Adam Sieff, Staff Writer
Ideology: Liberal | Writing from: Columbia University

If spherical differentiation defined twentieth-century modernity, then the centrifugal forces now hyperpolarizing society more absolutely into those ever-atomized spheres may very well be defining the twenty-first. The development seems to be shaping “post-modernity” and is nowhere more evident than it is here in the United States.

Perhaps no state represented modernity better than ours. Religious differentiation, after all, was built into our constitution and seemingly put the country on a path towards more complete differentiation. While Europe struggled to slough off the primacy of the religious sphere, America had already developed into a society defined by political-economy, a hallmark of what would become modernity.

To some extent, modernity is the culmination of liberal democracy, as invented by Enlightenment mythology, and as most robustly trumpeted in these United States. Tolerance, equality, pluralism, religious disestablishment—all of these effects tended irreversibly towards the differentiation of spherical realms in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The result, in true American fashion, was a marketplace of equal spheres. In the twentieth century, Americans shopped for salvation, meaning, theodicy, and value-creation in an open bazaar. Some shaped their lives with religion, others through ideology or science, while yet others preferred love or artistic beauty.

Now, as before, America is leading the charge into post-modernity. The diffusion of the Internet and the continued rationalization of liberal democracy into its purest form (hyper-individualistic relativism) have produced a galaxy of largely independent spheres. Whereas in the past spheres were broad, public and constantly in tension with one another, one can now subjectively construct a very specific life-world that only occasionally chafes against others.

But when these hyper-rationalized sub-spheres do abrade, the intensity with which they do so is extreme. Surely, this intensity can be understood as a product of the hyper-rationalization itself. The purer a sub-unit becomes to differentiate itself from its competitors, the more pretentious becomes their claim to truth and righteousness. Extra-spherical interaction becomes irrelevant as technology facilitates spherical networks to spring-up abstractly without regard for physical space, and the myopia of one’s own sphere becomes blinding. Actual interaction with the “other” becomes a strange and aggravating experience.

Now consider the political sphere. The political sphere is inherently public and, in a liberal democracy, demanding of interaction. Into this forum march the Limbaughs, the Olbermanns, the Palins and the Kucinichs, all in self-righteous possession of his or her own gospel. The form of the political in liberal democracy demands competition, but it also demands compromise. Hyper-atomized and intensified ideologues and religious zealots can compete, but they cannot compromise, simply because they all claim the pretense of truth.

For this reason, arguments have rightly targeted religion as being unsuitable for public discourse because anything ultimately decided on a religious basis cannot be assumed legitimate since not all discussants (citizens) suppose the same rationale. In other words, the problem with bringing religion into the public sphere has nothing to do with salvation or theodicy, it is that religion brandishes the pretense of truth.

Now, do not the hyperpolarized ideologues do the same? On the one hand, this could be an argument for the deprivatization of religion. That is not my point. Rather, my point is to illustrate the gathering storm that is necessarily building out of the innate incompatibility of post-modernity and liberal democracy.

The paradox requires citizen actors to leave their pretensions at the door when entering the public sphere, but the nature of our present condition wedges citizens into such tightly intensified ideological postures that the two have become inseparable. The emerging image is a state of war in which force alone justifies public decisions, and true legitimacy no longer exists.

Alas, the artifice of our imaginations could only dam the dangerous rivers of reality for so long. In our return to polytheism, we must once again pick up our swords.





po