Lots of great insights from both Benjamin and Pierz. The big picture looks like a perfect storm of multiple forces colliding with every one of the other forces, like four speeding cars simultaneously meeting at the central point in an intersection of two highways. It's hard to say A is colliding with B, when C and D are as much a part of the collision.

Perhaps the big picture could be reduced to fewer forces. (For instance, civilization, culture and technology are intertwined.) Humanity has long sought to reduce the pain of life (the struggle against cruel nature) through civilization, beginning with the turn to large-scale agriculture.

Like the joke about why dogs lick their balls, we've kept building civilization, increasingly making it bigger than us. Civilization turned from a drink of water into the ocean of water we swim in -- like fish, not understanding our the environment (only we made the environment). The reason humanism has gone out of fashion is because we aren't human anymore.

The result is our alienation from ourselves, each other and the world, because these three things are now only perceived through the lens of civilization our vision distorted by the water we swim in. We can't form the connections and relationships we did when life was more natural and less civilized.

In the big collision, civilization is likely to collapse (at a minimum due to climate change). The collapse will bring us closer to nature. Life will be hard again, but not so alienating.

One hope would be that we remember the horror of over-civilization, and remember the "grace" of the Enlightenment's humanism, so that we don't pursue "absolute" civilization like we did before, as modeled by Asimov in his Foundation trilogy, and keep nature and civilization in a healthy balance.