Publius is onto something. That lack of connection - sometimes (but
not always) unpleasant - is a part of what it is to be a modern
individual. But some questions:

1 Is it a correct diagnosis to say that the moral problem (the value
problem - call it what you will) of the age is the fact that we live
in a society that includes millions of people we will never know face
to face? Is that the problem?

2 Are all societies which include strangers to be lumped together as
equally dissatisfying?

3 Is the only meaningful (albeit impossible) direction backwards?

4 Is it absolutely inconceivable that there could be some other
articulation of the individual and society which, although not as cozy
(if one ignores blackspots like cannibalism, for instance or female
genital mutilation) as the old tribal one would nevertheless ease some
of the pain of individuation?

5 Is the problem not that there are strangers but that we are obliged
to participate in and support a society whose fundamental orientation
(the paranoid pursuit of eternal GDP growth) is meaningless - is
suicidal, frankly?

6 Are more meaningful ways of living amongst strangers inconceivable?

7 Now that one has some degree of privacy could one really bear to
give it up (because there is no privacy in the tribe) and is this not
one of the consolations of living among strangers - why one might
choose to live among strangers?

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