increasingly a model for everything, Bauman argues.
With "liquid love", the frailty of our bonds have been exposed in the late modern age--relationships are like "high tech toys" to be played with--expendable, recyclable, interchangeable objects.
No wonder so many people in today's world prefer to stay home alone and watch re-runs of Seinfeld (1989-1998), which, incidentally, portrays a world rich with meaningful friendships and relationships, so different from their (our) empty own lives.
Alienation is the estrangement between people, among other things. Karl Marx (1813-1883), the revolutionary thinker, historian, and social theorist linked human alienation to human labor, insisting upon a "materialist" conception of history. Under capitalism, work renders humans alien to themselves and to their own products. They loose autonomy, or self-rule, to the "capitalist class", Marx might say, that is the owners of the factories and other "means of production".
I first learned about scholarly writing on alienation on a train ride from Nice, France to Florence, Italy in 1980 through the writings of Erich Fromm (1900-1980) in his glorious The Sane Soceity(1955), in which he states:
"By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences himself as an alien. He has become, one might say, estranged from himself. He does not experience himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his own acts — but his acts and their consequences have become his masters, whom he obeys, or whom he may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with himself as he is out of touch with any other person. He, like the others, are experienced as things are experienced; with the senses and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the world outside positively."
Check out Erich Fromm who is a great humanist, Critical Theorist and superb writer, who cares deeply about the plight of humanity.
Modernity is an age of the Other, in which we forge identities by expelling all of our "fantasies of dirt" onto our enemies who we imagine to be the opposite of us (Mellinger 1994). The Postmodern American almost seems to say: "I am Mister Clean, SuperMan, The Hardest Worker---You Lazy Bum, You Dirty Swine, You Woman!!! "
The great British anthropologist Mary Douglas (1921-2007) in Purity and Danger (1966) traces the words and meaning of "dirt" in different contexts. Following Freud, she notes that dirt is "matter out of place" and that its content varies from culture to culture. (And kosher dietary laws are, perhaps, largely about symbolic boundary-maintainence concerns).
(In the verse of the Gospel of Mark cited in the opening of this essay above, Jesus encounters a non-Jewish foreigner on the opposite side of a lake who is demon-possessed and exorcizes him, which seems, perhaps, to be an act of boundary-maintenance and pollution-ridding.)
Who in modernity do we exclude? How do we exclude them? How do create notions of "difference" in modernity to exclude others and push them to the margins of our economies and our cultures? How is this connected to our criminal systems? Our gender systems? Our sexual systems? Our racial and ethnic hierarchies? Our notions of age and ability? So many questions.....
Those of us fortunate to life in the Northern Empires have expelled all those darker skinned people to the edges of the poorer continents, or to the edges of our own societies, or to the edges of our minds, or our lives?
And race is not the only weapon of choice: gender and sexuality, age and ability, and numerous other instruments of terror are used to inflict hierarchy and hatred into the hearts and minds of the silenced, marginalized, and the weak. All this "divide and conquer" only exacerbates" the alienation of the world!
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