After Transcendental Homelessness

A century ago, the philosopher Georg Lukacs diagnosed the modern age as afflicted with a “transcendental homelessness.” A similar critique has been mounted against liberal modernity in our own time: that it dislocates us from tradition and community, leaving us as individual specks floating in the void. Beyond those ideological charges, the revolutionary effects of digital technologies have also transformed our social structures, pulling people (especially young people) away from in-person interaction toward a disembodied digital agora. To offer a new place of belonging has been one of the implicit pledges of the various political disruptors today—whether they are populists, nationalists, socialists, postliberals, or ethnic identitarians.