I think the greatest harm, especially at this time, that we suffer in the west is the epidemic of loneliness, and its consequences. When we are cut off from other people our unmet capacity for love becomes a vehicle for self-torment, makes us dangerously vulnerable.

We become victims of our own desires, lost in every sort of subsitute and distraction, easily swept up into the false comfort of fashions, tribes, ideologies that promise us meaning and identity.

Perhaps most tragically of all we find ourselves pushed and seduced into glorifying our own abondoment and isolation, spending our time in a mirror-world of 'self-defintion', 'self-affirmation', 'self-disovery' endlessly constructing and deconstructings ourselves without purpose.

Lonliness is not just a disease born of the very literal isolation that we face, but something that pervades the de-humanised nature of the two possible societies offered by liberal modernity: the working life of the professional and the leisured life of the consumer.

The only remedy, the only possible form of resistance that we have is the risk of friendship - we have to abandon the false consolation of proud autonomy and put our life at the service of others in a world where this is neither encouraged nor approved of.

This risk is double, because we must at once seek to be useful and accept that we are needy, we must intrude our generosity into the lives of others, break open our own securely bounded lives to reveal our insufficency and inadequacy openly.