Modernity and the condition of being marooned

The condition of being marooned was perhaps most salient to early sailors who could find their ship dashed upon a rocky shore or sunk in an ocean. There, resorting to floating upon the flotsam of their vessel, the sailor probably succumbed to the danger of exposure, predation, and remaining in saline water for days.

This condition of being marooned is still with us only in different forms. The conscious apprehension of the world around each of us frames a condition of novelty and complete ambiguity with regard to the meaning of things. Behaviorally humans have few innate responses. Instead, humanity learns through parental guidance, group affiliation, and cultural membership to inhabit a world of symbols that overlays the physical world in ways that give it cosmological significance, a need for ritual, sacrifices, reverence, avoidance, love, distrust--the full human playset of emotional commitments.

Modern worlds, such as the consumer capitalist utopia of the United Sates present us with new and novel forms of being marooned. As consumers get individuated through consumer practices and institutionalization through schooling and workplace fealty these individuals gradually lose their bonds to family, friends, and culture. I should say that they can. Mormon and Amish communities represent two communities of faith and practice that have been able to mitigate the effects of consumer individuation. Others exist and so do many individuals who have chosen to avoid the trap of self-centered consumption.

In addition to being cut off progressively from family and friends through work, school, and other professional obligations--let alone media consumption and slavish devotion to leisure--in modern societies people are cut off from the earth. The first stage of this occurs historically through the mass urbanization of society, the lure of factory work, and easy access to travel. Let us be honest. Farm work is less desirable and less compensatory than working in a garment factory in South East Asia to rural South East Asians. The same can be said for rural Chinese who have flooded Chinese cities to assemble today's electronics. Those people are afforded some basic financial footing, have established lives away from home, and use earned money to plan for a better future. Farming, hunting, fishing, gathering--these are some basic ways that people have worked in their surroundings to establish a living, found sustenance, and learned about the world around them. These very basic activities have occupied humanity for ages.

Today's world has machines doing the bulk of heavy work. Computers do the repetitive logic tasks. People are left to find occupations so that they may live meaningful lives of consumption, so that they may occupy socioeconomic niches, and advertise their fitness as mates through dress, body maintenance, or conspicuous consumer purchases. And this is where my story of being marooned begins.

This condition of being marooned may not always surface consciously, but there it is. In the event of a major flood, fire, earthquake, or war the basic amenities of modernity break down. Sewer, clean water, electricity, gas, food transportation--all this halts or becomes problematic to rely upon. In the past I've called these the petristructure, that is, the very medium through which a life is lived. People are born into and grow up inside these prefabricated environments that they come to rely upon for daily meaning and basic needs. The post-traditional facade work of high-technology environments containing privately held structures and metered access to any number of needs require that a person have money in order to sustain meaningful connection to it. And this unfettered access, when the money allows, structures the one consequential moral in a modern world--without money you may die. At the very least, without money you live a degraded and undignified existence sometimes in group homes or on the streets, under bridges, in tent camps, or in abandoned buildings. That thin and often invisible line separating a have from a have not could be as simple as a power outage whereby one loses ATM access. Or worse, what if one loses his or her smartphone containing all the information one needs to live by for accessing others and calling banks or credit card companies? Or simply, what if there were no power? That phone becomes a rather blank slate-colored object of little use.

Does any one of us live in fear of losing access to all of this? Sometimes I welcome it as if fat people need to be weeded out or as if people with absolutely no ability to help themselves should go about begging like the indigent they always were. That lead me to think that modernity is simply a standardized dress code, a patina of functionality, the working ideology of a society that has essentially deprived the great many of us from any real existence outside of the stainless steel teats from which each of us, as a Romulus or Remus, suckle like the feral children we are underneath our designer clothing and knowledge of local sports teams. So this marooning is a very real condition of our artificiality and our contingency in a prefabricated and purely functional world that is one loose wire away from being lost.