Modernity does not replace intimacy with impersonality but transforms it through distancing

Evidence

It is simply not true that in conditions of modernity we live increasingly in a “world of strangers.” We are not required more and more to exchange intimacy for impersonality in the contacts with others we routinely make in the course of our day-to-day lives. Something much more complex and subtle is involved. Day-to-day contacts with others in pre-modern settings were normally based upon a familiarity stemming in part from the nature of place. Yet contacts with familiar others probably rarely facilitated the level of intimacy we associate with personal and sexual relations today. The “transformation of intimacy” of which I have spoken is contingent upon the very distancing which the disembedding mechanisms bring about, combined with the altered environments of trust which they presuppose. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 343

Categorization

• XREF: Core to the reader’s thesis: Stevens’s failure is not that he chose impersonality over intimacy but that he failed the transformation of intimacy entirely, retreating into pure system trust. — connects to: Modernity transforms both global interconnection and the most intimate personal life — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 24; Modernity transforms the stranger from a whole suspect person into a fleeting contact. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 197; Modern place is a local expression of distant, disembedded relations — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 260 (+5 more)

Related

• Modernity transforms both global interconnection and the most intimate personal life (similarity 0.88)
• Modernity transforms the stranger from a whole suspect person into a fleeting contact. (similarity 0.88)
• Impersonal modern systems paradoxically enable reembedding of local personal life (similarity 0.87)
• Modern place is a local expression of distant, disembedded relations (similarity 0.85)
• Modern intimate trust demands self-revelation that produces permanent psychological tension (similarity 0.83)
• Modernity transforms friendship’s opposite from enemy to mere acquaintance (similarity 0.83)
• Modern displacement integrates people into globalised communities rather than estranging them (similarity 0.82)
• Continuing intimacy requires each person to remain partly indistinct (similarity 0.81)
• Declaring oneself host of a locale legitimizes initiating contact there (similarity 0.81)
• Local place-based relations gave pre-modern communities solidity (similarity 0.80)
• System trust underwrites ontological security but yields no psychological reward (similarity 0.80)
• Pre-modern trust is anchored in local place rather than abstract systems. (similarity 0.80)
• Three mechanisms drive modernity’s dynamism and process of time-space distanciation (similarity 0.79)
• Personal intermediaries are the default route to new trust (similarity 0.79)
• Shifts from personal to impersonal relations track society’s size and complexity (similarity 0.78)

Broader Connections

• Impersonal modern systems paradoxically enable reembedding of local personal life #corroborates (0.75) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 342
• Modern societies increasingly substitute self-presentation for feeling as a basis of trust #qualifies (0.50)
• Social relations crystallize into fixed external forms that cannot keep pace with inner life #contradicts (0.40) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 778