I'm going to contradict myself here, as I actually do see much good in the modern world. But there are always the trade-offs; such as, how we now relate to existence.
There’s good reason why we feel so separate, autonomous, independent, alone: we choose to see things this way.
We see ourselves as substances, but without relations.
Decartes initially articulated the divide, which then got fleshed out more so with Locke. I don’t believe these thinkers compartimentalized things on their own. As Jonah Goldberg says, “We tend to give too much credit to intellectuals for creating ideas. More often, they give voice to ideas of impulses that already exist as pre-rational commitments or attitudes. Other times they distill opinions, sentiments, aspirations, and passions that already exist on the ground, and the distilled spirit is fed back to the people and they become intoxicated by it.”
Consider it all part of the Fall.
At some point we became intoxicated with the new science. In this, “we let one’s method dictate what counts as reality, rather than letting reality determine one’s method” (Feser).
The world was no longer enchanted with beings, animated with the supernatural, and gifted with aliveness! It was now a world of objective observation of the fragments. And “What is often regarded as a “discovery” arrived at via empirical scientific inquiry was in fact a stipulation concerning the nature of scientific method, a limitation, more or less by fiat, of what would be allowed to count as "scientific"” (Feser).
This should have got stuck in our claw, but we indulged to gain God-less merit. “If the science of the moderns has “succeeded,” then, it might be argued that this is in large part because they stacked the deck in their own favor” (Feser).
The traditional Scholastics did not see an epistemological and representational gap, or the self as buffered. There was relation and unity between things, with forms and matter making a whole. The unity between the parts was “organic and necessary, not mechanical and contingent.”
The character of existence was relational: this exists because that exists, and they exist in one another: inseparable, but distinct: substances-in-relation.
But these relations were not just horizontal, but vertical too. In fact, it is only because of the Trinity that we can relate to existence at all.
It is in the Trinity, where we can relate as existence itself.