Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred: Rights, Religion and Ideology 9781350058835, 9781350058859, 9781350058828

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Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred

Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred Rights, Religion and Ideology

Jon Wittrock Stockholm University, Sweden

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 Paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Jon Wittrock, 2018 Jon Wittrock has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN: HB: 978-1-3500-5883-5 PB: 978-1-3501-4666-2 ePDF: 978-1-3500-5882-8 eBook: 978-1-3500-5884-2 Series: Political Theory and Contemporary Philosophy Typeset by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

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Contents Preface

vi

1 Democracy, Authenticity, Critique

1

1.1

Religion and politics: Variations on a theme

1

1.2

Power, authenticity, and democracy

8

1.3

Secularization and the sacred: Possible buildings

2 Sacred Boundaries and Ethical Closure

22 39

2.1

Constitutive boundaries and sacralization

39

2.2

Meaningful autonomy over time

56

3 Axial Echoes in Global Space 3.1

75

Public worship beyond the state?

75

3.2 The state beyond public worship?

89

4 Back to Burgenland?

107

4.1

Toward a topology of the exceptional

107

4.2

Ethos, spiritual decompression, and fatal politics

128

Notes References Index

145 164 178

Preface Throughout my life I have lived in what is often labeled as secular societies, but that notion is also frequently challenged. While secularization is usually taken to signify the removal of some religious element from the public domain, or the wider society, it originally signified the transfer of something to a non-ecclesiastical domain. The last few decades have indeed witnessed a reversal in a perceived development toward secularity across the world, and many observers have pointed out that whatever secularity there is, is not only highly ambiguous, but also restricted, and prone to dramatic reversals. Not only do many people still remain members of churches and other religious organizations, even in supposedly extremely secular societies, but even many who do not still believe either in a God or in some kind of force or higher power. If we turn to political secularity, even when there is no compulsion to join a church or other community of organized religion in countries where there once was, there is nevertheless what can arguably be called a kind of public worship in all supposedly secular liberal democracies, in the form of the symbols and rituals of civil religion and nationalism, and narrative figures of both are spread through political rhetoric, media, and education systems. Also, the movements and narratives of modern ideologies are on the whole suffused with and derived from religious traditions. Ultimately, then, it is difficult to clearly draw the line between the religious and the secular. None of this entails that any critical stance in relation to contemporary phenomena need to be rooted in anything “religious,” but the very fact that religious elements are so intertwined with the history of secularity indeed calls for a deepened reflection on the subject. Even if we wish to reject religious elements, we should know what we are rejecting, and conversely, if we desire to affirm them, we should closely scrutinize what it is we are actually affirming. Furthermore, there are the questions both concerning the content and the range, of any religious elements, as well as any concepts and practices appropriated from and inspired by religious traditions, in an emerging global context.

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Some would of course suggest that we should embrace and extend germs toward an ethical universalism found within many religious traditions, perhaps in conjunction with a global multilogue on human rights, in order to escape ethnocentric tendencies. This, however, leaves aside other elements found within, and appropriated from, religious traditions, that may likewise be worth considering as sources of inspiration for publicly sanctioned practices beyond the confines of any specific religious tradition or community. My own interest in this wider spectrum of possibilities has its roots in my own personal history. This is not a matter of me being or having been a religious believer or a member of any religious community—although I have been a member of the Church of Sweden without really having been asked about it, I was never baptized, and have now left that church, without joining any other religious organization. What initially triggered my interest in the ambiguities and frequent simplifications in approaching the subject of religion, however, was something else. In my late teens, I had what I hesitantly call a series of “mystical” experiences of intense luminosity, a sense of time stopping, and of all things coming together. These experiences were not like the aesthetic pleasure that I derive from nature or great works of art. Those are nice too, but I have to say, hardly even comparable in depth and intensity. Art can make me stop in wonder, it can make me cry and laugh with joy, and it can even fill me with awe. The same goes for nature. Nevertheless, what I experienced was something of an entirely different level of intensity. I should clarify: I am not speaking of some vague, fleeting impressions of beauty and connectedness or of some imagined conversation with a divine voice within or the like—I am referring to a full-on, overwhelming experience of unity and luminosity; by far the most powerful experience of my entire life, at least in terms of intensity, quite unlike any other and clearly beyond the powers of language to really convey. I did not hallucinate, I did not perceive extraordinary beings, but rather the very same beings, but in an extraordinary way, and thus it became clear to me exactly that we can perceive the same “objects” in radically different ways. Nothing in my upbringing or education had prepared me for this. As a pupil in primary school, I had listened to our teacher reading biblical narratives, adapted for children; these amounted to good stories, but nothing more. I had not been baptized—I am still not, and am quite convinced that this does not condemn me to any sort of metaphysical punishment. I was not and am not a

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Preface

Christian, nor do I endorse any doctrines concerning divine entities, spirits, or paths to salvation. Despite the efforts of both atheists and believers, I remain content to call myself an agnostic. And yet, in a sense, what had happened to me entailed a collision with the assumptions of the surrounding culture. I realized that there was another realm of experience—not a metaphysical, transcendent, but a phenomenological, immanent one—with which my culture, including many of the churches, was not very comfortable. The subject was mostly avoided, or dealt with in the context of other, alien cultures, or historical epochs long gone. It was safer that way. Yet, here it was, happening to me. And the only apt descriptions I found were those of either ancient religious texts, or some of greatest literature of the twentieth century. Hence, it is hardly surprising that I became interested in the relevance of what we could perhaps call the phenomenology of the exceptional in the context of modernity, outside of any particular religious community or received tradition of interpretation. More generally, I came to delve deeper into the problems of defining religion, and of tracing the slippery boundaries between the opaque categories of the religious and the secular. This also entailed, however, questioning the ambiguities and indeed the possibilities of different trajectories of secularization. Since secularity is not a homogeneous state of affairs, but refers to a host of different actual as well as hypothetical outcomes, we may raise the question as to what kind of secularization we should pursue. Perhaps I have been able to be open to the valuable contributions and fascinating facets of religious practices and traditions, without myself being a religious believer, because I have never been under any compulsion to either believe in any religious narrative, or join in any religious practices. Thus, I feel no personal resentment to any specific religious tradition, and I have never felt a pressing need to either affirm or reject any such tradition, or, crucially, “religion” as a whole. I would like to thank the Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation for generously supporting my research. I would also like to thank Sophie for helping me in the process of editing the manuscript and correcting the language. I dedicate this book to Linda.

1

Democracy, Authenticity, Critique

1.1

Religion and politics: Variations on a theme

Robert Musil, one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, was an expert in exposing vague and vacuous values. His great novel, The Man without Qualities, paints a sarcastic portrait of the late Habsburg Empire, or rather his caricature version thereof, Kakanien. Admittedly, this imaginary empire does not, on the surface, appear to be all that unpleasant, but Ulrich, the gifted young protagonist of Musil’s novel, nevertheless seems lost, existentially. Only a strange love story appears to open up the possibility of something radically different: “it seemed to them,” Musil writes of the sibling love story tenderly enclosed within the larger narrative, “that they [themselves] and likewise the things [around them], no longer were distinct, mutually exclusive and closed bodies, but open and interconnected forms.”1 At the heart of Musil’s concerns lies the problem of an already existing political entity, seeking to determine its own basic values and motivations, in an epoch in which the belief in dynastic legitimacy and the rule of divine grace have been seriously undermined by the growth of the modern sciences and the emergence of nationalism, democratic movements, and egalitarian ideals. Musil, of course, grew up in a world very different from our own—he was born and raised in an empire, incorporating vast and culturally diverse tracts of Central and Eastern Europe, in an era predating the brutal wars, genocides, and carpet bombings of the horrendous first half of the twentieth century. Nevertheless, there is much in Musil’s great novel that remains relevant to our own contemporary dilemmas. We, too, face questions concerning our own grand narratives of progress and justice, of nations and capital, of economic growth and ecology. And who, upon considering for example the various proposals aimed at finding common European symbols and values, can

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avoid the similarities with the parallel action of Kakanien, that tragicomically developing project into which Musil’s antihero is drawn, and which aims to find and formulate the values an actually existing political entity embodies and ought to pursue? This problem, moreover, strikes at the heart of not only the pan-European project, but also its member states, and of nation-states more generally, since within these, too, public symbols, rituals, values, and national narratives, as well as supposedly neutral rights and meritocratic standards, are challenged by a host of multicultural critiques, including those of feminists, queer theorists, regionalists, and minority nations, as well as indigenous populations, immigrant groups, and religious minorities. Musil, however, not only asked probing questions about the assumptions underlying political order, but also raised a host of issues pertaining to the contemporary relevance of religious traditions. In so doing, he exposed wider problems and possibilities tied to processes of secularization, uncovering both structural analogies between organized religion and modern ideologies. Commenting on the outbreak of the First World War, for example, he observed that what was stammered at the outset and later allowed to degenerate into a cliché—that the war was a strange, somehow religious experience— undoubtedly corresponds to a fact. . . . Contained in this perception too was the intoxicating feeling of having, for the first time, something in common with every German. One suddenly became a tiny particle humbly dissolved in a suprapersonal event and, enclosed by the nation, sensed the nation in an absolutely physical way.2

Musil thus pointed to analogies between religious rituals and the mechanisms of nationalism, but he also wrote about the subject of phenomenological exploration and “mystical” experiences of love and luminosity.3 In this sense, Musil hints at a question which is considerably more original than that posed, for example, by the films of Ingmar Bergman, or some existentialist philosophers—instead of asking how we can we live with the silence, or in the absence, of God, Musil wonders how we should live with the undeniable presence of something divine, with overwhelming experiences of luminosity and wonder. No matter their ultimate origins and ontological or epistemological status, it would be strange to assert that such experiences are wholly insignificant when considering the aims or overall worth of human

Democracy, Authenticity, Critique

3

existence. As David Luft notes in introducing a collection of Musil’s essays and addresses, the latter’s “distinction between the ordinary relation to experience in everyday life and science and a second relation to things that he called the other condition refers not to objects of experience but rather to different ways of experiencing these same objects.”4 As Musil indicates, practices of the pursuit of this other condition may be tied to both social integration and the transgression of established social norms. Musil, then, traversed a wide landscape of possible trajectories of reflection and potential appropriation, regarding the relations between the religious and the secular. The wider domains uncovered by Musil imply a host of problematic interrelations between and within the ambiguous fields of religion and politics, where we encounter an entire terrain of related questions and recurring dichotomies—questions concerning phenomenology and interpretation, beliefs and narratives, but also symbols and rituals, where all of these may serve to uphold and reproduce, or challenge and undermine, social and political orders. This terrain, however, is so wide and so nuanced that it becomes practically impossible to address it in a single work, and a somewhat narrower focus is called for. What I am initially after is the potential political impact of religious elements, which obviously calls for a more precise rendering of what kind of impact we are talking about, following from what type of elements we should specify, that is, what we mean by religious, and by political impact. Luckily for me, however, I am neither after a general notion of religion, nor some grand transhistorical or cross-cultural theory or comparison, nor a theory on politics or the political as general terms. Rather, I am interested in the debates about religious and secular elements in contemporary liberal democracies, with a focus on those Jewish and Christian traditions which have exerted the greatest influence in the Western world. Thus, I set out from the observation that some religious traditions have indeed been hugely influential in the formation and reproduction of critical languages as well as institutional setups in the development of liberal democracies in Western Europe and North America; institutional and conceptual models which have subsequently spread across large parts of the world, morphing with local traditions. Here, the primary focus has been on Jewish and Christian, and more generally monotheistic traditions stemming from what we now call Western Eurasia and North Africa, with their particular emphases on faith,

4

Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred

debates on the relations between religious communities and political power, and figures of thought concerning the ends (in both senses of the word) of history. It is here that we find a particularly strong focus on the appropriation of eschatological and apocalyptic hopes and fears, and on the possibilities of human collective agency not only complementing, but even replacing divine agency in fundamentally transforming the world, not only in a technological, but in a moral sense as well. Here we also find, however, publicly supported ritualistic practices and political symbols, the presence of which may be questioned on the grounds that they are too particularistic in nature, but also that the focus on them overshadows wider alternatives, other possible, publicly supported practices. It has been said that religion makes good people do evil things.5 Certainly, but it is hardly the only way—economic pressures, military commands, everyday conformism, ignorance, and secular ideologies can obviously do the trick, too. However, it sadly does appear that the subject of religion is particularly prone to make intelligent people say stupid things. The topic of religion is an emotionally charged one to many people, making it difficult to approach with a more detached, analytical frame of mind. Also, many find it difficult to disconnect the general and abstract concept of “religion,” incorporating a multitude of actual and potential elements, from particular religious traditions, norms, narratives, and practices. It is more conceptually fruitful, however, to think of the conceptual pair of religious and secular, not in terms of one, single determined dichotomy, but rather in terms of a series of polarities, which can be specified in accordance with the particular criteria we choose, and remembering that those criteria are open to contestation—in other words, if we attempt to determine relative secularity in accordance with church attendance, membership in publicly recognized religious communities, or in terms of stated beliefs in statistical surveys, we will get one set of results. If, however, we question a supposed condition of secularity proceeding from the observation that concepts and practices have migrated between religious and allegedly secular settings, another image will emerge. Hence, as we question the division between the religious and the secular in supposedly secular nation-states, this can be done in at least two overarching ways. On the one hand, we may examine the shifting relationships between more or less well-defined entities, for example, church and state, or different

Democracy, Authenticity, Critique

5

religious and ideological movements or organizations, or in the clash between religiously motivated claims and the demands of a secular organization. In this sense, some scholars observed a reversal of the perceived trend toward greater secularity, which was assumed in the early postwar decades—thus, for example, as José Casanova argued, the expectations of the postwar discourse on secularization were stymied by a relative deprivatization of organized religion.6 On the other hand, however, we may question the very conceptual dichotomy of the religious and the secular in such a way that it becomes difficult to motivate why an ideological narrative of historical transformation is considered secular, while a theological one is religious, or why the rituals and symbols of the nation are supposedly secular, while ecclesiastical ones are not. Furthermore, we may ask, even if accepting some more refined conceptualization of religion, resting on family resemblances7 rather than one, single, unambiguously defined essence, to what an extent such a demarcation of the religious is indeed relevant when considering questions of political secularization: for example, if a persistent dogmatization and an iconographic ritualization, albeit disconnected from any claims of divine revelation or beliefs in supernatural entities, characterize the public life of a modern state, to what an extent is this a desirable model of secularization? I am not at all against the notion that we may define religion according to family resemblances, for some theoretical purpose, but it does not really matter to me, presently. Rather, I am after the transfer and non-transfer, with too little reflection, of some practices which are generally recognized to be of core importance to entities we call religions, and closely tied to what defines them. I am not aiming to study the immensely nuanced empirical and conceptual trajectories of processes of secularization, or indeed of the formation of concepts such as religion, or dichotomies such as those separating the religious from the secular, but rather, I want to widen the sphere of questioning of already publicly sanctioned practices, within contemporary liberal democracies. What ultimately interests me is which publicly sanctioned practices can be considered, and politicized, by pointing to structural analogies between prominent contexts that are usually labeled as religious and secular, respectively. It should be noted that challenges toward liberal democracies, whether rooted in religious concerns or not, need not result in a dichotomous

6

Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred

either/or, for or against liberal democracy as a whole. Liberal democracies incorporate a series of tensions between the democratic principle of popular rule and counterbalancing elements, which can be formulated by recourse to different terms, with different conceptual histories and slightly different emphases, for example, by counterposing majoritarian democracy and social egalitarianism to individual autonomy, the Rechtsstaat or rule of law, or liberal or republican constitutionalism. Such contrasting elements may be and have been related theoretically and in actual praxis in different ways. They can be decoupled. They may also, however, appear simultaneously as forming one set of demands for democratic rule. Theoretically, too, they can be seen as tersely joined together, or as mutually reinforcing each other.8 Furthermore, some theorists speak of the counterbalancing acts of constitutional, majoritarian, and executive forces.9 We should be careful, of course, not to complacently assume that our exact syntheses follow from a logically consistent balancing of, for example, protecting individual autonomy in the present and over time. Contemporary liberal democracies rely on both norms of individual autonomy, minority rights, and majority rule, and infringing on either may result in questions concerning their legitimacy and status as actual democracies. The survival of a liberal democracy in its entirety, however, playing out in the various terse syntheses between different logics may be called into question, and argued to require extraordinary measures, giving rise to discussions concerning sovereignty and decisions on the state of exception, or on the necessities of a constant reproduction of those institutions and civic virtues required to foster the long-term survival of what autonomy we indeed have.10 Even though the specifics of such arguments may be questioned, the basic tension is a real one: if we believe in the validity of certain basic aims, values, principles, or ways of life, it is imperative that we fight to protect that very order, which actually upholds them, if it is not immediately apparent that we could create a better one. This, however, again, raises further, uncomfortable questions, concerning short- and long-term perspectives in relation to values, duties, and behavioral dispositions. Do we need not only to vigilantly defend liberty from threats external and internal, but also adjust our behavior, if it is in other ways deemed to weaken the economic or military competitiveness of our community?

Democracy, Authenticity, Critique

7

We may consider a host of ways in which to consider and theorize the relations between religious traditions and liberal democracy. Since both the former and the latter vary, and consist of many components, and since the relations between these elements may take on radically different forms, we could for example consider how adherents of a specific religious doctrine or community may reject liberal democracy as a whole, work to change the system in some of its aspects, either fundamental or more superficial and less entrenched norms and institutions, or only protest against, or attempt to bring about, certain outcomes. Also, both rejecting liberal democracy as a whole, as well as challenging certain constituent components, outcomes or effects of it, may take on many different forms, and several strategies may be employed, from terrorist attacks or direct action to peaceful protests and public debates. A further complication is added once we realize that we could formulate a critique of present liberal democracies, drawing upon religious traditions as sources of inspiration, even if we do not ourselves commit to any religious community or tradition, either institutionally or in terms of beliefs, and even this latter stance may be further nuanced conceptually—in terms of degrees, rather than as a dichotomy. To conclude, debates concerning the role of religion for liberal democracy tend to focus on either the way in which religious movements may challenge political forms of rule by recourse to an allegedly more true understanding of or belief about reality itself, or the way in which critical languages may be shaped by religious narratives, values, or figures of thought, in terms of direct appropriation, or indirect inspiration or influence, resulting in analogous rather than identical features. If we restrict ourselves, as I will do, to contemporary, liberal democracies, we could consider, then, first, how we may challenge the processes and outcomes of democratic forms of rule by recourse to religious beliefs and commitments, and secondly, how we may enrich our critical languages by recourse to religious sources of inspiration, potentially even outside of any adherence to a specific religious community or creed. The remainder of this chapter will initially focus on the former theme, and then turn to the latter, which will subsequently be the focus of the remainder of this book. To somewhat anticipate my argument, the elements I will turn to initially are those of publicly supported, political symbols, rituals, and narratives, already existing practices of what we could call, following Hobbes, public

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worship: of publicly sanctioned rituals, symbols, and narratives. While Hobbes is at times perceived as a forerunner of political secularization, or at the very least as providing a solution to the problem of order that does not require the intervention of religion, we do find in his works an insistence on the “uniformity of Public Worship.”11 And while we might wish to imagine that contemporary liberal democracies have not, in this instance, followed in the path of Hobbes, but rather in that of a thinker like Locke, with his notion of religious toleration (albeit, in his case, one which is of course Limited12), contemporary, supposedly secular liberal democracies have not consistently disentangled their legal orders from elements of a collective worship incorporating symbols and rituals. Furthermore, not all liberal democracies have disentangled these symbols and rituals from explicit ties to a theological heritage (and this goes for some of the supposedly most secular and multicultural of states). Actual political movements, even allegedly secular ones, have incorporated ritualistic practices, taboos, privileged sites, temporal intervals, and pseudo-sacred artifacts. Such elements survive in contemporary liberal democracies, and they are the ones I will consider critically, in the sense that I seek not simply to determine whether they ought to be continuously present or not, but also to inquire into the wider possibilities lurking behind their actual presence. In so doing, we could draw upon existing elements as instances in a wider logical space of possibilities.

1.2

Power, authenticity, and democracy

The question of, as Locke put it, “not whether there be power in the world, nor whence it came, but who should have it” may be asked.13 This, indeed, is the “great question” which, as Locke observes, “in all ages has disturbed mankind, and brought on them the greatest part of those mischiefs which have ruined cities, depopulated countries, and disordered the peace of the world.”14 This great question has been handled, within what is reproduced as a European, wider Western, or even simply “modern,” tradition of political philosophy, under different headings, but among the more important ones, we should obviously count the concepts of authority, concerning the right to rule and the obligation to obey, sovereignty, pointing to the supreme authority of a state,

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9

independent from other states, as well as legitimacy, concerning the belief or lack thereof that obedience is indeed called for and authority is rightful, which is something different from mere pragmatic acquiescence.15 Within a currently dominant, and broadly liberal, tradition of thought, there have been intense debates and theoretical proposals on contract theory and consent—explicit or tacit—attempting to explain why we should, or perhaps need not or should not, obey the law of the land.16 Now, power is of course not only a question of direct, visible influence or coercive control, but also of the power to put questions on the agenda or remove them therefrom, of shifts in governmentality as well as government, and of the situational power of certain cultural roles or positions which are reproduced, often without further reflection.17 To all of these, the great question may be put. Explicit answers, however, are not always necessary: people may and often do obey out of habit, and perform the roles that are expected of them, without further reflection, but when the great question is indeed posed, there may be answers in the form of claims as to why power, in its present distribution and hierarchical structuring, is justified, legitimate, or rightful. Imagine a Mount Rushmore of modern thinkers! Which faces would be sculpted out of the rock, hewn, as it were, by a stream of books, journal and newspaper articles, conference papers, blog posts, everyday conversations, and dreams and desires? There is the face of Descartes, covered with numerous scratches and marks as subsequent thinkers have held him up as an inaugural figure, but also one whose notions of consciousness and the dualism of mind and matter have become a shared point of rejection, a meeting place for otherwise divergent schools, who all agree that his fundamental assumptions were flawed, forming a Cartesian pattern with which we must break. There is Francis Bacon, whose views on the mastery of nature can serve as a paradigmatic figure of thought and an influence to be questioned and perhaps rejected by the ecologically aware, and there are the adjacent, somber faces of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Locke, opening up exciting new vistas for political philosophy beyond the pale of classical and ecclesiastical constraints, but simultaneously creating constraints of their own, against which we now have to struggle. Kant and Hegel are also up there, of course, as well as Marx, Mill, and Nietzsche, as well as a few others, which may remain faceless for now.

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Contemporary Democracy and the Sacred

Unlike presidents, however, the great thinkers mentioned above have wielded little if any political power, in a narrower sense. The power philosophers exert in shaping the physical world and the actions of other people is rarely of the form we think of when we archetypically envisage power as the ability of one agent to make another agent directly do what they would not otherwise have done. In an archetypal direct exertion of power, the powerful one utters a clear command, unambiguously stating what should be done, and can also control the result—control that the one over whom power is exerted actually does what is demanded, in the right way. The king orders the serf to pour him some wine, and can directly control that the serf does it, and does not spill. If the serf fails to follow orders, or fails in performing them, he is punished. But the influence philosophers, saints, prophets, and the like typically exert clearly deviates from this pattern. They do not necessarily express a clear, unambiguous meaning, and cannot necessarily control the result, if indeed they influence someone. Rather, they formulate something, not necessarily very clearly, which influences people in ways over which they may exert little or no control, and which may far outreach their own spatiotemporal context. It is noteworthy that highly influential people in this sense often exert little direct power and vice versa, and there do seem to be different logics at work here. Withdrawing into isolation to write freely, or openly questioning the powers that be, might not result in the gaining of much direct power, or in rising rapidly within established hierarchies, but can yield a hugely pervasive, but more diffuse, influence. Figures like Socrates, Jesus, Machiavelli, or Marx exerted little direct power while they were still alive, but have exerted tremendous influence, not the least posthumously. If the difference between direct power and indirect influence depends on the capacity to control, however, why not be as clear as possible in outlining conceptual interrelations and pragmatic implications? Vagueness and ambiguity may be frustrating, but they allow for the tentative formulation of emerging insights, for the packing of many distinct interpretative possibilities into one concept, and for concepts to be unpacked in different historical contexts, addressing different concerns. Some works become shared storehouses of different interpretative possibilities, covering a vast ground of topics. Furthermore, a sweeping ambition has the advantage of speed, and may in that sense be compared to some military strategies: rapid movement, without stopping to defeat every single enemy force or position,

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may overwhelm the opponent, and render his strongholds irrelevant. These traits, however, which may aid in the influence of some works, also decrease the degree of control their creators exercise in the way their concepts are interpreted. The difference between forms of power often gives rise to tensions between those exerting direct controlling power as opposed to those that exert a wider, more ambiguous, influence. In conjunction with the great question and its various answers, we also find questions of what I propose to call authenticity— that is, the degree of coherence between answers to the great question, and answers concerning fundamental ontological and epistemological questions concerning the basic constitution of what exists and what we can know about it. When I speak of authenticity, I thus speak of the agreement or discrepancy between the justification of the distribution and structure of power, on the one hand, and fundamental ontological and epistemological claims, on the other. This issue concerns one aspect of what is handled in the discourse on legitimacy: a collective order could be perceived as resting upon a mistaken or superficial view of reality—an accusation that might, for example, be leveled against religious believers by those who are not or vice versa, or by thinkers describing a path toward knowledge beyond historical or cultural contingencies, toward those who lack such understanding. One type of challenge is that exemplified by Machiavelli in chapter XV of The Prince, concerning imaginary political entities that are not based in reality: Effective political reasoning, it may be argued, cannot be based upon an illusory notion of what ought to be, but has to be based upon transhistorical and contemporary observation of how people actually behave.18 Another type of challenge is that exemplified by Plato’s cave, and the notion that only a few people understand what really exists, transcending mere rumors and ephemeral impressions.19 Here, it might be a matter of mystical or Gnostic insight, or of a theoretical comprehension of the fundamental structure of reality moving according to mathematical patterns. These types of challenges, which could perhaps be called, paradigmatically, the Machiavellian and the Platonic one, respectively, can also be combined: for example, Peter Singer alleges that Marx’s political thinking is seriously and fundamentally flawed because Marx did not understand human nature—Marx, Singer argues, did not understand that human beings are endowed with evolved natures, which

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can be explained by recourse to evolutionary theory, as well as anthropological and historical observation to flesh out the interpretation of the theory.20 All of which raises the question—to return to the subject from which we set out—whether contemporary, liberal democracies are authentic. That is, we are not simply questioning whether people actually consider them legitimate, or whether we consider them legitimate in terms of functioning election systems, the adherence to basic rights and the rule of law, and so on, but rather whether they can coexist in relative harmony with our own basic assumptions about reality and what we think we can know of it. Turning to the defining norms and procedures of democracy, and the fundamental agreements on which they rest—on majority rule, usually via representation, on basic rights, relatively free public deliberation, and the rule of law—we can ask whether we consider them to be authentic. This could entail, from a perspective of religious belief, asking whether such beliefs and movements would trump, and should perhaps overthrow, democracy, and on what grounds. The modern state grew theoretically and empirically partly out of an attempt to neutralize religious conflicts and challenges, first by recourse to an embodied sovereign power keeping the peace, then increasingly abstractly, with a shift to the collective level. Large parts of modern and contemporary liberal and democratic theorizing can be seen as a continuation of this basic aim by other means: voting as well as deliberation channel preferences, but also presuppose a fundamental agreement, transcending metaphysical and existential differences, or what John Rawls calls those questions on which people are “bound to differ uncompromisingly.”21 It is not clear why people are bound to differ, let alone uncompromisingly, say, on questions concerning salvation and the church which are Rawls’s examples but the gist of the argument is clear enough, and the empirical situation in contemporary liberal democracies, whether one of necessity or not, is as Rawls says: people do differ on these questions. Thus, it may be argued, we agree on democratic values, the dignity of human beings, and perhaps a notion of deliberative rationality or agonistic respect, and erect procedures—electoral, deliberative—to channel disagreements peacefully (preference aggregation and formation), that is, without the use of deadly violence, and perhaps even reach consensus, compromise, or at least acceptance. What, then, is the role of religion? Slavoj Žižek, always a friend of the dramatic inversion, claims that

Democracy, Authenticity, Critique

13

science and religion have changed places: today, science provides the security religion once guaranteed. In a curious inversion, religion is one of the possible places from which one can deploy critical doubts about today’s society. It has become one of the sites of resistance.22

This sounds satisfyingly paradoxical and to the point. It is an elegant statement, typical of its author, but the actual situation is more muddled, less elegant. In actual fact, both scientific and religious claims may of course be used to challenge as well as support political aims and hierarchies, to differing degrees in various contexts. Scientifically supported challenges could proceed along several different paths of attack. For example, while there is no obvious elite that could rule simply on account of supreme knowledge or perhaps a superior genetic makeup, this could change, with advances in psychology or evolutionary biology, allowing for an efficient way of selecting or even creating the best leaders, forming an elite capable of ruling without resorting to messy democracy. Perhaps we could fashion a functioning epistocracy, where the political influence of the ignorant is institutionally limited in favor of the enlightened.23 Or perhaps we will be able to change the mass of humanity for the better by genetic and chemical means, and perhaps an extensive participatory democracy will work marvelously well for these future, massively and equally intelligent and altruistic superhumans; researchers have been able, after all, to temporarily increase people’s benevolence to others by means of a nasal spray.24 Or maybe an era of mass production, mass mobilization, and a broad middle class is now coming to an end? Perhaps socioeconomic stratification will continue to increase and the influence of lobbyists and campaign financiers continue to grow, while labor markets will be characterized by growing discrepancies in income as precarization and marginalization will be the fate of large groups of people, and  military apparatuses become increasingly professionalized and even privatized, and maybe all of this will have devastating consequences for liberal democracy.25 Perhaps the decline of the mass parties of the postwar era and the rise of voting volatility and elite technocracy will result in immense coming crises for liberal democracies.26 Perhaps technological advancements will entail the death of egalitarian humanism, as the mass of humanity becomes unnecessary to the economic system, while a small minority “will constitute a new elite of upgraded superhumans.”27

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Remember, however, that the question here is not whether current liberal democracies suffer from democratic deficits and whether influence is exerted disproportionally and the like, but whether the solution to those problems is more or less liberal democracy. Of course, we do not know the future: an external catastrophe may suddenly strike, or an internal collapse might already slowly be gaining momentum. Perhaps the global economy will break down, or state authority will dissipate. The fact that there has been relatively rapid economic growth, if in swings, from the onset of the Industrial Revolution and in industrial economies, and attendant technological innovations have made life easier and safer in most respects, does in no way guarantee that this development will continue forever. To borrow Nassim Taleb’s example (a variation of Bertrand Russell’s), a turkey may feel safe, secure, and pleasantly well fed, gradually increasing in weight for hundreds of days until—surprise!—it is suddenly slaughtered for Thanksgiving.28 Nobody knows about the future fate of our current global order, composed of nation-states, increasing economic interdependence, and a growing network of international organizations. We may stumble into disaster, or evolve toward techno-utopia. There are of course several further arguments, directed against democratic forms of rule, which could become convincing: for example, a critic may argue that democracies are feeble and economically and militarily unable to compete with some other form of order. Such arguments are not to be neglected: democracies could be challenged, if such critics were to become right and, leaving normative aspects aside, they will likely be out-competed, were such a development to occur. Perhaps a future social scientist, espousing a theory of political evolution, would have to conclude that in a changed global environment, democracies were no longer competitive.29 This has not happened, however. Those democracies that have been defeated on the battlefield have not been so, arguably, as a consequence of being democratic, but due to other factors. Also, democracies have so far been relatively prosperous. Turning to religion, not only have religious movements continuously throughout history challenged existing orders, but furthermore, religion, an ambiguous concept, presents us, when we try to trace its significance, with a bewildering array of practices, concepts, narratives, more or less consciously adopted behavioral dispositions, and formal and informal norms. While

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religious pluralism neither logically nor psychologically demands that adherents of specific religious communities or believers in certain religious narratives or theories give these up or even qualify their belief in them,30 it does, however, present a formidable political dilemma. We can try to convince each other, we can resort to violence, or we can accept that we disagree on some fundamental moral and metaphysical issues, and seek a common ground on enough of them to enable agreement and collective action on as wide a basis as possible. As for theological challenges, there might be a God, not apparent to the sciences but only arrived at by means of scriptural testimony, religious experience, faith, or inductive reasoning, but even many of those who agree there is disagree about the characteristics and intentions of God, as well as on the normative implications of these. God may have revealed himself, but that is disputed; which is exactly the point, and even those who do agree that God has actually revealed himself, disagree about what he wants us to do; which is, again, exactly the point. If religions grow out of claims to revelation or, more generally, the alleged experience of supernatural beings and realities, it could be the case that the sciences are closing down the explanatory space for such interpretations, and offer explanations for natural phenomena rendering religious ones unnecessary and obsolete, while modern nation-states have been able to provide an unprecedented degree of physical security, so that religiously sanctioned norms and comforts are no longer needed, either. Perhaps these persistent developments will even serve to obliterate the belief in supernatural realities and agents altogether.31 The development of the modern sciences and their attendant epistemological reflections do indeed pose interesting challenges to religious traditions, ones that should not to be eluded simply by retreating into a therapeutic or metaphorical understanding of the assertions of the latter. Questions about the existence of gods or the survival of consciousness beyond death or the body are not simply mythological, metaphorical, or therapeutic ones, although the belief in certain answers to them can of course have a therapeutic value—but the fact of the matter is that either my consciousness, or some aspect or version thereof, does survive my physical death, or it does not. This is a real question, which cannot be defined away by epistemological sleight of hand. Similarly, either there is a divine or cosmic, extra-human and perhaps also intrahuman consciousness, or there is

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not. When we try to interpret those enigmatic phenomenological trajectories and states of consciousness which destabilize our ordinary experience of the world, we do run into exactly metaphysical questions, and of course these matter immensely to many of us. It would be simply silly to maintain that the question whether my existence will continue after my physical death or not is irrelevant. It may not matter in explaining what makes life worth living, as Wittgenstein indicated, but it nevertheless matters immensely to most people.32 And it is likewise simply silly to claim that the existence of a vast, active, living intelligent entity, perhaps endowed with malevolent or benevolent intentions, does not matter to us—of course it matters. It is quite another thing, however, to assume that the answers to those questions are obvious, or that we do not know and perhaps cannot know the answers to them (which may well be the case, but how would we know that?). We can endlessly refine our conceptual apparatuses, and offer nuanced phenomenological examinations, but in the end, if we take the modern sciences at all seriously, we have to confront some hard questions, such as: Are we simply intelligent primates whose conscious lives are dependent on our complex, evolved brains and who, for some reason, are capable of a very rich spectrum of intense experiences and extraordinary states of consciousness, or are we something more than this? Are we, for all we know, the peak of the evolution of intelligent life in the universe—although we can conceive of even more intelligent beings somewhere else in this physical universe and may even consider this possibility probable—or is there another, vast consciousness, which some of us believe has intentions, and some of us call “God,” or other powerful, conscious, perhaps disembodied beings—“spirits” or “gods”—that sometimes interact with us? And these are simply still contested questions. This is not to say that there are not religious traditions that do not focus on these questions, and even leave them aside, certain strands of Buddhism being an obvious example. But it is far from my purpose to delve deeper into these questions, where one risks over-generalizing at any step, thus exposing oneself to rather tiresome and predictable polemics. Suffice it to say that the modern sciences pose an interesting challenge to religious traditions, but that the notion of God that many, but hardly all, of the latter have embraced is quite far, it seems to me, from what many people appear to believe the discussion is exclusively about, but that there is also a great risk in trying to rectify

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these skewed debates by reproducing some version of a distinction between theoretical and therapeutic, metaphorical or mythological knowledge, by simply shifting our emphasis from the former to the latter. In the former case, there is a peculiar way of grasping God as an entity, the existence of which has to be confirmed by means of observation, and the belief in which is roughly analogous to the belief in any other object in the physical universe, such as, say, a teapot circling somewhere in the solar system, to borrow Bertrand Russell’s example.33 God, however, need not be grasped as a super-object that we observe from without, but could be conceptualized as an elusive aspect of reality itself, which is both immanent and transcendent in relation to the phenomenological surface of the world in which we orient ourselves. God can be understood from a theological perspective as guaranteeing observed reality while also invisibly but intelligibly pervading it, as well as sometimes manifesting or intervening physically within it; as that which constantly underlies the entire causal chain of observed reality, rather than simply its seemingly absent “first mover,” which winds the cosmic watch and leaves it alone.34 In the latter case, we risk reproducing sharp dichotomies between belief and commitment, between religion as social engagement and therapeutic practice, on the one hand, and religion as the belief in a real divine entity, possible to encounter, more or less regularly, in this life, on the other. But religious traditions have intertwined both: as little as we can reduce historical religions along modern lines to beliefs in a super-object or transcendent entity, can we reduce them to social or therapeutic practices and reservoirs of mythological narratives where myths emerge to suit our psychological and adaptive needs. While the refined, purified, epistemological belief or lack thereof of some modern Christians as well as atheists—the belief in an entity, that is approached theoretically, without the need for mental and bodily practices that enhance our understanding of it—is indeed a strange one, we should not therefore conclude that premodern religions were bereft of anything resembling epistemological beliefs, expecting outcomes concerning actual developments, for example, of consciousness or resurrection after physical death, or that such beliefs are incompatible with an understanding of modern natural sciences. Religion is too ambiguous a concept, referring to such a wealth of conceptual and pragmatic elements, that it cannot be reduced to, even if it obviously greatly

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overlaps with, mythological structures; and conversely, the latter continuously emerge both within and outside of domains we commonly call religious. Now, it is possible that a world of stable nation-states and an increased knowledge of the modern sciences will result in the demise of organized religion attached to metaphysical beliefs about divine and spiritual entities, or the survival of consciousness or the soul beyond death. The future, however, remains uncertain with regards to these issues. For, first, scientific theories do not provide a complete map of reality and remain, to most people, partly incomprehensible. And, secondly, religious beliefs may offer a degree of emotional and existential comfort that is simply unmatched—neither the nation-state, nor scientific and technological advances can, after all, promise a continuation of conscious existence after physical death (or at least not yet, if we are to believe in the enthusiastic proponents of the singularity35), while nation-states may not continue to thrive if the worst predictions of ecological gloom, economic collapse, or other disastrous scenarios come to pass. Finally, some religious believers are fully capable of mounting highly sophisticated defenses of their beliefs, even as they recognize the advances of the sciences. Of course, it could be argued that everything the sciences show us about the physical universe points in the direction of the absence of any God resembling those of the great monotheistic faiths, but others will continue to disagree.36 Hence, some will maintain that the reason that religion is unlikely to disappear is that some religious beliefs are actually true; that there really is, for example, a divine person with intentions. Thus, Richard Swinburne has famously supported Christian faith by way of inductive reasoning, claiming that such an approach will result in the conclusion that something like a Christian God probably exists, whereas Alvin Plantinga claims that Christian faith and belief in biblical testimony can indeed be considered warranted following from profound and extensive epistemological reflection.37 We are ultimately left with a political and sociological issue: if the vast majority agree on a certain religious interpretation and, as a consequence, challenge democracy, democracy could well collapse. But this is not the current situation: for now, most people of actual liberal democracies live in an agreement, or at least acceptance—more or less active or passive—that entails certain methods for making decisions and restrictions on what kinds of decisions can be made: the liberal-democratic logic. We could of course conceive of drastic changes in

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the socioeconomic situation: if modern states have, as some research indicates, taken over the role of existential security provided, in other contexts, by organized religion, that development could surely be reversed38—widespread state breakdown, brought on by wars, economic, or ecological collapse, could entail the rebirth of widespread, politically active, anti-democratic religiosity in existing liberal democracies, successfully challenging democratic rule. Some people may retort, however, that the above discussion is ethnocentric and perhaps chronocentric as well: The notion of a patriarchal, personal God is typical above all of religious traditions emanating out of what is now called Europe, Asia, and North Africa, during the last 3,000 years or so, and there is a lot of internal diversity among and within such traditions; and this is of course correct. Furthermore, others may point out that the whole language of faith and belief is also typical of some traditions and interpretations and not others; and this is of course also correct. However, if we do not formulate the problem in something like these terms, we do not really get the same kind of fundamental problem in relation to liberal democracies: if religion is not conceived in terms of access to or belief in a truth or reality, the understanding of which has some relevant and wide-reaching bearing on how we act in the world, it does not pose the same kind of challenge. Obviously, one may still want to transform or abolish liberal democracy or some salient aspect thereof, but a claim to draw upon the ultimate reality of the cosmos, or the will of the creator of the universe, carries a force transcending mere human concerns: one is no longer simply a human being disagreeing with other human beings. However, one may believe in a higher reality and even believe that one’s surrounding legal order or cultural customs go against the will or truth of that reality, and yet for many reasons decide not to openly challenge them. It is far from clear what strategy one would opt for either way. The public sphere and party politics of liberal democracies may well seem a palatable, or at least an acceptable, arena for seeking change, for even the staunchest of religious believers, no matter how critical they may be of some phenomena of the surrounding society. We could of course conceive, if we are adherents of a certain religious tradition or perspective, of various hybrids, such as liberation theology or other variants of Christian socialism, a Christian conservative revival, or perhaps pagan right-wing politics. In the present political and ideological landscape of established liberal democracies, what would be the role of religion, however,

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for those not committed to any particular religious tradition? Perhaps there is something of value to retrieve out of religious traditions and communities, as sources of inspiration, even for those not committed to them? While some have used claims regarding continuities and analogies between religious and ideological elements as an accusation, others have professed it to be something positive, to be appreciated and embraced, drawing upon religious elements in a movement of reinterpretation, a basic stance which has been common in the Frankfurt School, both in its earlier and later incarnations: As Jürgen Habermas once put it, critical philosophy could take upon itself the task to “re-express what it learns from religion in a discourse that is independent of revealed truth.”39 The observation of a migration of descriptive concepts, ideals and practices from theological and ecclesiastical contexts, as well as the calls for a self-conscious appropriation of them from a theological heritage, opens up possibilities beyond simply defending either a religious, or a secular horizon, by drawing upon descriptive, normative, and pragmatic elements which are derived from or inspired by religious traditions, but have been reinterpreted, thus escaping from the gravitational pull of particular religious communities. Such re-interpretative movements have been influential more generally in the formation of modern and contemporary critical languages, providing some political projects with a source of justification, while simultaneously challenging others. It is not my intention to trace all the transformations, reinterpretations, and innovations of those traditions which have exerted the greatest influence upon Western, critical-ideological thinking—a mammoth task, obviously— but rather to raise the question what we should do with the religious content in them, we who are unbelievers (and most of us are, today, to some extent, in relation to most of these traditions, even if we happen to be committed to one ourselves). This, however, also entails that religious traditions serve exactly as sources of inspiration: in other words, this is a question of reinterpretation and innovation, rather than simply of application and translation. There is nothing wrong in being inspired by religious elements; just as little, however, is there something good about it, in itself. If we deem an element to be desirable for inclusion within an ideological narrative or some set of critical norms, it does not actually matter whether it has been retrieved from, inspired by, or is simply similar to, some corresponding theological component. In the following, I

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will not assume that we have to appropriate any specific element from this or that religious tradition. Rather, I will begin with the observation that some religious elements have already been appropriated and, furthermore, been incorporated within the conceptual and institutional architecture of existing liberal democracies. To conclude, the relations between religion and politics may take on many different forms, since both concepts as well as the relations between them may be theorized in many different ways, and political strategies may vary widely. The modern, territorial state grew out of violent conflicts, many involving clashing religious beliefs. It is in this sense variants of democracy can be seen as a continuation of the processes toward neutralization or sublimation of conflicts. I have considered the common discussion about the challenges that religious beliefs could pose to liberal democracy, in the form of the question concerning the legitimacy of democratic orders and social arrangements within them, and what I call questions about the authenticity of an established order, or in other words, doubts and attacks related to epistemological and ontological arguments concerning the fundamental nature of reality, or some especially relevant aspect thereof. This, is not, however, a path I intend to continue on. I accept that liberal democracy can be justified by recourse both to arguments concerning basic rights as prerequisites for meaningful autonomy, as well as to its favorable outcomes in comparison with non-democratic forms of rule, and I belong to no religious community, and hold no specific religious beliefs. In the following, I will thus accept a broadly liberal assumption of the fundamental desirability of aiming for an equal distribution—with some necessary restrictions—of meaningful autonomy. I will thus assume that liberal democracy can be justified as a good way of promoting and protecting the meaningful autonomy of individuals, and this will be my overarching normative framework, within which I will situate my arguments concerning potential political measures. I will not, however, defend one particular variant of meaningful autonomy but will, rather, again, situate my arguments in relation to dominant conceptualizations of it. This, however, does not entail that I could not use religious traditions—in terms of norms, narratives, concepts, and practices—as sources of inspiration for a critique of contemporary liberal democracies, even if I accept their political decision-making procedures.

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What I am after, is the way in which we may relate to religious elements as sources of inspiration for elements which are then lifted out of the context of a specific religious community or tradition, and the potential of such elements to enrich critical languages and alternative practices. Even if we do not want to resort to religious elements to challenge democratic forms of rule, we may retrieve elements out of religious traditions in order to critically approach contemporary politics. Notably, some such elements have already been appropriated, giving rise to questions concerning their continued status: Should we abolish, retain, or perhaps transform such elements, and how could we conceive of their actual and desirable interrelations?

1.3

Secularization and the sacred: Possible buildings

The term secularization originally entailed the transfer of, for example, a person or a piece of property from an ecclesiastical to a worldly, non-ecclesiastical context.40 It has, however, acquired wider, more abstract, meanings: briefly put, the secular has been considered at times as opposed not simply to the ecclesiastical or Christian, but to the religious, where the latter concept has been ascribed with more abstract and general significations. Thus, processes of secularization have been studied not simply in terms of the removal of some religious element from a certain domain, but also in terms of transfer and transformation. “All that is solid melts into air,” Marx and Engels famously proclaim in The Communist Manifesto. Frequently cited words, used as mottos and in book titles. At least equally interesting, though, are the ones immediately following, concluding that sentence: “All that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”41 At the immediately visible level, however, it is apparent that not all churches and sacred sites have disappeared with the emergence and spread of capitalism and processes of what we call secularization. Furthermore, we could consider analogies between the rites of churches and those of nationstates, the monuments of the world religions and those of civil religion, and the function of symbols, narratives, and behavioral patterns marked by an at least outward display of reverence.42 Also, modern ideologies have appropriated

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theological figures of thought. Many researchers have reflected upon direct influences, structural analogies, and normative possibilities, as well as great dangers, in the relations between theological and ideological elements. The appropriation and reinterpretation of theological elements in the construction of critical languages has been studied and criticized, and narratives proclaiming or foreseeing a crucial historical transformation are often taken to have shifted from a theological to an ideological context. Also, ideals of justice and basic rights, applicable to all of humanity, have been seen as derived from religious traditions. The early modern and modern eras, furthermore, witnessed the invention of a number of concepts—prominently civil religion and the nation— which serve to bridge the gap between the religious and the secular in the domain of political mobilization and the ritualistic and symbolic articulation of community and enmity. Indeed, one observer, Simon Critchley, has asked whether we should perhaps see “modern forms of politics” of all ideological variations “as metamorphoses of sacralisation.”43 When evaluating the appropriation of religious elements, we should take care to distinguish between a direct and an indirect influence: in some cases, we can plausibly discern a direct heritage. In other cases, a more indirect influence, via a cultural context infused with theological themes, is assumed, and as a consequence, can also be challenged. A good—or perhaps the paradigmatic— example, would be the debates surrounding the alleged influence of Joachim of Fiore.44 Eric Voegelin, notably, interprets the modern ideological field in its entirety in relation to Fiore’s medieval break with an Augustinian view of history: The speculation on history of Joachim of Flora at the end of the twelfth century . . . was directed at the then reigning philosophy of history of St. Augustine. According to the Augustinian construction, the phase of history since Christ was the sixth, the last earthly age. . . . The present had no earthly future; its meaning was exhausted in a waiting for the end of history through eschatological events. . . . In the time of Augustine it seemed indeed that, if not the world, at least a world was approaching its end. But twelfth-century western European man could not be satisfied with the view of a senile world waiting for its end; for his world was quite obviously not in its decline, but, on the contrary, on the upsurge. Population was increasing, areas of settlement were expanding, wealth was growing, cities were being founded, and intellectual life was intensifying.45

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Voegelin claims that Fiore introduced “a complex of four symbols which have remained characteristic of the political mass movements of modern times.”46 These symbols were the Third Realm, that is, a third phase of world history, the arrival of which would be marked by the “leader . . . who appears at the beginning of a new era,” but who also has “a precursor” in “the prophet,” and is consummated by the creation of “the community of spiritually autonomous.”47 Modern politics is thus permeated, according to Voegelin, with “gnostic” tendencies, based upon a refusal to accept the imperfection of this world: “The gnostic mass movements derive their ideas of perfection from the Christian [but] gnostic perfection . . . is supposed to come to pass within the historical world.”48 It is indeed striking how well these figures appear to match many modern political movements, ideologies, and critical narratives: we do find triads, self-anointed leaders and hopes concerning communities of people presaging a new era. It is not clear, however, to what an extent this is actually the result of the lines of interpretation and appropriation sketched by Voegelin; Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, for example, protest that “there has been construed, in fact, a kind of Joachimist bandwagon” and that “the political examples of ‘thinking in threes’ which have been claimed for Joachimism illustrate strikingly,” in actual fact, “the ease with which a pattern of threes can be derived spontaneously from independent historical sequences.”49 Another example could be Jakob Böhme, whose impact has also been considered to be great, providing a source of inspiration for modern critical narratives, and indeed, in sometimes surprising ways, modern popular culture as well. For example, not only did Hegel find many fascinating ideas in the thought of Böhme, but Philip K. Dick, whose works lie behind movies such as Blade Runner and Total Recall, was apparently strongly influenced by Böhme as well.50 Nevertheless, as Paola Mayer points out: The thesis—advanced in the twentieth century by some scholars and more or less universally accepted—that Böhme’s theosophy had a decisive, formative influence on Romantic thought derives from the attention this topic received in the previous century. . . . Rather astonishing is the widespread currency that this thesis—based on speculation supported by often flimsy evidence— has been able to achieve.51

This debate is further complicated by the fact that several thinkers relatively early on attacked each other regarding Böhme’s influence.52

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We should remember that to the extent that elements of a religious heritage are indeed appropriated, more or less consciously, by way of transformation or reinterpretation, we are looking at analogies, rather than identical components. As a consequence—and this is easily forgotten—we should also keep in mind that neither the appropriation of elements from a theological context, nor analogies more generally between theological and ideological movements and narratives, carry any self-evident implications concerning the normative or descriptive justification of the latter. We should thus beware of the genetic fallacy: the fact that an element of a critical narrative is reminiscent of, and inspired by, religious traditions, says little in itself of its descriptive or normative value. The latter have to be ascertained independently of its origins. Hence, while such connections are indeed important and interesting to the historian of ideas, and may thus also be investigated further, they are not in themselves directly relevant to the justification or validity of either norms or descriptive narratives. In other words, what is of prime importance here is not in itself that critical norms and narratives have been inspired by religious traditions—it would be strange, indeed, if none of them had—but what they have learned, and continue to appropriate, from them, and how they do so. Furthermore, it is one thing to simply study such processes, and quite another, of course, to argue that religious elements could and should be incorporated into contemporary critical approaches. Finally, we must remember that even if we do believe we have convincingly shown that there is an influence, that does not in itself entail that we have specified the cause of a certain element, or that a similar arrangement could not have emerged without the religious influence in question. Merely tracing an influence in terms of conceptual history does not necessarily in itself point to the ultimate or necessary causes of certain elements. Having made these cautionary observations, we may indeed proceed to consider the movements of appropriation of religious elements into modern politics, frequently but certainly not always in the form of norms and narratives that are described as ideological. Here, we have to draw a distinction between on the one hand elements—that is, an eschatological anticipation, an ideal of ethical universalism, or a ritual practice—which have merely been appropriated within a political movement or ideological narrative, and on the other hand those that have been officially adopted by a state or another political entity

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through legislative measures and/or incorporated in actual policies. In the latter case, political measures may take the form of public support, as well as various kinds of legal enforcements—they may be merely politically endorsed, or legally enforced. Several possible paths lie ahead to the researcher in this field—for example, genealogical for the historian of ideas. Another possibility, however, and especially pertinent for the political philosopher and to wider political and critical debates, is to ask whether there are elements which have not been appropriated, but which ought to have been? Furthermore, we may distinguish between, on the one hand, the unreflected reproduction of certain components, which are thus indeed appropriated, but with insufficient awareness and a lack of critical consideration, and on the other hand, elements which have not been appropriated at all; in this latter case, too, this may be the result not of a conscious examination of reasons for or against appropriating a certain element, but rather due to convention, or simply an absence of reflection. There are at least three major, overarching themes of appropriation and contestation, which may be considered. First, and most obvious, perhaps, there is the theme of history and historicity, and of immanent versions of eschatological and apocalyptic elements. This theme, however, is typically interconnected with a second one, which is also obviously prominent: that of ethics and justice, of attempts at moral or ethical universalism and universal justice and rights, or more generally a radical transformation of interhuman relations in order to remedy patterns of injustice, exploitation, and alienation. Many thinkers have drawn upon religious traditions as sources of inspiration when thinking about interhuman relations in terms of justice and rights, or more broadly in terms of a radical restructuring of socioeconomic relations, and how such a change can play out historically. Modern political and ideological debates have indeed been heavily concerned with the conceptual linkages between how we approach interhuman relations, and how we understand history, in a creative conflict with theological traditions. In this sense, something new does happen in early modern and modern Europe, where such promises come to be decoupled from theological narratives and the anticipation of divine intervention, and thus come to be secularized or immanentized, or as Reinhart Koselleck puts it, “Expectations that went beyond all previous experience” were no longer “directed to the so-called

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Hereafter,” but rather, “The objective of possible completeness, previously attainable only in the Hereafter, henceforth served the idea of improvement on earth and made it possible for the doctrine of the Final Days to be superseded by the hazards of an open future.”53 An open future, however, which could be filled with more or less vague or precise hopes for a radical restructuring of human existence on Earth. Such tendencies have been strongly criticized, throughout the previous century and into the present one.54 One of the standard reproaches against Marx’s works as well as broad strands of Marxism entails exactly that they represent a quasi-religious story of rebellion and redemption—as Karl Löwith put it, “The Communist Manifesto is, first of all, a prophetic document, a judgment, and a call to action.”55 For some, that has proved to be one of the great dangers of Marxism, and of much modern politics in general: the quasi-prophetic, apocalyptic, or eschatological tendencies that all too easily result in totalitarian horrors. While for others, conversely, this heritage of an appropriation of religious traditions is something to be embraced and developed further: “Against the old liberal slander which draws on the parallel between the Christian and Marxist ‘Messianic’ notion of history,” Slavoj Žižek has maintained, “What one should do is to reverse the strategy by fully endorsing what one is accused of: yes, there is a direct linkage from Christianity to Marxism.”56 And decades before Žižek, Herbert Marcuse, a great figure of inspiration for the student revolts of the 1960s, claimed that “in the process of civilization, the myth of the Golden Age and the Millennium is subjected to progressive rationalization. The (historically) impossible elements are separated from the possible ones” and thus, “In the nineteenth century, the theories of socialism translated the primary myth into sociological terms—or rather discovered in the given historical possibilities the rational core of the myth.”57 Even if we deny that Marx or Engels were in any meaningful sense “religious” or even “quasi-religious” thinkers, it is hard to avoid concluding that their works have had what can only reasonably be called a pervasive religious or quasi-religious impact; as György Lukács put it, You cannot just sample Marxism. Either you must be converted to it—and I know that is no easy matter, since it cost me twelve years before I took the

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decisive step—or else it is perfectly possible to view the world from a leftwing bourgeois perspective.58

Even more dramatic is the example of Che Guevara’s epiphany, as portrayed at the end of his Motorcycle Diaries: I now knew . . . I knew that when the great guiding spirit cleaves humanity into two antagonistic halves, I would be with the people. I know this, I see it printed in the night sky that I, eclectic dissembler of doctrine and psychoanalyst of dogma, howling like one possessed, will assault the barricades or the trenches, will take my bloodstained weapon and, consumed with fury, slaughter any enemy who falls into my hands. And I see, as if a great exhaustion smothers this fresh exaltation, I see myself, immolated in the genuine revolution, the great equalizer of individual will, proclaiming the ultimate mea culpa. I feel my nostrils dilate, savoring the acrid smell of gunpowder and blood, the enemy’s death; I steel my body, ready to do battle, and prepare myself to be a sacred space within which the bestial howl of the triumphant proletariat can resound with new energy and new hope.59

It is tempting, then, to think of the dramatic movements of the twentieth century in terms of immanently eschatological politics, where narratives foreseeing the possibility of dramatic future, incipient, or ongoing transformations may incite or inspire revolutionary movements, while a development through which radically transformative movements seem to gain in importance worldwide may conversely strengthen a narrative of historical transformation. It is as if the two combine into ethical-eschatological engines, interconnecting such elements, which drive each other on. Even if the notion of historical development may not always be strictly teleological, and adumbrated with reservations against fatalism, calls for the dramatic transformations of interhuman relations may still be intertwined with grand, historical narratives, and such combinations have captured much of the modern and contemporary political imagination, frequently at the expense of other concerns. It is indeed easy to criticize the ways in which the hopes for human collective action as a driver of historical change on a vast scale, without any aid of divine intervention, reaches a previously unseen intensity, giving birth to slouching beasts traversing modern political and ideological fields, and immensely impacting on and reshaping the lives of millions of people. Others, however, have defended the relevance of a religious heritage

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as a possible source of strivings for justice, and even as a bulwark against totalitarianism—here one may mention thinkers like, for example, Ernst Bloch and Jacob Taubes, as well as Martin Buber and Gershom Scholem.60 Furthermore, the prophetic, the apocalyptic, and the eschatological may be difficult to separate. While interhuman violence and repression and questions of interhuman justice and the extent of rights remain important problems to be continuously addressed, transhuman relations, however, are also indeed an important topic to consider, and increasingly so, given the vast growth of the power of humanity in relation to the nonhuman, but also the growing risk of a backlash, threatening human advances. Furthermore, here it is not only a matter of ecological questions, but also of phenomenological ones, tied to institutional frameworks: questions concerning the social organization of space and time, and our relation to things. Religious traditions have, of course, incorporated norms that impact not only on interhuman, but transhuman relations too, in the sense of the relations between humanity and what is not human. This includes relationships to divine and spiritual forces and entities, the existence of which is disputed, but also relationships to animals, to food and drink, to natural phenomena and artifacts, as well as to sites and temporal intervals and more generally, to space and time. I would even say that, in a metaphorical sense, and putting it a bit harshly, glossing over, or leaving aside as less relevant—if dealing with it at all— the rich domain of transhuman relations, that have formed an integral and highly valued part of the lived experience and concrete practices of actual religious communities, amounts to a kind of neutering of religion, removing some of its crucial generative forces, emotionally, socially, and phenomenologically. Obviously, we cannot empirically separate trans- and interhuman relations in distinct spheres that do not influence each other. Critiques focusing on interhuman relationships also deal extensively with transhuman relations, and the organization of transhuman relations impacts on and is impacted by the organization of interhuman relations; this very interrelationship is indeed one of the difficult themes we have to face, and it is one we will return to. What is immediately striking, however, is not simply that religious practices have regulated transhuman relations, but how—that is, they have elevated some domains to a status that, from a contemporary, secular perspective, appears puzzling. As Peter Singer puts it, in seeking to draw the line of moral

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concern, “It would be nonsense to say that it was not in the interests of a stone to be kicked along the road by a schoolboy. A stone does not have interests because it cannot suffer.”61 And yet, exactly what we find in many religious contexts is the claim that we have to approach stones, or artifacts, or certain sites, or even temporal intervals, ascribed the status of sacred, taboo, or some corresponding category, with reverence and respect, or that we have to avoid them for religious reasons. Whether we agree with the reasons provided for considering some domain sacred, or not, disrespecting it entails disrespecting the community which maintains it. Thus, from a perspective of religious toleration, the solution is of course that we agree to disagree on the ultimate reasons provided for such delimitations, while respecting them, to the extent that it is practicable and does not intervene with the basic rights of citizens, and, where applicable, animals. However, and here is the problem for contemporary liberal democracies, these also publicly endorse and even enforce certain domains, in the symbols, sites, rituals, monuments, and narratives of nations and of democratic governance, elements that could credibly be called sacred, by way of analogy. Here we thus find a third major theme of appropriation and transformation, that of communal worship and its public symbols and rituals, which is related to a wider theme of the sacred, and processes of sacralization and desacralization, and it is indeed the one I will focus on, in the following. There are two major reasons for this. First, it remains less analyzed and theorized than the ones touched upon above. Critiques of immanent eschatology and the like have already been advanced at great length, and responses offered. I have little to add to these debates except what I have already written about the dangers of genetic fallacies. Secondly, however, any “immanent eschatology” or hope for certain historical development, still points toward, or at least raises the question concerning, some kind of community. And even if we do offer some more substantial proposals as how to structure interhuman relations along the lines of basic rights, the distribution of various forms of opportunities and resources, and the organization of the world of work, there are still many other questions to consider: questions concerning symbols, rituals, communal festivities, and norms on how we approach things, space, and time. These questions push against the limits of conventional discourses on rights and justice.

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I will not, however, rest content with proposing some concept of the sacred, with which to criticize present liberal democracies. Rather, I will use discourses on the sacred as a starting point for further analysis. I will thus use such discourses in order to delineate several possible practices, the public status of which could be considered. What is of particular interest to me, is the question which elements are politicized by speaking of the sacred in contemporary, liberal-democratic contexts—which domains are thereby opened up to contestation, allowing for alternative arrangements to be considered, and forcing a deeper reflection on the possible meanings of secularization.62 I will thus enter into the debate concerning political symbols and rituals, proceeding from direct influence as well as structural analogies with explicitly religious practices, and seek to develop this very debate, crafting a critical approach and considering possible implications for shared, public practices in politically secular, democratic communities. There is, despite theoretical developments and novel ideas on how to revitalize and expand modern democracies, widespread agreement, within the contemporary Western world, on a representative, liberal-democratic, market-economic consensus. There has been an ever-wider acceptance of liberal democracy as offering not only the sole acceptable and realistic aim for processes of transformation, but also—despite the obvious counter-examples— as providing the only desirable channel or framework for change; political violence and calls for revolution have come to be increasingly stigmatized, and the occasional calls for more extensive direct or deliberative democracy have, on the whole, yielded little in terms of concrete results. Excluding violent activity aiming to overthrow liberal-democratic regimes, however, does not necessarily force us into a dichotomy of working within, as opposed to aiming to destroy, the political system as a whole: a host of third options have been proposed, including the metapolitical path of public and intellectual debate— which could influence both legislation and the interpretation of legal norms without the need to actually win elections—as well as the establishment of alternative spaces and practices—heterotopias or practices of prefiguration— which need not seek to actively challenge the established order as a whole, but try out alternative ways of life within it, which could anticipate a future way of life or complement dominant present ones.63 Besides these, there are of course further options, which could conceivably morph into or seek to inspire

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and incite any of the others, such as political demonstrations and mass protest movements, but also those of small groups seeking to promote and enforce their agendas by means of direct action. Emerging movements may exert what I would call broad-spectrum politics, that is, work with sincere manifestos, demonstrations and other physical gatherings, but also and crucially a broader cultural approach, involving a host of rhetorical strategies of memes, irony, and pop-cultural references. A broad-spectrum approach covers a wider range of emotional and existential positions than a sincere, programmatic approach. There is a tension, however, between unity and dissolution: organized political agency aiming to capture political power in a narrower sense requires unity, and rallying around shared aims, whereas gaining a broader, cultural influence, necessitates allowing for dissent and creative innovation and adaptation to continuously changing circumstances, and working within a broader range of networks. The counterposed demands, which may easily be observed more generally within human communities, for coherence and adaptation, for coordination and innovation, follow from humans being those peculiar kinds of “political animals” they are in an Aristotelian sense, that is, capable of complex, coordinated action, but also of constant critical examination and conscious adaptation to changing circumstances.64 We may mistakenly and superficially believe that adherence to secular political philosophical strands of thought are simply based upon the acceptance of fundamental intuitions, illustrated by thought examples. In reality, however, they are usually based on a persuasive normative flow, backed up by descriptive and prescriptive empirical claims: a libertarian community does not simply reject the exploitation of creative entrepreneurs, but becomes appealing because it will result in immense economic growth and general prosperity; a Rawlsian, just society does not simply reject the unfair allocation of social goods, but makes room for growth through maximin allocation, which allows it to escape the threats of stagnation; and so on. This persuasive flow also involves a wider range of tools, invoking (albeit perhaps not in the case of Rawls, which may be one of the crucial weaknesses of his rhetoric) hero archetypes (the selfless saint, the charismatic revolutionary, the Randian genius, the Stakhanovite but hardly the apparatchik, the Scaevolite) and using a broad spectrum of connotations and dog whistle politics.

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Questions concerning strategies of transformation, however, only pertain to some decisions, but leave room for many others: liberal democracy as an overarching framework and aim of change leaves room for many variations in policy and institutions, and there is room for critical norms and narratives, with which to question and challenge the world around us, even if these critical approaches do not turn back on liberal democracy itself—and even if they do, we still have to say something further about what kind of community we aim to create instead. Leaving aside the question concerning strategies of change, I wish to consider the range of options of our critical approaches pertaining to other issues. Whether “criticism is a constitutive feature of modernity,” as some have asserted, depends on how we define these terms.65 It is certainly the case, however, that the modern era, understood in a chronological sense, has witnessed a great number of critical intellectuals, who have often advocated notions of what is desirable or not in a certain privileged sphere of action, and judging their own contemporary worlds accordingly, perhaps even from the vantage point of “a sphere of absolute freedom.”66 Is this a problem, and if so why? We may wonder whether, for example, Marxist calls for a revolution and the at times aggressive rhetoric of Marx and Engels (not to mention Lenin) do not carry a certain burden of responsibility for later atrocities? Here, some claim, with Niall Ferguson, that Marx indeed changed the world, but hardly for the better.67 Others, however, may argue that Marx was not a Marxist,68 did not intend to invent an all-encompassing systematic explanation of world history or theory of human community, and can hardly be held responsible for how his works were later misused by dictatorial regimes. Furthermore, we may conclude that the political thinker and societal critic, just like the inventor of scientific theories and new technologies, cannot fully control the use these are eventually put to—but few people would argue that we need a ban on the sciences, in order to prevent nuclear war, run-away nanobots, or some other nightmarish scenario. This, however, does not exclude that restrictions are put on scientific and intellectual work, but even so, these tend to be a question of, for example laboratory experiments, rather than restrictions in advance on inventions that may later be put to use in creating advanced weaponry. Exactly what kind of restrictions ought to be placed upon political and societal critics, however, remains an open question; currently, there are legal regulations and

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cultural customs that differ according to the respective approaches to freedom of speech and wider social norms of different countries. One strategy is, as is well known, to point to internal contradictions and tensions: tendencies which are systematically opposed, and may force some kind of resolution or dramatic transformation. Another common strategy has been for critics to single out a paradigmatic sphere of human activity, deemed crucial to self-realization or human flourishing, and then to claim that this very sphere is currently in a state of atrophy, or that most people are prevented from realizing their higher potentials in it. This privileged sphere of action may be aesthetic, or political, or it may be a question of the world of work—in all of these domains, human beings may be claimed to have become alienated and in need of reconnecting with their potential, for example for self-expression or communal existence. Such critiques may be thought of as internal, proceeding from some actually existing domain of human activity, and claiming that human beings can experience self-realization existential meaning, or happiness in that sphere, but are currently prohibited from doing so by any number of factors, which causes suffering that may be more or less vaguely or clearly experienced by subjects themselves. To the extent that such critiques rely on historical comparisons and examples—for example, Hannah Arendt’s holding up the examples of the Athenian pólis, Roman Res Publica, American Founding Fathers, the French Second World War résistance, and Russian revolutionary councils69—they are crafted upon the extraction of historical counter-examples to a contemporary situation of alienation, atrophy, or repression, which move can then be tied to any number of perceived ailments of the present systems here rejected. Similarly, Marxist critics as well as anarchist theorists may draw upon the historical and anthropological examples of egalitarian, stateless societies, and then tie such a critique to the violence or internalized repression and vast inequalities of wealth and status of contemporary nation-states.70 Yet another strategy, however, entails a conceptual critique, by means of deconstructing false dichotomies and taken for granted combinations of elements, explicating conceptual ambiguities, but also inventing new concepts that may visualize pragmatic possibilities as well as trigger further conceptual innovation.71 There is also the question of whether critical approaches in general inspire pragmatic approaches that actually do serve to improve things. It could be

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maintained that utopian thinking is at best useless, at worst destructive. Useless, because its proposals stand no chance of actually being realized; destructive, because the efforts to nonetheless do so may lead to large-scale tragedies, and naïve assumptions about human nature may enable the emergence of violent, authoritarian regimes, or result in widespread chaos. Furthermore, directing energies toward unattainable goals may distract us from pursuing those pragmatic aims that we actually stand a chance of achieving, and which may alleviate our situation. How, however, do we determine what is utopian? While utopia indicates a no-place, some political programs have been deemed utopian, while not strictly being so in the sense of never having been realized, of being out of place in human history. Take anarchist politics, for example: leaving aside the admittedly difficult dilemma of how to handle interhuman violence without a state, to many, the mere suggestion that human beings could perhaps live in stateless societies may come across as wildly utopian. Yet, for most of human history people lived exactly in stateless communities. Far from being utopian, that was the normal condition for tens of thousands of years. If advocating abandoning the state appears not only undesirable, but also utopian today, it is because it has become so. Some things may thus become, and cease to be, utopian. Another take on the utopian, however, would be to insist that it strives for completeness, but then again, it is hard to see why this would necessarily equal either impossibility or undesirability. It is true that a complete transformation of any area will generally be more difficult to carry out, and will arguably demand a greater degree of knowledge and planning, than piecemeal changes, whether these be reformist and internal to a political system, or entail the emergence of heterotopic spaces, or practices of prefiguration, which may or may not be illegal. Finally, some programs may seem to go against human nature, and could thus be deemed strictly utopian. However, human nature remains to be fully understood and it is not easily determined which political programs are actually incompatible with it, and in what sense. The above does not entail that we need to be unreceptive toward complaints about utopian thinking. It is not unreasonable to complain about the futility of rejecting an existing order in favor of some wildly unrealistic, and perhaps undesirable, alternative. It is just that it is not so easily determined what is and what is not feasible, especially in the long term. The most promising way of

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thinking about what is politically realistic in the short term, is to consider the competitive nature of global power politics, and the structural presuppositions of different aims, strategies, and forms of organization. Anarchist proposals appear utopian, not because they would go against human nature, but because stateless societies, in a world of states, tend to either become assimilated within a state, or destroyed by one. Likewise, the states of real socialism and the like undoubtedly existed, and at times managed to run fairly advanced industrial societies, but they were far from the productive capacities of their capitalist competitors. What is competitive, however, is of course determined by the environment: capitalism will remain competitive for as long as it can extract and efficiently utilize resources. Nation-states are competitive as long as they can rely on capitalism in extracting resources, and remain relatively efficient models for mobilizing people in ways compatible with and conducive to that economic system. Should the environment radically change, we can also expect drastic political changes. While political developments are clearly not wholly contingent, it is nonetheless also true that we do not entirely know in which way they are not. We may well keep experimenting, and try out new paths forward, conceptually and pragmatically, and this is especially true if we are committed to experimental thinking, with the ambition of coming up with a multitude of possible paths, which may be realized in the future, transcending the immediate power-political context. Nobody invents the future in one piece; it does not spring fully formed from the head of a genius. Rather, it is continuously being crafted piecemeal, by the efforts of many agents, working in concert or clashing with each other. In the following, I will explore themes tied to collective, political, publicly sanctioned narratives, symbols and rituals, or what I have called, following Hobbes, the public worship of contemporary liberal democracies, utilizing all of the critical strategies outlined above. In so doing, I will not simply examine arguments for and against the continuation and modification of such practices, but will also investigate analogous possibilities. I will thus examine the theme of symbols, rituals, and narratives, and how it interacts with and could be related to that of attempts at ethical universalism and human rights. I do not deny that there might be a great value in developing this perspective from another angle, say, from within an established religious community or tradition. But this is not something I desire to do, or am even able to do.

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Such a project would have to work from the inside out, from within a certain tradition and outward, to probe the limits of a desirable or possible degree of consensus, in relation to that tradition as well as the surrounding society, whereas I start with already established public practices, and assume I am talking to both those committed to a specific religious tradition, and those who are not, and may even be skeptical of all of them. Instead of working from within an established religious tradition or community, in a narrower sense, and outward into the surrounding societal context, I work from within the nation-state and its public practices, and outward in the sense that I want to examine what these practices could be seen as instances of. There is thus, first, the issues of direct inheritance as well as structural analogies linking religious and secular collective rituals and associated elements, and secondly, these practices, already appropriated within a shared public sphere, and sanctioned by existing states, may be analyzed as constituting instances in a larger space of possibilities to be considered. Analytically, the two great risks concerning practices of public worship are, first, not considering them at all (thus leaving oneself defenseless to their continued, unreflected reproduction), and, secondly, to only handle them in terms of national symbols and rituals, which can be challenged due to struggles of recognition. The risk in the latter case is that we do not consider other options, besides the dichotomy of for or against them in their current form. We are apt, if sticking to that dichotomy, to opt for a pragmatic conclusion: symbols and rituals should be modified as a consequence of the outcome of struggles for recognition, and maintained as vaguely indispensable, if perhaps for unclear reasons. The question I pose, however, is not simply what to do about these practices, but what they themselves constitute instances of: if we raise the normative question as to their status, we can also consider wider options, examples of similar practices, but in a different form. I perceive contemporary practices of public worship as instances of sacred demarcations of certain spatial and temporal domains— artifacts, monuments, symbols, rituals, norms, and narratives—which raises the question both concerning the desirability of existing practices, as well as potential alternatives. We need to consider a wider range of domains—spatial, temporal, conceptual—encircled by cultural boundaries and demands for a change of behavior, forming an entire topology of the exceptional, including the sacred elements of nations, as well as the sacralization of humanity, most

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prominently visible in the development of human rights. I will thus examine the constituent conceptual elements of public worship and human rights, as well as their interrelations. Ultimately, this will allow us to consider a wider range of alternative conceptualizations of community. The reader, however, should be aware that I am not proposing a set of norms, practices and institutions that I deem to be necessarily feasible or desirable. The possibilities I point to will have to be situated in a given context, if we are considering some more concrete application of them. The critique I will advance is thus a peculiar one, in that it is neither normative, nor prescriptive. Rather, I will seek to point out further possibilities by deconstructing concepts and examining possible combinations of pragmatic elements and logics of action already present within contemporary liberal democracies. To quote Wittgenstein: “I am not interested in erecting a building but in having the foundations of possible buildings transparently before me.”72 As for basic normative constraints, I accept the foundations of existing liberal democracies, although this does not necessarily entail that the critical paths I will point to will not be relevant to other political contexts. Finally, then, it should be noted that while I will primarily focus on, and take as my point of departure, European nation-states, this does not necessarily entail that the lessons learned will only be applicable to Europe. Likewise, even if I have restricted myself politically to accepting the framework of decision-making of liberal democracies, the issues under consideration may be interesting and relevant outside of such restrictions, too. So even if my primary focus is on European liberal democracies, it is not self-evident that the implications of the analysis will be restricted to such social and political settings. Ultimately, what we are dealing with are the very foundations of human communities.

2

Sacred Boundaries and Ethical Closure

2.1

Constitutive boundaries and sacralization

The problem of Kakanien is that a political entity already exists, while the reasons for and aims of its existence are unclear, and this problem, upon closer inspection, pertains to the European Union as well as its constituent member states, and to political entities more generally: there is the great question of the distribution, exertion, and enabling structures, of various forms of power, as well as the question of authenticity, concerning the conformity or lack thereof of these social and political arrangements with fundamental epistemological and ontological assumptions. In the case of Kakanien, the problem was not the emperor himself, but rather that an increasing number of influential people no longer accepted the institutions of dynastic, imperial rule and their ideological underpinnings. Of course, there are many possible solutions to a perceived crisis of authenticity, and the actual outcome, in our own world, of the dissolution of the Habsburg Empire, followed directly from a lost war; we cannot know for sure what would have had happened if Germany and its allies had won. What we do know is that there are still many monarchs in Europe, who are being allowed to stay on the throne, and enjoy considerable popularity, but in exchange for the loss of political power. The great question, concerning the distribution of social power, already presupposes, however, that there is something within which power is distributed. Likewise, the question of authenticity, concerning the conformity of the justification of the distribution of power with fundamental ontological and epistemological assumptions, already presupposes that there are defined arrangements to question. The end of the Habsburg Empire entailed not simply

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the end of that monarchy, but also the division of its constituent realms into a host of new nation-states. Communities are demarcated, geographically and in terms of membership, by their constitutive boundaries. These boundaries may be primarily territorial, or fundamentally an issue of who belongs and who does not. They may also conceivably, in both cases, be more or less fuzzy and ambiguous, and more or less hierarchical and dichotomous. Spatial boundaries and criteria for membership need not be coextensive, and there may be sub-divisions, nuances, and fuzzy borders, concerning membership and territory. Boundaries may be more or less fluid both territorially and in terms of membership: for example, a tribe or even a nation-state may move in a territorial sense while keeping the mass of its population and its criteria for membership intact, or the other way around. Of course, we should be wary when using words such as community: not all groups have conceptualized themselves in the same terms, or reproduced the same kind of relations to people within their boundaries. To the extent that a boundary—territorial or in terms of criteria for membership—is taken to be significant and worthy of respect (legitimate, justified, or at least deemed to be necessarily taken seriously), I consider it a symbolically recognized constitutive boundary. Constitutive boundaries thus exist concretely, but also discursively, culturally, and cognitively, as something more than mere hindrances or obstacles. On the one hand, then, we can take the existence of a political entity for granted, as a ready-made tool to be used, and simply ask what we should use it for. On the other hand, however, we may begin to question the constitutive boundaries of an already existing entity, its very existence as constituted by certain fundamental delimitations.1 There is of course a lot more that could be said about the complex dynamics of territorial and cultural boundaries, but what is especially pertinent to my concerns is that there are arguably two major domains of sacralization, which coexist tensely in contemporary liberal democracies, and are immediately relevant to constitutive boundaries.2 First, there are the sacred elements of the nation, with its narratives, symbols, and rituals, which are related to religious traditions in the sense of appropriation, reinterpretation and inspiration—national symbols that are originally religious, or national rituals that are inspired by religious antecedents—as well as analogy. These elements function as markers, or border

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stones, as it were, constituting publicly communicated cultural boundaries. These are obviously not simply lines which are unambiguously drawn, but rather, since such markers are open to interpretation and reinterpretation, these boundaries are somewhat fuzzy. We could compare them to a frontier or a borderland, an ambiguous zone of interaction, rather than a wall that clearly separates the inside from the outside. Cultural boundaries are ambiguous and constantly renegotiated, since cultural markers, or symbolic border stones— symbols, rituals, norms, and narratives—are open to reinterpretation. Nevertheless, such reinterpretations do not occur in a vacuum, but in a more or less ambiguous zone, which is itself delimited by the cultural and discursive context. Secondly, however, human rights can be understood as entailing a sacralization in the sense of demanding a protective circle around human beings, or one protecting their dignity; they could be interpreted as a tendency, as Hans Joas writes, toward “the sacralisation of the person.”3 Or as Yuval Noah Harari puts it, “We are constantly reminded that human life is the most sacred thing in the universe.”4 Furthermore, basic rights can become sacralized in themselves in the sense that they can become charged with an extraordinary significance, by recourse to historical narratives and foundational events. The discourse on human rights represents one version, which has grown in stature since the end of the Cold War, of a broader theme of hopes and demands for ethical universalism and a transformation of interhuman relations, often with strong, if qualified, tendencies toward egalitarianism. Grand historical narratives and demands for a radical restructuring of interhuman relations are not necessarily imbued with a universalistic ethics, in the sense of pertaining equally to all of humanity. Such may be the claims of some advocates, but there are of course nuances and restrictions. There are usually, in concrete politics at least, but also more or less explicitly within rhetoric as well, enemies to be combated and perhaps weeded out. The circle of ethical concern is most often restricted. It may be a question of all of humanity, as opposed to other organisms. Or it may be a question of the people, as opposed to the devious and parasitical elite few. Or it may be that only certain ethnic, racial, religious, or social groups are included, while all others are enemies to be defeated and annihilated in the coming playing out of global hyper-antagonism. Hence, in the visions of some right-wing radicals, stressing ethnic or racial solidarity,

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the circle of ethical concern is restricted along lines of race or ethnicity, at times resulting in hyper-antagonistic visions of global struggle.5 For others, as we have seen, it is a matter of the people or proletariat against the exploitative bourgeoisie, and so on. Here we may consider several relevant conceptual figures. First, there is expulsion, resulting in the transition to homo sacer, one no longer protected by the law, the human wolves of medieval societies, the one who may be killed without any punishment, the one without rights or duties.6 Secondly, there is incorporation, of being integrated physically into a community, and endowed with duties and perhaps some rights, but without choice: one simply enters a community as a body, is socialized into its rules and customs, and assigned, or being allowed to choose between a limited set of, roles. In more dramatic cases, incorporation is not a matter of birth, but of appropriation. Here we may recall two great stories of incorporation, one ancient, one modern: the rape of the Sabine Women, and Marx’s account of primitive accumulation.7 The point here is not merely one about exploitation, about which Marxists and libertarians may quarrel endlessly, but about the fundamental lack of autonomy, about which Marxists and libertarians agree, albeit from their different vantage points: that is, even if there is a promise of legal rights and hence a degree of justice and autonomy, there is a lack of fundamental autonomy, a lack of choice concerning which order to enter, and a lack of alternative options outside of being incorporated as a wife, or a worker; or, for that matter, for the libertarian, an exploited taxpayer. The two figures come together in a particularly unsettling way in the figure of the faceless, of the harsh “non habens personam” of Roman law, those who are simultaneously expulsed and incorporated.8 Paradigmatically, in antiquity, the faceless are the slaves; in the history of the twentieth century, they are those who perished in its many labor and death camps. The problem for the slave economy is how to reproduce the slave population, since slaves are needed to secure the reproduction of the order as a whole. The problem for the totalitarian regime is how to transform society, and that transformation is ultimately realized by the annihilation of the faceless, rather than their reproduction. The ultimate purpose of the slave is to live, work, and reproduce. The ultimate purpose of the prisoner of the death camp is to die: bare bones and ashes. Death camps are, ultimately, eschatological

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machines of radical transformation. The slave is a means of continuity of order, and the prisoner of the camp is a means of radical transformation of order. Modern ideological meta-narratives could be said to bestow historical subjectivity upon their adherents—to partake in a demonstration to improve one’s conditions could be simply to guard one’s interests; but to partake in a demonstration as a pragmatic node in a network of significance, pointing toward a historical horizon of transformation, whether hoped for or feared, is to be an agent with world-historical subjectivity. In that sense, the death camps bestow historical subjectivity upon their victims, if we remember the ambiguity of that concept, that is, as either agent, or acted-upon; they are interpreted as elements of eschatological transformation. The same could be said, of course, of the perpetrators and victims of terror attacks. We may thus speak in terms of degrees of ethical closure. In other words, the circle of ethical concern may be more or less restricted, with consequent problems of lines of demarcation: who counts as real German, or belonging to the proletariat? Or if the circle of concern is extended, as proposed for example by Peter Singer in speaking exactly of an expanding circle, to animals, which organisms are capable of suffering and endowed with interests?9 Furthermore, however, following Jonathan Haidt, we may distinguish between different sources of morality—Haidt suggests the following six broad categories: care, liberty, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity.10 The core point here is that different individuals and groups—cultures, ideologies, religions—tend to draw upon these to a different extent: thus, some are more oriented toward care and compassion, others prioritize liberty and fairness, yet others consider group-loyalty to be a central concern, or feel that it is of key importance to foster hierarchical, orderly relationships, and hold some things sacred, and wish to avoid spiritual contamination, and so on. If Singer’s metaphor of an expanding circle of moral concern works as a horizontal metaphor, an analysis of the variations in sources of moral concern points to a vertical one: we may draw upon these different sources to a different extent, and thus be more or less open to the plurality of sources of morality. Regardless of whether we accept Haidt’s particular classification and causal explanations of the different sources of morality, it is obviously true that people involved in political conflicts proceed from different, fundamental intuitions about what is right and good, and that this entails that any attempt at arriving at

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universal norms, applied to all, has to face the problem of what to universalize, and why. We may also distinguish, however, I would add, between a closure of reflection and a closure of action: people may expand or constrict the circle of ethical concern haphazardly, without reflection, and likewise, may expand or restrict their sources of morality without thinking about it; for example, someone may consider themselves to be exclusively concerned with care and fairness, and opposed to anything being sacred, while actively engaging in emotionally charged practices of sacralization, without reflection. The sacred is an ambiguous notion, just as is religion. The notion of the sacred is ambiguous, not only since it is associated with both terror and wonder, and with being elevated as well as being cursed, but also because it can be seen as both a sociopolitical category tied to certain restrictions and behaviors, and as a phenomenological category entailing a type of experiences or states of consciousness. Furthermore, while the sacred can be viewed partly in terms of restrictions on ordinary, instrumental usage, assigning a sacred status to something can nonetheless be an integral element of political strategies, aiming at certain goals, and profiting certain groups and individuals. In both senses, apart as well as in combination, there may arguably be a secular sacred, or if we wish to put it polemically (although in the end, it may be difficult to determine why that would be motivated), perhaps pseudo-sacred. This is in itself hardly a very controversial conclusion, and whether we think of such developments in positive terms, or, like Simon Critchley, “come to this conclusion with no particular joy” is another matter.11 When we approach concepts such as the sacred, with a rich history of usages in the context of socioeconomic power struggles as well as sophisticated theoretical constructions, it ought to be with a certain awareness of both their ambiguities, as well as why we ourselves turn to them—both with sensitivity toward the shifting usages of human languages, and an awareness of our own aims. For example, we may try to find a common core in all actual linguistic usages, perhaps abstracting from a host of conceptual pairings in natural languages, and constructing thereof one, single concept of the sacred, that captures their essence. Or we may, conversely, look at the ambiguities of actual linguistic usage, to dispel efforts at a simplified essentialism, and leave it at that. However, none of these approaches is what I propose; neither of them are relevant to my present purposes. Rather, I will retrieve elements that I

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think we should reflect upon, and develop critically. I turn to the sacred, not to enshrine that concept with a determined meaning, but rather to examine potential alternative arrangements, viewing contemporary ones as examples, empirical instances out of a greater logical space of possibilities. So, the sacred, for me, is really a starting point for further analysis, rather than a conceptual endpoint for crafting a critique. There are of course numerous investigations of the sacred in different contexts, all around the world, and across time. Turning to recent studies of the sacred and corresponding concepts, as well as their associated practices, we may note that researchers have highlighted sacred landscape formations (and which types of landscape tend to elicit these responses12), sacred sounds,13 sacred writings,14 sacred bodies,15 and undoubtedly a range of similar phenomena that I am, perhaps unfairly, neglecting at the moment. Furthermore, many authors, throughout the last century and into the present one, have developed critical arguments involving notions of the sacred in many different ways. I do not mean to dismiss all of them lightly. Perhaps René Guénon was really right to condemn the “reign of quantity” and to turn to the traditions of sufi Islam?16 Or perhaps authors like Ursula Goodenough or Stuart Kauffman are right to propose that a scientific story about the universe may inspire religious awe, or that the sciences themselves have to be fundamentally transformed by leaving reductionism behind and embracing emergence?17 But here we have to inquire into the reasons provided for labeling something as sacred, and the extent to which these are compatible in relation to our normative and political aims. While we could perceive sacred domains in terms of temporal and spatial demarcations, by recourse to heuristic traditions and social hierarchies, we could also conceive of them as tied to the degree of intensity of experience, to phenomenological shifts and trajectories out of the ordinary. There may of course be many different sources the sacred, such as the perceived longevity, size, shape, and perceived uniqueness of something, or an experience of wonder and awe in the face of overwhelming force, power, beauty, dimensions, or theoretical elegance, and these sources may be used to legitimize or argue in favor of behavioral norms in relation to that which is considered sacred. Earlier attempts at retrieving a general notion of the sacred, carried out during the twentieth century by some of the most brilliant minds of their times, exposed interesting, fundamental ambiguities: between wonder and

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awe, and between being elevated and being cursed, but also between the sacred as a phenomenological category, and as a category of behavior, where these can, perhaps should, but do not necessarily fuse. Durkheim famously proposed a theory of religion incorporating a distinction between sacred and profane, defining “sacred things” as “things set apart and forbidden.”18 Any competent anthropologist, religious scholar, or analytical philosopher, however, could attack such a statement. It could be pointed out that what is set apart need not be forbidden: perhaps some “sacred things” are set apart, but not forbidden? Or it could be observed that some of those terms which, in Durkheim’s usage correspond to the category of the sacred, frequently refer to things that are in fact not consistently either set apart, or forbidden.19 Also, maybe the dichotomy of sacred and profane is not only too ambiguous, but also unabashedly ethnocentric in that it mirrors the religious institutions of Europe, but hardly those of religion in a more general sense?20 But do these kinds of critiques, if we accept their conclusions, render Durkheim’s theory useless? Hardly. It has inspired further research, if only to prove it partly wrong. In some instances, or with some clarifications or modifications, it may still hold. Furthermore, even if it is to some extent (and to what extent remains a subject of debate) flawed as a descriptive perspective on religion, it may still be useful normatively. We could well use Durkheim’s notion of the sacred to construe a concept of the sacred of our own, to be used for concrete political proposals, while not claiming that this concept accurately describe the workings of a general category of religion, applicable to parts or all of human history. And the same goes for other famous theories of the sacred, proposed during the twentieth century by prominent religious scholars such as Rudolf Otto or Mircea Eliade: these cast light on the importance of extraordinary phenomenological domains to individuals as well as to human collective existence, as does Durkheim’s concept of collective effervescence, referring to the coming together of a group in collective, ritual participation, generating emotional excitement and an experience of communal fusion.21 There is, in fact, a fourth major theme, tied to questions concerning the sacred, that is arguably even less debated than that of symbols and rituals: that of extraordinary phenomenological shifts and states of consciousness, or what is often labeled as “mysticism.” Why not turn to this theme for sources of

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inspiration when critically relating to contemporary liberal democracies, and considering alternative forms of community? Social and political struggles concern the division of resources and the regulation of interhuman relations, but they also concern not only the interpretation, but also the organization— or attempt thereof—of experience, and the relations of human beings not only to other human beings, but also to things, space, and time. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of the history of religious traditions may easily observe that at least some of them have incorporated, and emanated from, a kind of experimental religion, whereby human patterns of action are understood to dynamically relate to dramatic differences in the experience of beings, space, and time. There are explorations of the interrelations between interhuman, transhuman, and intrahuman relations, so that, for example, the ingestion of certain substances, or the adoption of ascetic interhuman, transhuman, and intrahuman relations, are understood to impact on both interhuman and transhuman relations: a whole series of techniques have thus been adopted, in the pursuit of phenomenological exploration, even if that exploration has not been an aim in itself. This, however, has also entailed perceived encounters with non-physical but conscious beings. Indeed, some researchers theorize the emergence of religion exactly in terms of the fusion of, on the one hand, the false attribution of mental states to things that lack them with, on the other hand, the human capacity to enter into overwhelming, extraordinary states of consciousness, that may appear to confirm such false attributions by pointing to other worlds, to spiritual beings, or to the perceived dissolution between the self and the surrounding world. In The Art of Loving, Erich Fromm recalls a story by Isaac Babel, from the Russian civil war, about an officer who stamps his enemies to death, instead of simply shooting them: he wants to get at the soul, to expose the essence of human existence so that it reveals its secret.22 Taken on its own, this could of course be dismissed on the grounds that what is revealed is simply the reaction of human beings to terror and suffering. Simultaneously, other and arguably more interesting aspects of them withdraw, become unavailable. It is trivially true that human beings encounter each other dynamically, in interaction, and that the other is responsive to our own actions. It is also obvious that our interaction with animals and even plants works to some extent in the same way. Somewhat less obviously, however, there is a dynamic

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in our interrelations with inanimate domains as well: thus, the way in which we perceive space and time, as well as beings in the world, may be drastically impacted by our own behavior, not only in the obvious sense that humanity indeed to an ever-increasing extent shapes its physical environments, but also phenomenologically. Meet Howard Roark—he is a brilliant architectto-be, newly expelled from his all too conformist, all too human, school of architecture, and now he is gazing upon his surroundings: He looked at the granite. To be cut, he thought, and made into walls. He looked at a tree. To be split and made into rafters. He looked at a streak of rust on the stone and thought of iron ore under the ground. To be melted and to emerge as girders against the sky. These rocks, he thought, are here for me; waiting for the drill, the dynamite and my voice; waiting to be split, ripped, pounded, reborn; waiting for the shape my hands will give them.23

Howard Roark is, of course, the protagonist of The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s riveting tale about the collision between creativity and conformity, which was also turned into an underappreciated movie. My point in bringing up Roark, however, is that his gaze exemplifies a certain existential stance, let us say that of homo faber, who masters nature in order to create human artifacts. This is one existential stance, with its own way of viewing things. One among many, and it certainly has its legitimate place in the full spectrum of human existence. Now imagine an adherent of Shingon Buddhism viewing the very same landscape, and perceiving a “natural text” of signs, intimating the path to liberation from suffering.24 Or imagine someone being lost in the beauty of nature, recalling a painting of the Finnish forest landscape, forming a space of meaning that calls for the national liberation of Finland from Russian domination, or imagine atheist author Barbara Ehrenreich, overcome with fiery ecstasy amid the mountains of California.25 Or imagine a hunter, following the paths of sacred animals, and stopping every now and then to attend to an ancient burial mound, or some other site of great spiritual significance. Or think one of the many wanderers in the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich, who simply stop in the face of sublime beauty, and sense, I take it, some vague longing for something as of yet unsaid, and undreamt of. Or a biologist on an expedition, looking for novel species, and gathering information, or the participants of a communal ritual, dancing ecstatically in the presence of the ancestors.

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Philosophical reflection on what is now commonly called mystical experiences or states of consciousness—the former term is easily associated with a short duration of time, whereas the latter implies that the duration may vary greatly—has entailed, among other things, the classification of them and attempts to uncover their causes and mechanisms. An influential division into introvertive and extrovertive “types of mystical consciousness” was introduced by W. T. Stace: the former type is characterized by a vision of the unity of all things, whereas the latter is an experience of “pure consciousness” or “void.”26 Furthermore, there has been a movement from “perennial” arguments stressing the similarities between mystical experiences or states of consciousness across space and time, to “constructivist” stances stressing the differences between contexts.27 As for the causes of extraordinary states of consciousness, these may simply emerge due to human biology in interplay with the natural and cultural environment. Daniel Dennett, for example, speculates that religious people—those who have a belief in (a) supernatural agent[s], which is how he tentatively defines “religion”28—who enjoy intense experiences of love and luminosity are indeed in love with a “system of ideas” (Dennett’s italics).29 Thus, Dennett asks, “Has our evolved capacity for romantic love been exploited by religious memes?”30 This, however, leaves one wondering about the skeptics and atheists who nonetheless quite literally see the light, or have a vision of fiery ecstasy. Indeed, neurotheologian Andrew Newberg acknowledges that both believers and atheists, and both people belonging to religious communities and those who do not, may have similar intense experiences, sometimes labeled as “mystical” and interpreted in terms of something divine, but not necessarily so, as does a critic like Pascal Boyer, who focuses on the errors of reasoning resulting in religious beliefs.31 Conversely, it could of course be maintained that even if most religious visions or overwhelming experiences could be explained naturalistically, some of them are indeed induced by a divine force, perhaps a person with intentions. Or it could be argued that even if such experiences are not caused by a direct, divine intervention, but rather follow naturally from the way in which some people’s brains function in interplay with their specific social context and personal history, and so could perhaps be explained by recourse to scientific investigations, this entire constellation of brain processes, personal history, and social environment, in a specific individual, time, and space, could in

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itself have been foreseen by God, and ultimately designed by Him for His purposes. Or it could be the case that the same divine reality is experienced differently by people immersed in different cultural contexts, and that their cultural and psychological patterns and idiosyncrasies color the experience in particular ways. When we want to know what the phenomenological content of extraordinary experiences or states of consciousness ultimately indicates, we run into gaps in our scientific knowledge, which appear to leave room for theistic interpretations. These debates concern issues such as the alleged fine-tuning of the universe that makes life possible, and the relation between consciousness and the material world. None of these debates can be considered to be settled at the moment, so people speculate about them, and in so doing, embrace their own pet projects and leanings, although we are not forced, in a democratic order, to agree with them. Furthermore, even those who acknowledge the value of “mystical” states of consciousness, may still quarrel about them—for example, commenting on famous atheist Sam Harris’s positive evaluation of Buddhist practices, contemporary orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart writes: He provides a long passage ascribed to the (largely mythical) Tantric sage Padmasambhava and then breathlessly informs his readers that nothing remotely as profound is to be found anywhere in the religious texts of the West—though, really, the passage is little more than a formulaic series of mystic platitudes, of the sort to be found in every religion’s contemplative repertoire, describing the kind of oceanic ecstasy that Christian mystical tradition tends to treat as one of the infantile stages of the contemplative life.32

What extraordinary states of consciousness actually imply thus remains contested. They do imply, though, that at least some people, under some circumstances, which are not entirely clear, experience dramatic phenomenological shifts, and may enter into states of consciousness, the experiential character of which is difficult if not impossible to communicate to others who have not had the same or a similar type of experience.33 But while this is certainly interesting from a phenomenological standpoint, we do not know what it entails ontologically, epistemologically, or normatively, unless, of course, we accept a specific frame of interpretation.

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A fruitful path of inquiry, however, has focused on notions of purity and pollution, and the way in which certain domains are rendered as pure or polluted, a phenomenon which arguably remains relevant to contemporary, liberal democracies, even outside of religious communities and traditions: Then the Lord said to Aaron, “You and your sons are not to drink wine or other fermented drink whenever you go into the tent of meeting, or you will die. This is a lasting ordinance for the generations to come, so that you can distinguish between the holy and the common, between the unclean and the clean, and so you can teach the Israelites all the decrees the Lord has given them through Moses.”34

Originally, the desire to avoid pollution is eminently understandable against the horizon of the very real threats of dangerous food and disease; hence, it makes good sense to a close-knit community to avoid pollutants and signs of pollution and pathogens, by forbidding the ingestion of certain sources of nutrition, avoiding waste, and expulsing or keeping a distance to people whose health appears compromised.35 However, the theme of pollution has of course become an extraordinarily broad one, as it has been embedded in cultural contexts where actual, physical pollution may no longer be feared, because some elements are considered spiritually pure, and where certain symbols, concepts, and narratives are to be shunned and avoided, to maintain group cohesion. Even within an explicitly secular context, certain discursive positions and associations can thus become politically polluted, giving rise to a vast and fierce debate over political correctness—or what Daniel Dennett has called eumemics36—and the extent of free speech, or the necessary delimitations thereof. Conversely, certain salient norms and narratives are communicated as exemplifying what is best and most desirable in a certain national, cultural, or macro-regional context. We may easily observe, more generally, that there is a common feature of modern and contemporary politics whereby people are mobilized by way of narratives, symbols, and rituals, and whereby these are used to legitimize a certain order or even specific decisions. This linkage can be ecclesiastical, or ideological, it can be a matter of the communities of organized religion, or of secular states and ideologies. An important feature of such elements has hitherto been the coordination of bodily movements, the ritual repetition of key events, and the utilization of mythical images or metaphors. Thus, narratives conjoined with symbols and

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rituals, surrounded by reverence or respect, and the challenging of which will frequently be met with violence or anger, is a common feature of modern and contemporary communities, and by no means a phenomenon of the past, or of a more primitive or archaic stage of human existence, chronologically or geographically. Neither are taboos, or the way in which certain opinions and those who express them come to be regarded as impure, as sources of moral contamination to be shunned. Categories of sacred and profane, pure and impure, and the like, have been used frequently to study non-Western and non-modern societies. These categories seem to fit right into anthropological, rather than sociological, examinations, in line with the division that assigned modern Western societies to the latter, and premodern or primitive, non-Western societies to the former. However, such dichotomies have come to be increasingly questioned. Not only does anthropology concern itself with contemporary Western societies, but simplified notions of modernity, progress, and secularity, and the relations between them, have been severely criticized for decades. Thus, the idea that categories like the sacred and practices of maintaining order by putting the impure in its proper place can be applied to contemporary Western societies, hardly seems that strange. However, if one of the accusations frequently directed at earlier attempts to generalize from studies of “primitive” societies points to the construction of universal categories and practices of the pure and the sacred, the same problem encounters those who wish to use such notions in the study of contemporary, Western societies: here, too, there is the risk of creating supposedly universally valid categories with too little empirical backing to justify such claims. Furthermore, if previous researchers have been criticized for neglecting differences between premodern societies, perhaps contemporary researchers run the risk of not only overemphasizing the similarities between contemporary, Western societies, but also those between the latter in general and those communities which have been classified as primitive: in other words, to see the flag of the nation as its totem, and to use a terminology of purity and sacrifice to describe processes and events which are in fact widely distinct from those described by scholars of those communities which formed the paradigmatic cases for theories of the sacred, of purity, exclusion, and ritual sacrifice. Finally, one might ask why we should describe certain types of concepts and patterns of behavior in terms

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of the sacred and purity, if participants of those practices themselves resort to no such categories—what kind of theoretical imperialism is that? An integral part of the legally and culturally sanctioned practices of actual nation-states, however, has indeed been and continues to be the ritual and symbolic communication of collective, national identity. Such practices have already been appropriated and are continuously reproduced by existing liberal democracies, so we are not merely dealing with hypotheticals; furthermore, what is especially interesting about them is that they are continuously publicly sanctioned by liberal-democratic states, and tied to the notion of these as communities. Their way of functioning renders them, for the political community as a whole, as universal, rather than particular, while at the same time, marking this or that community in its entirety, as particular in relation to other communities. What are the recurring traits that characterize ritual practices? One temptation when attempting to define ritual is to adopt too wide an understanding, rendering rituals widespread and pervasive in all human communities, but at the cost of analytical precision. Referring to a work on ritual in industrial societies, Jack Goody notes that one of its “findings is that ‘rituals are of far greater importance in an industrial society such as modern Britain than is often realized’.” However, when Goody recounts what the concept of ritual used to reach that conclusion includes, that result appears less surprising: Handshaking, teeth cleaning, taking medicines, car riding, eating, entertaining guests, drinking tea, or coffee, bear, sherry, whisky, etc., taking a dog for a walk, watching television, going to the cinema, listening to records, visiting relatives, routines at work, singing at work, children’s street games, hunting and so on.37

Too narrow a definition, however, risks excluding some activities arbitrarily, something that could become particularly problematic if this conceptual maneuver is accomplished by tying rituals to another ambiguous and undefined concept, like myth or religion. The very word ritual derives from the Latin ritus, “religious ceremony” or “custom”; furthermore, earlier usages stressed the connection either to Christianity, or to religious rites of Classical Antiquity, while contemporary usage, as we have seen, may be much wider.38

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It is hardly necessary, however, for my purposes, to reach an unambiguous definition. Rather, we may adopt an understanding based upon shared traits in a pattern of family resemblances, in order to consider whether elements of ritual activity should be regulated politically.39 A common criterion when trying to define ritual is that of the repetition of key words and entire acts, as well as the belief that the ritual in its entirety repeats an original act of great significance.40 Rituals may involve not only active participants, but also bystanders, interested onlookers, guests who are perhaps expected to recognize the significance of the ritual and enhance its status, witnesses who may confer it with validity, and outside beneficiaries.41 However, a ritual may carry little consequence for participants in terms of societal standing, or there may be an absence of sanctions for not taking part. Rituals may also degenerate into empty spectacle with little or no emotional impact—within Christian traditions, for example, it has been pointed out repeatedly that the outward display and the inner disposition may be disjointed.42 This indicates the importance of the phenomenological content of ritual activity, but just the same, that content is not a criterion for an activity being counted as ritual in the first place, it is not what makes the ritual a ritual. Nevertheless, for some arguments in favor of ritual, it could be an element rendering ritual desirable. Hans-Georg Gadamer, for example, discusses ritual symbolism in terms of the tessera hospitalis of antiquity, that is, an amulet which is split in two parts, where two people take one part each: when they or their relatives are reunited, the pieces fit together.43 Rituals allow people to gather together, in recurring intervals, beyond the separation of work, to merge into a community. Gadamer develops this line of argument by distinguishing between “Two fundamental ways of experiencing time”: on the one hand “our normal, pragmatic experience of time,” which oscillates between the “two extremes of bustle and boredom”; however, he adds, “There is .  .  . a totally different experience of time . . . profoundly related to the kind of time characteristic of both the festival and the work of art.” This is what Gadamer calls “‘fulfilled’ or ‘autonomous’ time”44 In describing autonomous temporality, Gadamer resorts to a language of play. How, then, do we distinguish between rituals, such as that of the collective worship of the churches and of nationalist movements, and, for example, the play of children? And which are the features the two,

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seemingly so apart, have in common? The difficult question does not seem to be able to distinguish the two—the differences are obvious—but rather to pinpoint the crucial similarities. There is a key component, which connects directly to Gadamer’s observations. We may and often do approach time strategically, as a resource used to achieve aims further on. Some practices, however, incorporate an experience of time in which we come to appreciate it as a free flow. Robert Bellah has proposed an ambitious and wide-ranging analysis, also using the term play to describe a characteristic feature of ritual behavior, but also evoking the notion of flow, being pleasantly absorbed in an activity: “a kind of optimal experience of full engagement with the world and full realization of one’s own potentialities.”45 Some rituals, as well as other activities—including, for many people, work—enable this experience of time. Several other theorists have also stressed the play aspects of art as well as ritual—but then one encounters exactly the problem of examining the obvious differences between the play of children and the collective rituals of a community, where the latter is much less spontaneous and more predetermined in their structure, even when there is room for variation. If we turn to Johan Huizinga and Homo Ludens, it seems that play, as Huizinga understands it, does not really fit when describing public worship: Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious,” but at the same time absorbing the player intensely and utterly.46

While the collective rituals I have considered are indeed outside “ordinary” life, they are still serious. Similarly, Richard Schechner has analyzed the role of rituals, play, and performance: “Indeed, art and ritual, especially performance,” Schechner writes, “are the homeground of playing. . . . Playing is a mood, an attitude, a force. . . . It is ‘banana time’—the transformation of work into play.”47 Hence, “playing,” to Schechner, can be understood as a creative, destabilizing action that frequently does not declare its existence, even less its intentions. . . . Work and other daily activities continuously feed on the underlying ground of playing, using the play mood for refreshment, energy, unusual ways of turning things around, insights, breaks, openings and, especially, looseness. . . . Looseness encourages the discovery of new configurations and twists of ideas and experiences.48

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There is also the question of the ritual framework of antagonistic games as well as rituals of role reversal: a competitive element may enter into the ritual space, which simultaneously contains it, and similarly, hierarchies may be temporarily dissolved or reversed.49 Rituals may handle ambiguity, they may stabilize situations in between two more stable categories, thus handling transitions in a zone of liminality: “During the liminal period,” Victor Turner writes in a work on the Ndembu people, “neophytes are alternately forced and encouraged to think about their society, their cosmos, and the powers that generate and sustain them.”50 For example, in contemporary liberal democracies, acquiring citizenship may be tied to a rite of passage, structuring the path from outsider to insider, but in a broader sense, liminality may be conceived of as a space of potential, of possibilities beyond the actual order, an ambiguous zone characterizing transformative political events and perhaps even extended periods of conceptual and institutional innovation and transformation. There is no doubt that contemporary, liberal democracies publicly support ritual practices, tied to symbols and narratives that supposedly represent the political community as a whole. This is most obviously, but not exclusively, a question of nations and nationalism, and indeed, the actual and potential relationships between nations, nationalism, and human rights is a contested one, laying bare the roots of community in the conceptualization and organization of different dimensions of autonomy and temporality.

2.2

Meaningful autonomy over time

When Slavoj Žižek approvingly quotes Robespierre as speaking of “that sacred love for the homeland,” as well as “that even more sublime and holy love for humanity,” this could be read as capturing the tension between two entangled lines of sacralization traced to the symbolically foundational event of the French Revolution, but we could also locate a tension for example in the writings of Herder, between people and humanity.51 There are actually two sources of tension, that have shaped subsequent political debates: on the one hand, there is the tension between the universal and the particular globally, and on the other, within every national community. Thus, when Robespierre, as quoted above, speaks of a “sacred love for the homeland,” he does in fact speak

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of no such thing, but of love for la patrie, “whose nearest English equivalent,” as the translator of the collection of Robbespierre’s speeches to which Žižek refers, remarks, “is fatherland.”52 Hence, the rights of man may be extended by criticizing the conceptual particularity of the man, or the human, and so on, or the range of any such conceptualization may be criticized for being restricted geographically to a certain community. The actual and desirable relation between human rights and constitutive, national boundaries is a fiercely contested issue. Typologies of nationalism pertain to conflicts concerning both of these lines of sacralization, albeit with different degrees of clarity. We are dealing with ideal types, while empirical patterns present hybrids: thus, even “civic” nations incorporate traces of specific ethnic and religious traditions, while “ethnic” nations incorporate an emphasis on basic rights.53 Furthermore, both of the above are “cultural” nations in the sense that what is always required is adherence to certain cultural norms, in the broadest sense, that is, norms of behavior transferred between people, rather than instinctual behavior. Norms are, of course, not necessarily politically regulated: for example, entrance into the labor market, and hence escaping the traps of long-term or permanent unemployment, requires adherence to certain norms, which may be more or less explicitly articulated and legally regulated, and a “purely” civic nationalism can hardly survive without recourse to some form of shared “culture.” What is actually characteristic of ethnonationalism is how it ties culture, territory, and genetics into a certain whole, connected to political agency. A distinction may be made between more ethno-genetic variants, which stress the genetic component of ethnicity, and articulate concerns about genetic purity, race, and IQ correlations, and the preservation of certain phenotypic elements, and more ethno-cultural versions, that stress the preservation of ethno-distinctive traditions; although, again, this is an analytical distinction which cuts through various empirical mixtures of the two.54 Another distinction pertains to the extent of required homogeneity of behavior, regardless of whether such expectations are formulated in terms of ethnicity, culture, or values. Regardless of how it is framed, however, the issue of the relations—actual and desirable—between the two trajectories of sacralization of human rights and national communities remains a key issue for contemporary political philosophy, as well as wider political and public debates. Perhaps the nation-

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state is simply a hindrance that needs to be done away with or at least radically transformed and re-situated, a stumbling block in the movement of cosmopolitan expansion and integration. Or is it, on the contrary, the very entity which is required to guarantee that basic rights, unfettered by religious and ethnic affiliations, are actually upheld? Or the nation-state could be incorporated dialectically into a speculative narrative about the future: it is to be followed, perhaps, by macro-regional blocs, and then a global political arrangement? Or it could be argued that the cultural or ethnic homogeneity of the nation is indeed what needs to be preserved and continuously recreated, in order for human rights to be actually implemented as something beyond mere civil and political rights, so that the citizens of nations may also enjoy a considerable extent of socioeconomic equality and a rich lifeworld of cultural significance, and hence a planet of stable, culturally homogenous, but peacefully cooperating nations is what is required. Or it could be claimed, conversely, that we need multicultural policies that support the reproduction of cultures within states, and perhaps grant certain groups special rights or a limited degree of territorial autonomy. Do we need to maintain and reproduce cultures, and if so, does this entail preserving and perhaps restoring existentially meaningful lifeworlds, within state borders, as coextensive with the latter, or in cultural macro-regions or civilizations? Should identity groups primarily be spatially bounded and should they strive for political autonomy, or is it a question of voluntary membership among people dispersed across territorial boundaries? From a common contemporary, broadly liberal perspective, the core question is that of autonomy, and debates on negative, positive, and republican liberty, as well as the controversies of multiculturalism and ethnonationalism have disclosed a larger theoretical landscape, centered on the issue of the structural preconditions for meaningful autonomy over time. Questions of meaningful autonomy within modern and contemporary debates pertain to the necessary characteristics, formation, coercion, capabilities, and available options of autonomous agents. Thus, advocates of measures to ensure a relatively egalitarian distribution of life chances and material resources may argue that the mere equal distribution of the absence of coercion does not amount to meaningful autonomy: after all, to put it starkly, negative liberty amounts to little for the child without legs, starving to death in the gutter,

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while those ensnared by excessive state taxation and regulation may argue with conviction, and hardly without ground, that they are by no means enjoying true self-ownership.55 Also, as some republican thinkers argue, if we desire to defend autonomy, we should reflect upon the structural conditions we are nestled within, while others point to a wider range of capabilities that we need to develop in order to enjoy meaningful autonomy, and caution against an overly simplistic focus on rights and resources.56 Furthermore, advocates of multicultural policies as well as those striving to preserve areas of natural beauty and living organisms, may both argue that mere positive liberty is not enough without something valuable to discover and choose from, and the ability to retrieve meaning from those choices, and ethnonationalists may well argue along those same lines: if cultures provide meaningful choices as well as the ability to retrieve meaning from them, and if cultures are vulnerable and in need of public support, we may well decide to support one or several of them within our polity.57 Likewise, if natural environments and organisms enable rich experiences that we wish to preserve for ourselves and coming generations, we may decide to intervene in order to save them.58 Regardless of where we stand regarding the spectrum of meaningful choices and the moral duty or not of political intervention to preserve natural areas and cultural practices and environments, it can hardly be denied that, for the overwhelming majority of people, a world of meaningful experiences— of natural beauty, plants and animals, other people, and artifacts—is a presupposition for meaningful autonomy, whether in the form of absence of coercion, or a wider range of capabilities. Without a world to inhabit and explore, autonomy, for most people, loses its meaning. Hence, we need to consider autonomy across space—that is, restrictions on its distribution globally—but also what space we deem it necessary to preserve, in order for us to enjoy meaningful autonomy. Autonomy, however, has a temporal aspect as well: we do not want perfect autonomy today, only to become slaves tomorrow. Ultimately, we may advocate measures that restrict liberty now, in order to preserve it over time.59 So, not only are positive and negative liberty at odds with each other, but the desire to preserve autonomy over time may interfere with the ambition to expand it right now. Furthermore, a world of a multitude of interesting species, natural environments, or cultural traditions, existing today, may be irrevocably lost tomorrow. After all, being imprisoned does not

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merely imply constraint of movement, but also a varying degree of relative experiential deprivation. In this larger theoretical landscape, revealed by opening up the concept of autonomy to analysis, and exposing the tensions between its different dimensions and their presuppositions, the nation may come into play, rhetorically, in several different ways. First, as a precondition of either negative or positive liberty; thus, it may be argued that the cultural or ethnic coherence and internal solidarity of the nation makes possible either a libertarian community of a minimal state, or an extensive welfare state. Conversely, it could be argued that immigration is a threat to the welfare state, eroding internal solidarity, or it could be argued that a dominant ethnicity or culture is skeptical of welfare measures, whereas immigrants support them. Secondly, as a precondition for meaningful autonomy, providing a lifeworld of meaningful choices, or conversely (and simultaneously) as precluding meaningful choices for those not belonging to, or wanting to opt out of, the dominant national culture. Furthermore, any culture may arguably not only provide, but positively obscure, meaningful choices. Thirdly, nationalism may be understood as upholding autonomy over time, rendering possible, for example, general conscription or civic duty, or aggressive and authoritarian nationalism could, conversely, be cautioned against exactly as an internal or external threat to the preservation of autonomy over time. Also, nationalism and the nation-state could be perceived either as hindrances to worldwide cooperation in order to preserve a meaningful world of human habitation globally, or conversely, the nation-state could be seen as the only realistic agent that could improve environmental conditions, and preserve culturally meaningful lifeworlds. In other words, nationalism is a nebulous, ambiguous phenomenon, and what matters is what kind of nationalism we are speaking of. Nationalism is especially interesting, however, because it appears to enjoy a structural advantage over its ideological competitors: some kind of mysterious “force” that indeed forces alternative forms of modern political organization to at least cohabitate and compromise with the nation. The cognitive riddles of nationalism are arguably unlike those of other ideologies, and indeed appear to be, at least to the cynical observer, mirror-images of those of Marxism and libertarianism. While there has been some debate regarding whether nationalism is characterized

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by “philosophical poverty,” or is in fact “conceptually richer than the critics allow,” the major enigma about nationalism is why it has worked so well, and why modern ideological alternatives have been forced to cohabitate with or form hybrids with it.60 While Marxist and libertarian theorizing is frequently brilliant, theoretically elegant, and intellectually engaging, concrete proposals do not quite seem to work; nationalism, conversely, appears to be much less of an opium for intellectuals, but has the distinction of not only actually having been implemented successfully, but also of having achieved a global reach and an underlying ideological status so pervasive, that even many nationalists often do not understand that this is what they actually are. The question remains, however, what to do with this legacy, in the contemporary world: should we strive to replace or fundamentally transform the nation-state, and if so how? Habermas, for example, has argued that the tension between a universalist, civic understanding of the political community and the “residue of sacred transcendence” of the nation as a “prepolitical entity” may “be solved on the condition that the constitutional principles of human rights and democracy give priority to a cosmopolitan understanding of the nation as a nation of citizens over and against an ethnocentric interpretation.” However, “this republican core of the national state is in danger as soon as the integrative force of the nation . . . is led back to a pre-political fact, to the quasi-natural features of a historical community—that is to say something given independently of the political opinion and the will-formation of the citizens themselves.”61 But could such a solution actually work, and if so, on what scale? As Craig Calhoun observes, “There is no intrinsic reason why ‘constitutional patriotism’ could not work on the scale of Europe, but there are questions about whether it can stand alone as an adequate source of belonging and mutual commitment.”62 Nationalism appears to have had some kind of advantage tied to its pseudoreligious force; thus, William Parker, for example, has argued that Europeans .  .  . seemed increasingly to need in politics, as they once had needed in religion, an intercessor between the individual and the universal, an object of tangible love on a grand scale. . . . It was not simply a political necessity, but a psychic hunger that the national idea fulfilled.63

Many scholars of nationalism have indeed stressed the similarities between nationalism and religious phenomena, sensing that this may explain something

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of the force of nationalist movements and narratives and their ability to either out-compete or to complement organizational and ideological alternatives.64 This is hardly surprising, given some striking structural analogies. First, we find, in both cases, symbols, manifesting communal unity and appearing in concrete, collective gatherings. Secondly, these elements communicate an identity-constituting self-reference, while simultaneously pointing to something beyond this immediate context of representation. Just as there are sacred elements in what we call organized religion—artifacts as well as natural objects, persons, locations, and events—we find similar components in relation to national narratives. Such elements, furthermore, are tied to ritual gatherings, repeating an event, a sequence of words or patterns of movement.65 The nation is a way of conceptualizing community, and symbolically reproducing its boundaries, by way of practices of sacralization. Here a quotation from John Breuilly may serve as a convenient point of departure for some clarification: nationalist movements, Breuilly claims, like all mass movements, make use of symbols and ceremonies .  .  . enabling people to come together in ways which seem directly to express the solidarity of the nation. . . . Nationalist symbolism is able to do this in particularly effective ways because it has a quality of self-reference which is largely missing from socialist or religious ideology. Nationalists celebrate themselves rather than some transcendent reality, whether this be located in another world or in a future society.66

The combination of symbols, ritual practices, and narratives does, however, enable a kind of transcendence, a crossing of boundaries, at two levels simultaneously: on the one hand, participants manifest, symbolically, that they belong to a larger community; on the other hand, this collective symbolically transcends the present, by relating to shared historical narratives, representing the past but also projecting toward the future. There are thus what could perhaps be called totemic rituals which symbolically constitute a community.67 It should be noted that the ambiguity and scope for differing interpretations and emotional and pragmatic effects of symbols and rituals allows for the resolution of social tensions and for maintaining continuity and a semblance of coherence diachronically as well as synchronically; that is, since the same symbols, rituals, institutions and offices can be interpreted differently, over time as well as simultaneously by different people, they may serve as nexus points

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of community, that absorb conflicts. Conversely, as elements of public worship come to be challenged, and articulated as irredeemably tainted, impure, and tied to unacceptable norms and beliefs, overt clashes over them ensue. These, however, are not merely clashes between groups with different agendas and material interests, but also between wider interpretative patterns, each of which tie together a certain understanding of beings and their interaction, extending into the past and the future. Without understanding how such conflicts are rooted in deep, conflicting emotional and existential concerns, not only for the present, but for the future, we fail to grasp what they are about. It should be noted immediately, however, that this is not only a question of nationalism, and neither does the latter concept refer to a homogenous phenomenon. Rather, nationalism can be studied at different levels: it can be a question of official nationalism, of pervasive tendencies in the public communication of certain norms and narratives ascribed to a nation-state, as a distillation of its ideals, incorporating claims about what it does best, and which its sources of pride are; or it can be a question of wider, more diffuse tendencies. Such tendencies, furthermore, vary widely and are not always easily classifiable within categories such as ethnic or civic. Variants of official nationalism are of course not stable over time, but subject to constant reinterpretation and sometimes drastic shifts. Also, there are norms and narratives ascribed to certain nations that circulate in the media, and in the general population, while, conversely, some rituals and symbols might be described, instead, in terms of a civil religion explicitly tied to the political system and its history. The concept of civil religion, which was originally used by Rousseau, was revived during the latter half of the twentieth century by Robert Bellah to describe some salient themes of modern American politics—such as “the obligation, both collective and individual, to carry out God’s will on earth.”68— as expressed in presidential speeches, rituals, and monuments. While both Rousseau and, originally, Bellah tied the notion to an explicit recognition of a God, it has subsequently been applied to contexts that are not explicitly religious.69 Perhaps we could understand civil religion as those symbols, rituals and narratives that are directly tied to democratic forms of rule? If so, civil religion may be nationalistic, but does not have to be, while nationalism is more pervasive and widespread than civil religion. We may thus speak, with Michael

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Billig, of a “banal nationalism” in the everyday reproduction of nationhood, which is consequently not only a matter of grand ceremonies and (pseudo-) sacred sites and symbols.70 Can we speak of a banal civil religion? Strictly speaking not, in my usage, since I refer to symbols and rituals directly tied to political institutions. However, in a looser sense, people visiting monuments celebrating political institutions and significant events, and the like, could perhaps be considered instances of banal civil religion. When noting the similarities between what can arguably be described as sacred domains in different contexts, however, we should also be aware of crucial differences. The sacred artifacts of nations are typically not ascribed the same powers as the sacred relics of medieval churches.71 The fears and hopes of national narratives need not and often are not directly tied to any eschatological anticipation of divine intervention. There are no monastic complexes of phenomenological exploration tied to secular national narratives, rivaling those of some religious organizations. The very notions of transcendence and the transcendent are indeed ambiguous and may refer to many different things: in the former case, we could refer to a movement venturing beyond something, so that we may speak of phenomenological transcendence as a matter of entering into extraordinary states of consciousness, remembering, however, that the latter pertain to an entire spectrum of possible states, whereas the transcendent could refer to an interpretation of a consistent reality beyond the world of the senses. Although this distinction is hardly stable, for even if we may speak of a transcendent domain, the existence of which is merely a postulate, perhaps motivated by moral considerations (i.e., hopes for divine agency which ultimately provides a desirable solution to the uneven ethical equation of earthly existence), the two may come together in various ways: experiences of phenomenological transcendence may thus be interpreted in terms exactly of an intervention from a transcendent domain, or as signs of a human being having successfully penetrated the boundaries between the immanent world of ordinary existence and the realms of gods and spirits, and the boundary between the two may be conceptualized as more or less fuzzy in the first place. Furthermore, practices of the transgression of customary norms of behavior may also be thought to aid in a breaking of ontological boundaries, which themselves may be considered to cut through the human psyche.

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The beyond of the national community, its transcendence into time, usually extends into what Benedict Anderson calls “secular, serial time,” and the emergence of modern nation-states entailed a shift—albeit empirically, not necessarily a consistent one, obviously—toward symbolically constitutive events and foundational texts bereft of claims of divine intervention and religious revelation.72 Some sociologists have attempted to work out systematic typologies of modes of temporality, tied to social structures; for example, Otthein Rammstedt has suggested four basic temporal horizons: the occasional time of undifferentiated societies, where the fundamental distinction pertains to now and not-now, and where past and future fuse in a mythic time; the cyclical horizon of archaic, hierarchic societies where the basic division separates before and after; the linear time with its basic separation between past, present, and future, with a divine or ideological télos of history; and the linear time with an open future of late modern societies.73 Historical, ideological horizons, furthermore, coexist with what Zygmunt Bauman has memorably called the “pointillist” temporality of contemporary consumerism, which entails the pursuit of individual experiences, rather than the integration into a collective project.74 Thus, commenting on the tragic shooting down of a civilian jet over Ukraine in July 2014, the twin sister of one of the victims allegedly said that “the only comfort I can find is that he crammed the experiences of so many lifetimes into one.”75 The imperative to pursue experiences has indeed become a way of justifying individual existence, even to pass judgment on it, but this has not entailed the end of practices of communicating and symbolically reproducing national identities. Neither has the increased complexity of multicultural societies rendered political rituals obsolete, even though there is a risk of a perceived failure of ritual performance, and the interpretation of the very same symbols and narratives may vary widely, which both renders possible alliances, if such ambiguity is accepted, or at least not politicized, or conversely, bitter conflicts may emerge.76 Finally, it should be observed that we cannot neatly tie the use, repetition, and circulation of publicly sanctioned symbols only to public worship: rather, the power of the state manifests both concretely and symbolically through an entire network of elements that pervades society in its entirety, and may become subject to the same kinds of conflicts, coins being an obvious, everyday example. Also, symbols, sites, and rituals are not merely, of course, a matter of either organized religions or

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the state, but also of transnational as well as sub-national levels of political decision-making, as well as civil society associations. Attempts to clearly distinguish nationalism and civil religion from religion proper are complicated by the fact that it is difficult to define an essence of the nation, let alone of the ambiguous notion of religion. We are dealing with wide categories in both cases, and furthermore, there are many empirical instances where the two fuse and combine in various ways. As for civil religion, the very term is enough to indicate that scholars have studied it in religious terms, as either explicitly religious, or clearly structurally analogous to elements of organized religion. In the end, it comes down to how we wish to use these concepts. So yes, there are important historical continuities as well as structural analogies between churches and nation-states, or theological narratives and those of civil religion, and there are even fascinating parallels between totems in stateless communities and the symbols and rituals of modern nations, but there are also significant differences. This, however, does not entail that we cannot make comparisons, and point to analogies, even as we remain aware of significant differences between contexts. The nation-state, viewed from this angle, could be perceived as an intermediate stage between the religious and the secular pertaining to public worship, in the sense of both the appropriation of religious elements, and the structural analogies between explicitly religious and allegedly secular contexts. The nation-state could be considered to consist, in the most basic analysis, of two major elements: the nation, and the state. Leaving aside the common ambiguities in defining the former—as population, territory, or state—we could define the latter as a recognized center of sovereign power in a given territory, while the nation could be understood in the context of the complex practices of symbolic recognition of a community of people, delimited by constitutive boundaries. What is interesting here is how nationalism serves to reproduce a community symbolically by way of drawing boundaries around certain sites, artifacts, rituals, norms and narratives, some of which are publicly sanctioned and legally regulated. If the state is defined analytically by the two constitutive differences between, on the one hand, state and non-state elements of society, and on the other, the state territory and its exterior (other states, non-state political entities), where does this leave the nation?77 Transcending a simplistic understanding of nationalism, we may break down the state and the nation into

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core, constituent elements, which could be present and absent in alternative forms of political organization, and consider possible interrelations and arrangements. Nationalism is most obviously about historical narratives, about the nation as a more or less clearly demarcated community moving through time, and symbolically tied to certain cultural markers and lands. In this sense, nationalist ideologies are analogous to other ideologies that likewise operate with horizons of collective human agency in chronological history, even if they may orient themselves differently in relation to the visions conjured up of the past and the future. While questions of the temporality or historicity of narratives certainly point to key aspects of collective action, however, so does the organization of public rituals, and the related questions uncovered by a more extensive excavation of further possibilities. Even if we often define secularization in terms of the relative absence of beliefs in divine entities and metaphysical realities, there are a host of relevant dimensions to consider, with a myriad of possible combinations. For example, we may envisage a highly demanding national collective to which, in the eyes of its members, one belongs whether one likes it or not, and which is reinforced and legitimized through publicly, and extensively communicated narratives, symbols, and rituals which, however, are not derived from any recognized religious tradition. Or we may conceive of a state, some of the core symbols of which are clearly Christian either in origin or in actual, undisputable fact, and the national narratives and symbols of which are publicly communicated, albeit incoherently so, and which places stringent demands on its members in terms of economic contributions and the willingness to fight and die to defend it, but which is open to new members according to rather relaxed criteria, and which it is also possible to leave without fearing retribution or other dangerous repercussions. Which of the two is more secular? Here we see that this question, in itself, is not all that interesting. Rather, the interesting question is: how do they restrict or open up certain paths of secularization and transformation? Empirically, the power of states—central power, territorial control, legitimate violence—is legitimized by norms and narratives that are frequently withdrawn from serious contestation, and the challenging of which is met with anger and violence, but also by physical and symbolic delimitations of spatial and temporal domains. Nationalism and civil religion are functionally equivalent to “religion” in legitimizing power, which does not mean that this

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is everything these concepts, norms, narratives, and movements do, just as little as the legitimizing function is all that religious elements in general do, or that all of them do it. Furthermore, there is no guarantee that such practices of communicating a symbolic collective identity are clear and coherent. Still, we can appreciate that legitimizing the power of the state and the rationale for its constitutive boundaries is an important function of nationalist elements and this raises the question whether analogous elements could not do the same, for a modern state? The evidence suggests that this is indeed possible, although to further the discussion, we have to trace the dividing line between “religion” and “nationalism”: obviously, religious as well as nationalist elements may be more or less ethnically and religiously tinged, but the interesting analytical distinctions pertain to the degree to which a certain identity is a question of conscious decisions and if so according to which criteria, the extent to which members of a group are forced to do certain things and what kinds of things, and what types of narratives they are supposed to at least outwardly respect. Hence, national collectives may be open to changes in membership status to a varying degree according to different criteria, as may religious ones. Both may but need not demand extensive engagement from their members, and different kinds of actions may be prescribed or prohibited. Narratives may be concerned with different spatial and temporal perspectives, and ontological assumptions about beings, the relationship of the group to a territory may take different forms, and different modes of temporality may dominate to various extents, as may conceptualizations of human beings, animals, natural phenomena and perhaps spiritual or divine entities. Furthermore, nationalist and religious norms and narratives—to the extent that they can be empirically separated—may be publicly communicated, and if so with various degrees of conscious effort and coherent design, or pervade the wider social landscape, in agreement with or opposition to official versions. Debates on the continuity or surprisingly recent origins of national narratives and identities seem relevant in the sense that the former option appears more closely related to perceiving nations as natural or necessary, whereas the latter appears to point in the direction of contingency. This is deceptive, however: if nations are theorized in terms of adaptation to an environment, they may be relatively “necessary” in relation to that specific environment, which is itself subject to historical changes, and shaped by the

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very actors it shapes. Even so, however, even if we were to accept that nations are, if not transhistorically necessary, at least structurally favored in a certain environment—of industrial economies, mass warfare, and a conceptual trend toward an immanent horizon of chronological history and collective human agency as a means of salvation78—that does not preclude alternative arrangements, not only in the sense that these may thrive despite being in some sense structurally disadvantaged, but also in the sense that arrangements which are analogous to nations may enjoy the same advantages; as could, conceivably, more dissimilar arrangements if they find their own ways of being competitive. The argument that the nation-state enjoyed a structural advantage in a modern socioeconomic context, and perhaps continues to enjoy one today, does seem plausible, prima facie, but even so, we may think of analogous forms of organizations with the same advantages, and we may think of many dimensions of possible differentiation even between what at first glance seems to belong to the same overarching categories, and the dangers of conceptual stretching remain relevant descriptively as well as normatively. We may thus quarrel about the dispersion of identity groups in space, and the extent to which belonging to them can be based on conscious decisions or clear criteria and what that implies. These debates, however, too easily gloss over the observation that the nation is not simply an entity coinciding—or one that should coincide, as the basic creed of nationalism states79—with the constitutive boundaries of a political community. The nation-state traverses a line of its own, extended in intermediate stages between the religious and the secular. It is not only the flat community of territorial borderlines and criteria for membership, it is also a peculiar solution restricting the past and the potential future dynamics of political secularization. Thus, the normative questions that emanate from challenging national narratives and ideals, as well as the nation-state as a form of political organization, include the questions concerning public worship. That is, should we maintain shared political rituals? Should we also to tie these to a symbolical structure and a historical narrative transcending the immediately existing community into a wider horizon? All of these elements are actually present within contemporary allegedly secular liberal democracies, but ought they to be? Furthermore, regardless of whether we accept and desire to defend the nation-state or not, or self-identify as nationalists or not, we are still stuck with the question of the political status of

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symbols and rituals. Nationhood is reproduced not only through maintaining outer borders, but also through linguistic conventions and mental constructs. Apart from obvious institutional arrangements—educational, socioeconomic, military, judicial—and rhetorical elements, nationhood is also symbolically reproduced through collective rituals as well as works of art, being attached to a host of symbolic objects, sites, and buildings, as well as recurring, ritual gatherings. Now, we could consider transcending the nation in two logically distinct senses. On the one hand, we may strive to transcend it spatially, either by dissolving its boundaries, or adding layers of political decision-making above or between them. On the other hand, however, we may rest content with the present constitutive boundaries of our community—even though the degree of their porosity is a question that could also be considered—but desire to replace the nation rhetorically and institutionally with some other ideal, such as constitutional patriotism or non-nationalist republicanism. Obviously, these options could be combined. True, nationalist movements, especially in Europe, have entailed a movement of particularization as opposed to earlier dynastic empires and religious communities—however, they have also at times represented the transcendence of previous cultural and socioeconomic boundaries into new national communities. If we take care not to equate nationalism with its most violent varieties, but look instead to the properties of public worship, it is not impossible to imagine that the entire Earth could conceivably become a kind of civic “nation” in this respect—that is, regarding the type of historicity of its narratives and the structural properties of its public worship, which would then be tied to a global, virtual community. Although this is highly unlikely to happen in the near future, the point is that this is not due to some logically necessary limitation of either nationalism or public worship. New communication technologies make vast democracies feasible, but there is much path-dependency in the present world and absent a huge pressure from without, people in stable, prosperous nation-states are content to hold on to them, as indeed seems rational given a reasonably good track record. In the latter case, however, we are dealing, not with spatial boundaries or criteria of membership, but nevertheless with the transformation and innovation of institutional setups as well as collective forms of worship, and potentially with practices analogous to these, but beyond them.

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Either way, we should consider practices of public worship. Those who envisage and strive toward some post-national—replacing the nation and its symbols and narratives as sources of symbolic legitimacy, for example with republican or constitutional patriotism—or trans-national—transcending the territorial and institutional boundaries of the nation-state—community, should also take these features into account, or risk rendering themselves weakened in relation to competitors who do take them into account, and use them efficiently. The same goes, really, for any kind of political project desiring to transcend the nation-state not only geographically, but also to replace or radically transform it in terms of collective autonomy and a monopoly on violence; they should all take these elements into account, and develop a strategy of how to deal with them. But those defending national ideals and existing nation-states, whether they are civic, liberal, cultural, or ethnic nationalists, should likewise take a stance on publicly sanctioned rituals, symbols, norms, and narratives. Liberal democracy incorporates a series of tensions, counterbalancing components and restrictions on majority rule, for example, election systems that do not actually channel the preferences of the majority into corresponding outcomes, due to peculiar institutional mechanisms or parallel, formalized or wholly informal, channels of influence, and individual and minority rights that are difficult to challenge and restrict the will of the majority. Is nationalism, however, somehow un-democratic in essence? Historically, nationalist movements have of course coexisted with and legitimized projects of liberalization and democratization, but is there something to nationalism that is inherently contrary to the essence, spirit, or culture of democracy? Not really—not so long as decisions on the reproduction of nationhood are made democratically, whatever that means, more precisely—for example, following from the will of the majority, or being in accordance with liberal democracy, or resulting from open deliberation of an educated and enlightened demos. Elements of nationalism, however, coexist tensely with liberal notions of a neutral, secular state, and hence it is hardly surprising that they at times come under attack. Conversely, of course, liberals may accept and defend nationalism and the nation-state.80 Regardless of our stance on the nation-state as a restricted community, delimited by certain constitutive boundaries, that is not the end of the matter, since nations are not simply bounded communities, but also reproduced symbolically by publicly sanctioned practices of what I have

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called public worship, incorporating the combination of symbols, narratives and rituals. By way of conclusion, I wish to direct attention to the way in which what we call religion may tie together diverse elements into a functioning whole, to great effect, in a certain social environment. For example, the emerging Christian Church of antiquity managed, with great difficulty and in constant conflict with what became branded as heresies, not the least those commonly bundled together as Gnosticism, to tie different elements together, to connect elements of phenomenological exploration and experimentation, with the socially cohesive elements of proclamations of faith and the performance of ritual, within an institutional framework which was both durable, and addressed widespread, perceived problems of the then contemporary, Mediterranean, world. Christians, according to witnesses, attracted at times reluctant admiration by way of their internal solidarity, their helping of the poor, their modesty in food, drink and sexual behavior, their refusal to admire casual brutality as entertainment, their transcending at least to an extent private self-interest and socioeconomic divisions; and, of course, by what can only be called the fanaticism of some of them when facing brutal punishment and certain death.81 Religious traditions and institutions have amounted to entire constellations, tying together, albeit often with great difficulties and internal strife, diverse elements into an effective whole, both conceptually and institutionally. Thus, tensions have played out institutionally and theologically, for example in the emergence and solidification of early Christianity, in the transformation of the phenomenological exploration of experimental religion into regulated coenobitic coexistence.82 This is neither to assert, then, absurdly, that religious traditions are internally homogeneous, monolithical, and unchangeable, nor that they are all alike. The point here is not to denigrate internal conflicts or subsequent splits into competing institutional and interpretative strands, but rather to appreciate how such competing projects tie together institutional, heuristic, symbolic, ritual, normative, and narrative elements. This in turn allows us to consider actual and possible constellations of analogous elements in the contemporary world, whether we considered them to be religious or secular, and in so doing, we should reflect upon the differences between the contemporary global space and the cultural spaces in which earlier religious

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and philosophical traditions emerged. In the following chapter, I will thus restate the question from which we set out, concerning the impact of religious traditions on contemporary political debates, but in a global, world-historical context. As a consequence, I will turn to the conceptual framework proposed by Karl Jaspers, in coining, possibly by mistake, the notion of an Axial Age.83

3

Axial Echoes in Global Space

3.1 Public worship beyond the state? On Christmas Eve in 1968, the three astronauts of Apollo 8, stuck in a tiny metallic cone orbiting the Moon, addressed the inhabitants of planet Earth by reading out passages from the book of Genesis in a live television broadcast. The following year, the American flag was planted on the Moon by the crew of Apollo 11, and in 1971, Alan Shepard saw fit to hit a few golf balls during his lunar visit. “The magnitude of the space enterprise,” Hannah Arendt wrote, in the 1960s, “seems to me beyond dispute, and all objections raised against it on the purely utilitarian level . . . sound to me slightly absurd, out of tune with the things that are at stake and whose consequences today appear still quite unpredictable.”1 It was the triumph, Arendt claimed, but also the tragedy of the sciences to have arrived, if at first only abstractly, at an Archimedean point, from which Earth could be observed from the outside, and thus “we have found a way to act on the earth as though we disposed of terrestrial nature from outside.”2 And yet, having arrived at such a point in concrete reality, from which Earth could be actually observed from the outside, it seemed that the significance of the event eluded us, and very quickly dissipated, despite the stunning images of, say, the Apollo 17 crew’s Blue Marble or Voyager 1’s Pale Blue Dot, which have inspired environmental movements. One of the stranger aspects of the outcome of the space race was the quite sudden and unexpected loss of interest from the public after the first moon landing was completed. While Neil Armstrong’s peculiarly disrupted words— “That’s one small step for .  .  . man, one giant leap for mankind”—are still famous, by 1971 Alan Shepard was playing golf on the moon, and few seemed to care much anymore; the very last manned Moon mission ended in 1972.

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As Paul Harris remarked in The Observer, commenting on the death of Neil Armstrong, the moon landing seemed to herald something, which never really came to pass: “At the time it had seemed the beginning of a remarkable new journey. But it was not. Rather, it was the summit of a nation’s achievement. It was a peak of progress.”3 Crucially, the late 1960s not only witnessed the culmination of the race to the moon, but also the parallel development of the dramatic rise and rapid dissipation of a sudden revolutionary fervor which had gripped large numbers of people in the Western world, as well as east of the Iron Curtain; for a while, radical transformations, beyond the order of either the ruling parties of the Soviet satellite states or the representative democracies of the West, seemed like a real possibility. While these new political spaces did open up, it was only a short while before they quickly closed again. The late 1960s might have appeared, at the time, to signal the arrival of something new, the imminent opening up of outer space to human exploration, or the radical transformation of industrial societies into egalitarian, postindustrial ones. In hindsight, however, space was not colonized, and representative democracy as well as socioeconomic egalitarianism reached their peaks in that era or soon after, to be replaced by a trend toward increasing inequality and worries about growing democratic deficits. The questions raised by this confluence of the late 1960s and the developments of subsequent decades concern the interrelations between different kinds of space: there is the calculable spacetime of the natural sciences, with planet Earth revealed as a tiny speck in the periphery of the galaxy, but there is also the geographical space of the planet itself, with its patterns of interaction, of violent conflicts and trade routes, its flows of goods and people; there are the political spaces of democracy and deliberation, virtual as well as concrete, but also the political spaces carved into the earth by the notion of nation-states, with their claims to sovereignty and a monopoly on legitimate violence; and all of these are part of the trajectory of the history of humanity itself, with its sudden, explosive changes in the last five millennia or so—indeed, history in the narrower sense of written history, itself constitutes a kind of cultural explosion, located in a bracketed timespace of relative but precarious stability and security, in-between natural—and potentially manmade—disasters, which could swiftly wipe the species off the globe, signaling the sudden end of its brief existence. In this situation, the critical thinker may indeed strive to

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view the world holistically, as if from the outside. If so, drawing upon which religious traditions, if any, should one address its inhabitants, far below? This is the theme from which we set out, but now played out, potentially, globally and world-historically. Karl Jaspers observes, in his 1949 Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte, that a number of conceptual and institutional transformations across the Eurasian landmass, from China and India to Israel and ancient Greece, in the first millennium BC, exhibit fascinating similarities, both in terms of being chronologically cotemporaneous and in basic conceptual and institutional innovations.4 This suggestion has been taken up in recent decades by several prominent scholars. Thus, Shmuel Eisenstadt summarizes core similarities, recurring in Axial Age transformations, pertaining to the division into an immanent and a transcendent ontological domain, whereby the latter is seen as superior not merely in terms of the strength of its divine inhabitants, but morally, thus as offering the promise of a liberation from the sufferings of existing in the immanent domain, or the world as we know it. This in turn gave rise to competing paths to salvation or liberation from worldly woes.5 The movements growing out of Axial Age transformations crossed established boundaries, for example, in the words of Paul, “We were all baptized by one Spirit so as to form one body—whether Jews or Gentiles, slave or free—and we were all given the one Spirit to drink.”6 They also, however, erected new ones, resulting for example in recurring conflicts between Jews and Christians. The notion of an Axial Age obviously has to be qualified in several respects. We should be open to a nuanced approach in estimating similarities and differences between traditions which are both geographically and conceptually far apart. Furthermore, the Axial Age itself is chronologically restricted, whereas what we could call broader axial traits or themes are not: historically, neither the growth of Christianity, nor the rise of Islam, belong to the Axial Age. Conceptually, however, they surely exhibit what we could call axial traits.7 It cannot be denied that the major axial traditions and subsequent innovations drawing upon them are hardly homogenous, and there have been many alterations to them. The notion of an Axial Age, then, can of course be criticized; one may wonder to what an extent it is really possible to generalize across distinct traditions, and one may also question which traditions should be seen as seminal, and where to put the chronological emphasis. What can

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hardly be contested, however, is that thinkers from the first millennium BC both remain relevant in contemporary discussions to an extent that those preceding them do not, and that their influence cast a long shadow up until the present—people still debate Buddha, Plato, and the Hebrew prophets, there are still Taoists and Confucians, and many of the major later religious and philosophical developments clearly draw upon axial sources of inspirations, the emergence of Islam being an obvious example. The point of bringing up the Axial Age, presently, however, is not to delve deeper into discussions about the similarities and differences of the various axial traits and traditions, or to speculate about the causes of their relatively simultaneous appearance. Rather, the point is to emphasize how conceptual innovations develop historically, and to raise the question concerning their continued relevance today. We remain very much influenced by axial themes. It is obviously an exaggeration to say of the Axial Age that, as Henry Parkes put it, “no really new ideas have been added since that time.”8 Nevertheless, it arguably remains true that—to paraphrase Walter Benjamin—contemporary political norms and narratives are related to axial themes as a blotting pad is related to ink: they are saturated with them.9 Norms and narratives are transmitted by the constant reinterpretation and pragmatic modification of traditions and their institutional set-ups, but world history as narrowly conceived of—the last 5,000 years or so—entails a brief timespan, and an explosive process, landing us abruptly in the present. Do we need a radical conceptual rupture, and if so, of what kind? Is it time for a new Axial Age? Are we in the midst of one now? Or perhaps we already had one, and we are living in its wake, in the political and philosophical surges created by massive vessels traversing the oceans of thought, or perhaps strange monsters navigating depths we cannot hope to reach? Whether we are in, or even behind, an epoch witnessing the invention of concepts and narratives powerful and original enough to rival those of the great axial thinkers, is not merely a question for debate, but actually one of pure speculation: we do not and cannot know the future. Hence, we have no idea whether, say, the influence of Marx will, over time, rival that of Gautama. The last few decades have seen the emergence and proliferation, and indeed the caustic critiques, of discourses on globalization. Critics advance a number of reasonable points in seeking to deflate the bubble of a buzzword, ranging

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from the non-linearity of processes of increasing economic interdependence and the presence of previous periods of cultural and economic exchange across vast distances, to the ambiguity of the very concept of globalization, and exaggerated predictions concerning the alleged obsolescence of the state.10 Nevertheless, it cannot be seriously denied that we have witnessed, in the postwar era and up until today, a rapid increase in economic interdependence, in financial flows and foreign investment, as well as the advent of novel technologies of transportation and communication, allowing for the increasing ease of the movement of goods, services, people, and information. The contemporary world is witnessing the dramatic continuation of processes resulting in the creation of a truly global space, tying together, through technologies of transportation and communication, local, regional, national, and macro-regional spaces, with the possibility for instant interaction across vast distances, as well as the triumphs of scientific-technological developments tied to yet another set of ontological interpretations. Furthermore, the gradual uncovering of the depth—and indeed, from a certain angle, brevity—of actual human history adds perspectives previously unknown. A truly planetary space has emerged gradually since the onset of the great journeys of discovery of the early modern era, when Europeans set out to find new trade routes as well as to conquer and colonize vast tracts of the world. Increasingly, the planet has been mapped and measured, and more recently, it has become routine to survey its surface from space, but it remains an overwhelming experience to view it from afar, as in the famous Blue Marble and Pale Blue Dot photographs. While a global space was indeed imagined by some as far back as in antiquity, the actual capacity to survey the entire planet from outside, and indeed to photograph it from various distances, sometimes to great dramatic effect, is entirely new, as are a host of new technologies of production, communication, and transportation. What does it entail that we can now actually see the world from the outside? Or as Hannah Arendt puts it, to gather “the infinite horizons, which were temptingly and forbiddingly open to all previous ages, into a globe whose majestic outlines and detailed surface” we now know as we know the palm of our hand.11 And to what an extent are the problems and crises of this new global space different from those problems plaguing people of previous, and pre-global, cultural spaces? Here arises a possible problem, to the extent that

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there is a certain discrepancy between our critical perspectives, which are largely dependent upon religious and philosophical forbears that grew out of a cultural and socioeconomic context very different from our own, and our actual situation. If so, we have to bridge that gap. However, this may not be an either/ or situation: it may be the case, not that either religious traditions, or ideological innovations, entirely lack means of addressing some salient contemporary problems; it may simply be that our appropriation of them tends to be a bit skewed, so that we only tend to draw upon some themes, but not others. The fact that conceptual figures and institutions originating in the cultural spaces of the Axial Age are currently in the process of adapting to and facing the consequences of the de facto formation of a global space is truly fascinating. And here arises a possible problem, if there is a certain discrepancy between our dominant critical perspectives and our actual situation. If so, we have to bridge that gap. This, however, need not be an either/or situation: it may not be that axial traditions entirely lack means of addressing some salient contemporary problems; it may simply be that our appropriation of them tends to be a bit skewed, so that we overemphasize some themes, and gloss over others. The questions which seem to suggest themselves, then, are to what an extent axial figures of thought are still descriptively and normatively relevant to our own global space, and what that implies for the crafting of contemporary critical thinking. In The Gay Science, Nietzsche, under the rubric New Battles, presents a beautiful metaphor: After Buddha was dead, they still showed his shadow in a cave for centuries—a tremendous, gruesome shadow. God is dead; but given the way people are, there may still for millennia be caves in which they show his shadow.—And we—we must still defeat his shadow as well!12

Viewed from this angle, modern political history becomes a projection screen for certain themes: quasi-eschatological narratives, pseudo-sacred artifacts, ritual-like patterns of action—those are shadows in the modern political landscape. Shadows, however, may also hide and obscure; or to put it differently, it may not only be the case that religious elements are transferred and transformed, but also that some elements that are closely associated with organized religion are, for that very reason, glossed over, or unreflectedly rejected. At other times, Nietzsche resorts to the analogy of echoes of a religious

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heritage, playing out even in secular settings: a figure of thought that calls for a closer reflection on what would be the source of those sounds, reverberating across wide contexts.13 As for conscious strategies in relating to religious traditions, several broad categories can be discerned among modern and contemporary thinkers. First, there is the strategy of reversal. Here it is a matter, as the term indicates, of reversing and breaking with inherited traits—derived from certain religious traditions—which are perceived to either be inherently destructive to crucial aims, or to have become so in a contemporary context. Hence, there could be the risk of an exaggerated altruism and a vapid universalism, resulting in the erosion of concrete communities, and the disenchantment and destruction of nature. Prominent contemporary defenders of the strategy of reversal can be found within the French so-called New Right (Nouvelle Droite), for example, in the works of Alain de Benoist and others “who,” as de Benoist puts it, “share Nietzsche’s belief that the conversion of Europe to Christianity and the more or less complete integration of the European mind into the Christian mentality, was one of the most catastrophic events in world history.”14 If de Benoist is the grand old man of the Nouvelle Droite, Guillaume Faye could be considered its enfant terrible, and although Faye has criticized de Benoist’s positions, he, too, draws upon a Nietzschean critique of the Christian heritage, although differently, putting it to different aims.15 Secondly, there is the strategy of containment, which has proceeded from a critique of the immanentization of eschatology in the formation of modern ideologies. The most prominent advocate of this strategy is probably Eric Voegelin, who believed that a movement of immanentization of the Eschaton results in the destructive ambition to create the perfect community on Earth, led by elites inspired by immanent prophets or visionaries, and resulting in violence and destruction. This pattern rendered much of modern politics Gnostic to Voegelin’s mind.16 Hence, eschatology has to be contained within a religious framework, and not be allowed to spill into the immanent domain of political action. However, the strategy of containment need not, of course, rest on alleged parallels between Gnosticism and modern politics. It is enough to criticize the dangers of immanent eschatology and its views of perfectibility, requiring drastic and destructive action by the insightful, to transform actual communities.

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Thirdly, and finally, however, there is also the strategy of transformation: this strategy entails extending some salient religious elements, but in so doing, disconnecting them from their ties to a message of divine revelation, or a comparable metaphysical narrative. Broadly speaking, many Marxists could be said to belong in this camp, attempting to extract what was valuable in religious promises and hopes for salvation and transformation, but dispensing with divine agency and the belief in the metaphysical or mythical content of religious narratives. More broadly, however, anyone who draws upon elements that have emerged within religious traditions, while separating them from any necessary ties to these traditions and their metaphysical claims, could be said to belong in this camp. While the strategies outlined above can be analytically separated, any actual thinker or movement could of course mix them, pertaining to different elements, that is, argue that some inherited elements need to be reversed, others contained, and yet others transformed and disconnected from the specific tradition(s) within which they originated. The above concerns strategies in relating to the content of religious traditions, but we should also consider, then, which content in them would be particularly relevant. One common response to the present global situation entails the promotion of human rights. The themes of human dignity and autonomy have been picked up by liberals, social democrats, and libertarians alike, and it goes without saying that these contested concepts have been hugely influential in the discourse on human rights, where a Kantian legacy has been broadly egalitarian, anthropocentric, and secular and entailed connections, close but often opaque, between dignity and autonomy. Wider Christian elements have also been seen as constitutive to the emergence of the centrality of human dignity. Habermas, for example, prominently, has argued that “the appeal to human rights feeds off the outrage of the humiliated at the violation of their human dignity.” This notion of “human dignity,” he maintains, is “the moral ‘source’ from which all of the basic rights derive their sustenance.”17 And it, in turn, can be traced genealogically to “the medieval discussions of human beings’ creation in likeness to God. . . . Everyone must face the Last Judgement as an irreplaceable and unique person.”18 An advocacy of human rights can of course be combined with hopes for a cosmopolitan, political development: “Human rights,” Habermas, again, writes, “constitute a realistic utopia as

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they no longer paint deceptive images of a social utopia which guarantees collective happiness but anchor the ideal of a just society in the institutions of constitutional states themselves.”19 Thus, “Human rights rely on finding institutional embodiment in a politically constituted world society.”20 As a consequence, he hopes for the composition of a General Assembly comprising representatives of the citizens and the states [which] would ensure that the competing justice perspectives of world citizens, on the one hand, and of national citizens, on the other, would be taken into account and brought into balance.21

The recent decades have indeed seen a broad shift toward human rights, in particular, as a utopian horizon, and toward rights in general, and away from Marxist calls for revolutionary transformation. Of course, egalitarian approaches centered on the discourse of justice, non-discrimination, and equal rights—supplanting the dignités, or feudal privileges of the ancien régime with the equal dignity of all, and the rights of man with the rights of all human beings—may be attacked on numerous grounds, pertaining both to the universalist aspirations of their advocates and to their content, whatever their range of application. Human rights may thus be criticized for being selective or politicized in the interests of the already powerful, and it has been argued that “the human rights corpus, though well-meaning, is fundamentally Eurocentric” and that its narrative of savages, victims, and saviors “rejects the cross-contamination of cultures and instead promotes a Eurocentric ideal.”22 Critics also argue that “traditional human rights standards categorize violations in ways that exclude women, eliding critical issues.”23 Furthermore, we tend to enter into debates about the extent of national sovereignty in relation to the responsibility to protect human dignity, distinctions between hard and soft law, the inconsistencies of victor’s justice and the selectivity lacuna24—which entails that the importance of human rights is highlighted, and breaches condemned, in some cases, but not in others—the potential role of reconciliation and truth commissions25 as opposed to trials, quiet diplomacy, and different forms of sanctions as opposed to open protests and interventions, and the problems and possibilities of international institutions. It might also be that “human rights need to adjust to the context of globalization, in much the same way they adjusted earlier to the Holocaust,” and that “in a globalized world, the human rights obligations of states are simply not enough. Mechanisms need

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to be created that ensure the accountability of other actors” and that “these actors include influential economic powers whose actions drive people into poverty.”26 Regardless of which versions of human rights we advocate, however, we should also reflect upon the relations between these rights, and practices of public worship. The last century witnessed not only the spread of global capitalism and the increase of the power of human beings over other species as well as nature in a wider sense, but also the rise, triumph, and, according to some, the beginning of the end of the nation-state paradigm as a global phenomenon, in conjunction with the decline or transformation of alternative modes of socioeconomic organization to those of capitalist mixed economies, with different degrees of state intervention and planning. Culturally and legally, nation-states came to be a presupposed form of political organization, a development some lament and others enthusiastically embrace as the peak of human sociopolitical progress, while, simultaneously, macro-regional cooperation has intensified in parts of the world, and repeated attempts have been made to transcend the widespread capture of the political and moral imagination by the nation-state27—and nation-states, in turn, have utilized publicly sanctioned narratives, symbols, and rituals. Public worship is controversial since it is connected to the question of special obligations, and the tension between symbolic and constitutive boundaries in contemporary liberal democracies. There is thus the empirical situation, from which some draw normative implications, that most people prioritize compatriots over other human beings.28 Not only is moral cosmopolitanism difficult to translate into practical policies due to the weakness of international institutions in comparison with national ones, but perhaps also because of the constant symbolic, and publicly sanctioned, reproduction of nationhood; at the very least, the latter will easily come to be seen as a problem by both moral and political cosmopolitans. As David Held puts it, “The paradox of our times can be stated simply: the collective issues we must grapple with are increasingly global and, yet, the means for addressing these are national, local, weak and incomplete.”29 A renaissance for cosmopolitan ideals occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a host of suggestions have been advanced in recent decades. According to some, this new wave of cosmopolitanism is “neither cosmopolitan enough, nor

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new enough.”30 It is still too dependent, some thus argue, on the nation-state and an understanding of the world associated with it, and it tends to rely too heavily on a Kantian and Eurocentric conceptualization of cosmopolitanism. The term cosmopolitanism derives from the Greek kosmopolites, “citizen of the world” or “citizen of the cosmos,” used by cynic and stoic thinkers. It is not known with certainty who actually coined this term, but Diogenes of Sinope may well have; at any rate, he is the one most famously associated with its coming into usage.31 But it may mean many things: it may signify a reluctance to admit a primary loyalty to any political community, or it can imply a desire for a worldwide or global political community, or the striving toward a multilayered citizenship with rights and perhaps duties at all levels, possibly from the local to the global. It may signal a sense of solidarity with all of humanity, transcending political divisions and borderlines, or a global responsibility including the entire planet and its ecosystems. It may exclude a patriotic attachment to one’s native land, or we may want to complement sentiments of national or civic patriotism with a cosmopolitan one. If we desire to extend citizenship legally and institutionally, this may include its civil, political, social, and environmental or ecological aspects, or only some of them. Ambitious proposals have been made to strengthen institutions of cooperation at a global level, while some have criticized “a comprehensive liberal cosmopolitanism” which “is analytically beautiful . . . but . . . of neither theoretical nor empirical use when confronting the reality of international relations,”32 and more minimal variants of universalism and allegedly more pragmatic approaches to cosmopolitanism have been suggested.33 But what about public worship in relation to cosmopolitan proposals? The strategies of what I have called reversal and containment are not uncommon when it comes to collective symbols and rituals. These are sometimes perceived to be at least obsolete and unnecessary and at worst divisive and destructive, and hence, it could be argued, should either be abolished, or contained. The latter strategy could simply entail keeping them within the frameworks of organized religious communities, but outside of politics, or of the shared, public sphere, or some other delimitation that captures and contains the dangerous and disruptive potential of symbols, rituals, and collective gatherings. Conversely, however, the strategy of transformation could entail removing ethnic and religious traces from rituals, symbols, and

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narratives, and use the latter to further cosmopolitan aims. The advocacy of a cosmopolitan public worship could be supported by claims that cultural as well as territorial boundaries are morally irrelevant, or perhaps that we need increasingly to cooperate in the face of growing global challenges, and that this requires strengthening either moral or political cosmopolitanism, or both in tandem. Indeed, Kant, one of the greatest sources of inspiration for human rights thinking and cosmopolitan theorizing as well as in several other areas of contemporary political philosophy, hinted at this possibility. Kant’s proposals concerning a possible cosmopolitan development remain relevant, in that his sketch of the increasingly peaceful interrelations between republican governments, entering into a league of nations, and becoming economically interdependent, has received empirical support, sometimes visualized in terms of a Kantian triangle, indicating that economic interdependence, democracy, and international institutions do in fact decrease the risks of violent conflicts.34 Also, Kant’s demarcation of questions of the existence of God and his hopes for public reason serve as important sources of inspiration for contemporary projects of deliberative democracy and public reason, where it is hoped that while we may disagree about fundamental metaphysical issues, we may agree on conceptions of justice and rights, by way of a reasonable deliberation.35 Kant also maintained, however, that there is something to religious rituals, which may be morally elevating: “The oft-repeated solemn ritual of renewal, continuation, and propagation . . . under the laws of equality (communion) . . . has in it something great which expands people’s narrow, selfish and intolerant cast of mind, especially in religious matters, to the idea of a cosmopolitan moral community.” However, “to boast that God has attached special graces to the celebration of this solemn ritual, and to incorporate among the articles of faith the proposition that the ritual, though a purely ecclesiastical action, is in addition a means of grace,” Kant adds, “is a delusion of religion which cannot but work counter to the spirit of religion.”36 One could conceivably envisage using symbols and rituals in the service of both moral and political variants of cosmopolitanism. In the former case, the ambition could be either to actively encourage cosmopolitan sentiments, or at least to see to it that existing practices do not counter the core principles of a cosmopolitan project. In the latter case, it becomes a question of deciding what public worship should be tied to: for example, should national practices

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be supplanted, or complemented by, supra-national ones? A comprehensive cosmopolitan public worship in this latter sense, however, hardly appears realistic—even the European Union, after all, the most advanced example of an attempt at erecting a transnational democratic entity, has encountered problems with a hesitation to acknowledge the state-like and symbolic aspect of the organization, and attendant debates on democratic deficits: as one commentator observes, on the rejection of the proposed Constitutional Treaty, “the use of words such as ‘laws,’ ‘minister,’ ‘flag’ or ‘anthem’ and .  .  . ‘constitution’” actually “provoked a psychological shock which proved to be larger than the legal nature and substantive content of the Constitutional Treaty.”37 While resistance to European integration is hardly only a matter of these aspects, it highlights tensions in the relations between states and transnational entities, prominently the European Union, when it comes to the ritualistic and symbolic articulation of community. Furthermore, arguing against the state as such, in defense of peace, equality, and democracy reminds me of a cartoon from an old issue of the New Yorker I saw some years ago (I cannot now find the reference but it does not matter; even if this cartoon were a purely hypothetical one, which it is not, it would still serve to illustrate my point), from the time of Roosevelt’s presidency, the gist of which was the Republican candidate arguing, during an election campaign, along the lines of “we need a strong hand to steer us through these dangerous times; and therefore we need to remove that strong and steady hand which is now doing just that”—I do not remember the exact formulation, but the point of it was of course the absurdity of the argument. That European nation-states have managed, at best, to both reign in excessive nationalism and excessive capitalism, by embracing moderate forms of nationalism drawing upon shared norms, narratives, symbols, and rituals, while promoting peace and cooperation, as well as to establish welfare systems to avoid the worst aspects of capitalism by means of democratic reformism rather than revolution, appears to me to be great achievements indeed, and still to an extent underappreciated. This is a great legacy of the latter half of the twentieth century, which stands in stark contrast to the horrific record of the first half of the century. This is not to deny the obvious: that the reach of nation-states is limited, and that some of them are awful. Nevertheless, the European, reformist nation-state is a great invention. No other political entity has managed to achieve the same or

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even similarly positive results—in terms of both security and socioeconomic equality—under the conditions of an industrial economy, while, conversely, those parts of the world where people suffer the most in terms of violence and poverty, suffer from an absence of strong states. Perhaps we should simply strive for the whole world to “get to Denmark”38— that is, not to immigrate to Denmark (where the whole world would hardly be welcome) but rather, to attempt to create a globe of peaceful, prosperous, non-corrupt, stable, and cooperating sovereign liberal-democratic nationstates. Whether this is indeed possible under the present structural conditions, culturally, economically, and militarily, is of course another question. Cosmopolitans, furthermore, will continue to argue for more or less extensive, and not necessarily utopian,39 arrangements to address global imbalances of wealth and opportunity and some will doubtless reason like Natasha Lennard, that when asked the question of “what do you propose instead?” to the present, global, capitalist order: “If you had a blood-sucking monster on your face, I wouldn’t ask you what I should put there instead. I’d vanquish the bloodsucking monster.”40 Others will claim that contemporary “champagne liberals,” producing the discourse on cosmopolitanism, consist of or aid previously captured elites, which are in the process of freeing themselves from the fetters of state-imposed egalitarianism.41 And as Craig Calhoun puts it, the argument that nationalism is itself an intolerant and aggressive ideology in need of replacement rests on “an image of ‘bad nationalism’” with Nazi Germany as a paradigmatic example, that is empirically dubious when generalized, and, as he argues, “Advocates of a postnational Europe—or world—do themselves and theory no favors by equating nationalism with ethnonationalism and understanding this primarily through its most distasteful examples.”42 Nationalism, however, operates at different levels of depth, culturally, with varying degrees of reflexivity: that is, an explicit anti-nationalist may well be an ardent nationalist, implicitly, and even if a world of nation-states does not necessarily produce explicit nationalists, it does produce nation-state dwellers. Of course, aside from the normative issue, the state may be considered obsolete—and indeed, the state has been written off more times than I care to remember.43 And yet it marches on, largely undeterred, and to the extent that sovereignty has indeed been hollowed out—or perhaps more correctly, been rendered ambivalent—this is a highly selective development, and skewed in

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favor of powerful states.44 If, however, we do not believe in the feasibility of either a cosmopolitan public worship, or a wholesale rejection of the state, perhaps we could argue in favor of abolishing public worship within existing states. This could be motivated, for example, by recourse to the need for an increased porosity of territorial borders, and an increased plasticity of cultural boundaries, in a world where people would be endowed with, or come to acquire, a much greater autonomy of movement;45 a world, that is, of mass migration between countries and multicultural societies within them.

3.2

The state beyond public worship?

Entering the debate on public worship at the current moment entails stepping into a situation in which societies are becoming increasingly divided, on the grounds of differing perceptions of wider social trends; perhaps we could speak of a European duck-rabbit, where people perceive the same broader trends, but interpret them in widely disparate ways: they quarrel not only about the facts (although they quarrel about them too) but above all over the Gestalt or holistic character of present developments, and which shadows they cast into the future.46 At the extreme ends of the spectrum, one side sees a morally justified movement toward empirical and normative multiculturalism and, hopefully, cosmopolitanism, threatened by right-wing and religious radicalism alike, while the other sees the descent into catastrophic social dissolution and ethnic or racial displacement, as a consequence of irresponsible policies of mass migration, egged on by lying politicians and the dishonest mainstream media. Furthermore, these debates are intermingled with the empirically related but analytically distinct ones on political correctness and hate speech. More generally, both in public and academic debates, people are separated according not only to differing normative concerns and moral intuitions, but also pertaining to different risk-assessments and estimations of causal factors and the predictive shadows they cast into the future; in reality, of course, given the complex causality of social phenomena, we are all guessing, albeit in a more or less coherent and empirically supported manner. At the national level, in liberal democracies, there is a rather narrow range of ideological themes dominating public debates, and most parties

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fundamentally agree on the most basic issues. This is not to trivialize to the extent that we believe that voting does not matter; that is clearly not the case. Still, there is widespread agreement on basic rights and freedoms, on some version of a capitalist mixed economy, on liberal and in most cases overwhelmingly representative democracy, and on a language of justice, equality, and rights as the dominant critical discourse on what ought to be done and what should be criticized. Even the recent rise of populist politics as well as illiberal tendencies across the Western world, despite their occasional successes being viewed with great surprise, and interpreted by both advocates as well as critics in terms of a basic restructuring, for better or worse, of the realm of political possibilities, has so far failed to fundamentally alter this state of affairs.47 But why does this feel, to some, like a gray dead end? Like such a stale repetition of official mantras that have lost their capacity to excite anyone anymore? Perhaps because democracy, despite expanding geographically, has in some ways petrified, failed to develop, and even regressed, during the past half century. Indeed, some sense an almost claustrophobic lack of palatable options, a frenetic standstill to speak with theorists of acceleration.48 Although joy about the spread of the model of liberal democracy and the market economy at the expense of all actual and ideological alternatives may be dismissed as an example of naïve liberal triumphalism, it is difficult, wise after the event, to be terribly enthusiastic about either real socialist or fascist competitors to liberal democracies. We could still ask, however, about the many other ideological branches, both those that are still alive and well and never really went away, such as the many variants of Marxism and postMarxism which were never bound to any project of state socialism, as well as those which were once flowering, only to later wither away. Alongside the big three of fascism and National Socialism, real socialism, and liberal-democratic capitalism, there were many minor ideological variations appearing in public debates and pervading the wider cultural landscape, which were once taken seriously, only to later lapse into obscurity—we may think, for example, of anarchist movements, both concretely political and ideational, but also of Weimar Germany’s Conservative Revolution and similar movements in other countries. In contemporary public debates and party politics, we often get the specter of nationalism against multiculturalism or globalism, of the return of

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a right-wing radicalism seeking to defend the nation and its cultural, ethnic or racial homogeneity against the intrusions and threats of the other, within and without. Indeed, we may well witness the competition, as some fear, between a dominant, neoliberal project, encompassing both left and right, and a populist or radical right-wing opposition, challenging, in party politics and media production, the “system” in its entirety.49 Philosophically, however, the conflicts are subtler than simply ethnic or racial nationalism as opposed to neoliberal globalization and multiculturalism. Not only, and obviously, does globalization have many dimensions, but the other is not simply a question of ethnic or religious differences, threatening the socioeconomic and ethnic homogeneity of the race, people, or nation. The other can be rejected or approved of, something to be avoided or to approach and perhaps fuse with, and comes in many forms beyond the obvious: the other of the future or the past, of the community to come or of Medieval Europe, of multicultural elites or the racist working class, of oppressive statist centralization, or international financial powers. It should also be pointed out that several of the most prominent thinkers associated with categories such as the radical right, or whatever concept we wish to use,50 have been highly skeptical, to say the least, of the nation and dominant contemporary forms of nationalism. For example, controversial contemporary radical right-wing thinker Guillaume Faye has launched scathing attacks on the modern nation-state, and has proposed an ethno-federalist,51 and Julius Evola—an important twentieth-century traditionalist thinker who has exerted a wide influence in certain circles52—in Revolt Against the Modern World, praises the Empire, not the nation.53 Several themes and domains of contestation overlap here. While it is tempting to draw parallels to the interwar era, and see in the present the return of fascism, the actual developments, both of the present and of the interwar era, are and were of course much more nuanced. The first half of the twentieth century witnessed the growth of several ideological branches and offshoots, and there was indeed for a period of time (roughly the interval between Mussolini’s March on Rome and the end of the Second World War) three major political-ideological alternatives appearing as serious, and radically different, contenders for ways of successfully organizing modern, industrial societies. After the end of the Second World War, however, radical right-wing movements in general, and National Socialism in

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particular, came to occupy a post-Christian position of absolute evil in our cultural landscape. Symbolically, the Shoah or Holocaust, often condensed into the one symbolic site of Auschwitz, an image of hell on Earth, has become a force legitimizing human rights—as Michael Ignatieff formulates this strand of thought, “The Holocaust laid bare what the world looked like when pure tyranny was given free rein to exploit natural human cruelty. Without the Holocaust, then, no Declaration.”54 In popular culture, however, National Socialism, in general, and Adolf Hitler, in particular, play a peculiar role symbolically; the latter, indeed, often appears as a strange archetype of clown and demon; not a satanic clown (that beast of nightmares) but rather an ambiguity of on the one hand the demonic force of monstrous cruelty (rather than simply destructive chaos) and on the other, a comical everyman. Not an exuberant, diabolical clown, but rather a Chaplinesque common man. We could say that he represents, then, the combination of utmost human cruelty with ultimate, unrestrained pettiness, in the symbolic landscape of late modernity. We can enjoy countless internet videos in which Hitler reacts with vehemence against this or that trivial occurrence, or angrily loses some game or race of utter insignificance, while we are simultaneously fed stories of his almost suprahuman forces of persuasion. This is how archetypal evil appears to many of us: banal, ordered, and unbelievably cruel and sadistic; a strange figure indeed. In this cultural context, hyperbolic comparisons with Hitler and the Nazis have become the butt of jokes: there is Godwin’s Law, basically stating that as an internet discussion on any charged subject goes on, one contender will inevitably invoke the comparison with Hitler or Nazis, thereby automatically losing the debate; and there is the observation made by famous comedian Jon Stewart, that such comparisons are not only unfair to those likened to Hitler, but also unfair to Hitler, who did not start a world war and a genocide to be compared to just any nobody.55 The repeated usage of Hitler analogies increases the risk that they lose all force to shock, just as curse words tend to transform what they refer to, over time, into something relatively harmless. As for the actual force of historical analogies, there is the obvious risk of oversimplification, and of polemically compressing a wide political and ideological spectrum into the descriptively dubious overarching categories of “fascism,” or even “Nazism.” The actual “fascist” bloc of the interwar years was internally divided, ideologically and

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politically, and furthermore, there were a host of authors, thinkers, and ideological branches that do not fit easily into clear-cut divisions. In the German case, one may mention such eccentric figures as Friedrich Hielscher or Ernst Niekisch, but the real star of the conservative revolutionary, or radical conservative, movement, in the clear light of hindsight, has to be sphinxlike author and warrior poet Ernst Jünger, whose peculiar brand of magical realism wavers dramatically between profound illumination and hollow mannerism, sublime poetry and platitudinous remarks. Even the harshest critic of this uneven but brilliant author has to concede, I think, that On the Marble Cliffs is a classic of twentieth-century German literature and that the diaries from the Second World War, with their enigmatic codenames, as well as Storm of Steel (a book whose coldly detached descriptions of the First World War, despite the author’s own pro-war stance, may turn many a reader into a pacifist), are monuments of modern literature as a whole; and even besides these well-known works, one could do worse with an idle afternoon than delving into, say, the rambling late essay Annäherungen: Drogen und Rausch, with its curious mixture of personal anecdote and hallucinatory reverie. One may accuse Jünger of many things, but lack of an adventurous will to explore is not one of them. Yet, there is a coherence to all his works, and indeed his adult life as a whole, in that he consistently turns to the significance of extraordinary experiences, be it in the context of bloody battles, dreams, drugs, or the careful study of natural forms.56 In the Italian context, one may turn to a figure like the previously mentioned Julius Evola, whose Revolt Against the Modern World sets outs from the claim that “the man of Tradition was aware of the existence of a dimension of being much wider than what our contemporaries experience and call ‘reality’.”57 Evola then goes on to stress that this was no mere theory, but real knowledge, based in experience. It is interesting to compare the opening of Evola’s magnum opus with that of Marx’s, with its observation that “the wealth of societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails appears as an ‘immense collection of commodities’,” the point of the comparison being that these claims are by no means mutually exclusive.58 A common criticism of Marx of course concerns the vagueness of his proposed alternative to global capitalism, but he did write at one point that he desired a social order that “produces man in this entire richness of his being . . . profoundly endowed with all the senses.”59

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Evola’s and Marx’s analyses of human history, and their respective visions of the good community, are indeed in many ways radically different, and Revolt Against the Modern World could be read as a counterpoint to Marx. What is interesting here, however, is that even if Evola did indeed defend a hierarchic social order where religion legitimizes the rule of divine kings or emperors, his conceptualization of religion can by no means be reduced to the doctrines legitimizing such an order: to him, it is primarily a matter of a “much wider” experience of reality, which then translates into hierarchy; it is quite clear that he alludes to a greater phenomenological spectrum of reality, which he then ties to his preferred political order. The point here is to not simply categorize thinkers into monolithic wholes, to be counterposed and affirmed or rejected, but observing that the respective conceptual elements of their thought need not be interconnected in the way they preferred, and that debates on nationalism and multiculturalism incorporate additional theoretical dimensions, beyond the obvious. As for the present, we do not yet know how lasting the current wave of radical right-wing radicalism will be, whether it will come together in a synchronized movement or split into bitterly competing branches, or how its influence will play out, in party politics and the wider culture. Both anarchism and what we could call, for want of a better term, radical conservatism, continue to attract curiosity and a degree of admiration in cultural and intellectual circles all over the world, even if they generally fail, as of yet, to channel such sentiments into mainstream electoral or deliberative acceptance or success. Indeed, it could be argued that the present decade has witnessed a return of sorts to something more similar to the interwar period at least in terms of intellectual debates, with the growing influence and visibility of both right-wing populist parties and politicians, and the rise of new, nebulous radical right-wing movements such as the American alt-right—although this development may arguably be said to have started much earlier, perhaps with the revitalization of the French intellectual radical right, with the emergence of the Nouvelle Droite.60 Conflicts centered on the advent of new radical right-wing groups have reached a renewed sense of urgency in the United States in conjunction with the election of Donald Trump, the preceding presidential election campaign, and the relatively recent events of Charlottesville, Virginia. The label of white supremacy, used in public debates, however, signals a certain failure

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of comprehension: what separates the radical right most starkly from other movements is its insistence, not on white supremacy, but white vulnerability, where both of those words are crucial. That is, adherents and sympathizers of the radical right tend to believe, first that whites should be perceived as a global collective, endowed with a shared group interest, and secondly, that this collective is currently under threat. This threat, to them, is both a matter of demographics and symbolic politics within countries, and of global power politics.61 Thus, for example, Guillaume Faye warns of the “colonization” of Europe by immigrants from the Third World, and calls for a new European Reconquista.62 To put it somewhat schematically, then, just as Marxists and libertarians mirror each other in both sides resisting exploitation (by the owner of the means of production via labor exploitation; or by the state via taxation), and multiculturalists and ethnonationalists and communitarians mirror each other in wanting to preserve and publicly support cultures—one or several within a state—so too, the clashing groups which became visible at Charlottesville mirror each other, in their apocalyptic horizons of racial displacement and genocide: by whites, or of whites. In this increasingly polarized environment, any mention of public rituals, symbols and narratives easily comes to be perceived as automatically tied to some particular position on these issues. But what about public worship as such? Are there any good arguments for or against public worship per se? We could easily enough imagine a situation in which there is no public worship at all. Iain M. Banks, for example, describes such a situation in his books on a utopian science fiction setting called the Culture, where humans coexist peacefully with artificial intelligences: Our Azadian friends are always rather nonplussed by our lack of a flag or a symbol, and the Culture rep here—you’ll meet him tonight if he remembers to turn up—thought it was a pity there was no Culture anthem for bands to play when our people come here, so he whistled them the first song that came into his head, and they’ve been playing that at receptions and ceremonies for the last eight years.63

Maurizio Viroli, for example, writes that “we do not need more citizens attending national festivals with great fervour; nor do we need more citizens willing to offer their lives to protect their country’s religious or ethnic or cultural unity.” Rather, he argues, we need “more citizens willing and capable of

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mobilizing when one or more citizens are victims of injustice or discrimination, when unfair laws are passed or constitutional principles are violated.”64 If the majority of the members of a community, however, feel on the whole that they affirm its fundamental aims, basic rights, system of government, or shared culture, and if this approval is manifested in collective rituals and shared symbols, this is hardly a bad thing in itself.65 One argument against collective, political rituals implies that they are somehow specifically a phenomenon which has characterized authoritarian, and in particular fascist, regimes: as Montserrat Guibernau puts it, “Fascism implied a new style in politics. One of the most prominent and distinctive features of fascism was the use of symbols, ceremonies and rituals. A world of sacred objects was created and their worship effectively organized.”66 Such statements, however, should be qualified on the grounds that while the use of symbols and rituals has certainly been a prominent feature of fascist movements and regimes, symbols, and rituals recur all over the ideological spectrum and can be found within all kinds of communities, and not necessarily only in conjunction with grand ceremonies. Both civil religion and nationalism entail the utilization of symbolic artifacts, rituals, and narratives, in support of a regime or in the symbolic constitution of collective identities—that is, in terms exactly of a public worship. Ideologies that are overtly anti-nationalist, or claim to be internationalist, may likewise use symbols and rituals in a similar way. The USSR, for its part, had its own rituals and political icons, tied to narratives legitimizing the regime.67 Of course, we should not deny that, as Jan Platvoet points out, “rituals of war, confrontation and exclusion are endemic in all religions.”68 There is thus the logic, not only of rites of passage and rituals of inclusion within a cultural order, but also of exclusion and blame projection, and this goes for religious as well as secular, nationalist movements.69 Nevertheless, while the specter of fascism as the ritualization of politics has haunted the imagination of many authors, the great projects of welfare state building of the twentieth century also incorporated their own variants of public worship, of symbols, rituals, and narratives; in fact, all modern states have sanctioned such elements. They may also be used, however, to criticize, challenge, and even topple a sitting government. Recent examples include political manifestations and protests against regimes in Serbia, Ukraine, and in conjunction with the Arab Spring. Indeed, such strategies are succinctly described in Gene Sharp’s influential

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From Dictatorship to Democracy, which has become a source of inspiration for many movements challenging non-democratic regimes in the last few decades.70 Perhaps we could borrow Carl Schmitt’s term political theology to describe the practices of public worship that support an established order, while the term theopolitics, borrowed from Martin Buber, could describe the utilization of symbols, rituals, and narratives in challenging an order?71 None of these seem in themselves reprehensible or desirable, but our support for, or rejection of, them probably depend on whether we support or reject the projects they are tied to. Publicly communicated symbols, rituals, norms, and narratives are not culturally neutral and as a consequence, some may oppose them on those grounds and aim to modify or abolish them, or to receive public recognition for their own collective symbols, rituals, monuments, norms, or narratives. Multicultural demands for recognition and special rights can be perceived on the one hand as claims to the consistent extension of the rights of the individual, while on the other hand, it can be a question of the creation of what could conceptually be considered minority nations, or particular communities within the wider national community. Such demands can be justified by recourse to the particularity of supposedly neutral rights in actual fact, or the dangers of indirect discrimination, domination, and misrecognition. Ultimately, however, as I have argued, multicultural demands, as well as claims that the state should support a shared majority culture, could be motivated by recourse to the core liberal value of autonomy: cultures, it is at times argued, provide us with meaningful choices; without them, our autonomy may be rendered vacuous. This does make sense: a presupposition of there being any meaningful autonomy is that there is a world to explore, interpret, and experience. Hence, if we do believe that some cultural elements are both valuable to experience and being immersed in, as well as vulnerable, we could well argue in favor of state support for them, just as we could make the same kind of argument in favor of protecting natural environments and organisms. Still, again, none of this really entails a need for rejecting, or affirming, public worship per se. Matters are further complicated, however, when bringing in questions of recognition: narratives, rituals, and symbols may entail patterns of misrecognition, being implicitly skewed in favor of some, while misrepresenting or blatantly ignoring others.72 Yet another argument

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against public worship could maintain, then, that it implies and perhaps reproduces a collective identity that could be perceived as repressive and as implying a symbolic violence, which indeed provokes outbreaks of physical violence.73 The homogenizing processes of modern nation-states have given rise to numerous conflicts and multicultural counter-reactions along the lines of the politics of recognition. None of this is very surprising, since nationhood is constantly reproduced by way of processes of institutional homogenization as well as symbolic communication, while national populations are ethnically, culturally, and religiously diverse (due to immigration and cultural and religious fragmentation), and minority groups are increasingly politically mobilized (regionalism, indigenous groups, minority nations).74 Such reactions, however, again, do not entail that symbols and rituals are inherently destructive, but rather, other supposedly neutral and transparent features of liberal democracies may likewise become problematic against the backdrop of multicultural challenges—one may think, for example, of the right to education and debates surrounding culture and language use in educational systems, public spaces, and the media. There are no, nor have there ever been any, neutral states, or universally accepted ontological premises: all actual arrangements and restrictions on state power and publicly communicated rituals, symbols, norms, and narratives have resulted from specific historical conflicts and compromises in order to end or neutralize conflicts. Concerning all of the platforms of contestation and compromise alluded to above, we may imagine an anarchist or libertarian extreme, or an extensive system of publicly financed practices and institutions, of shared holidays, mandatory schooling with certain set curricula, in specified languages, of state-run or publicly financed or supported media working according to certain principles of representation of groups according to ethnicity, sexual preferences, or gender, and of discursive delimitations. And we can imagine a whole host of alternatives between these extremes—for example, transferring decisions on public holidays as well as, perhaps, memorial sites and symbols, to particular communities, according to some predetermined criteria, or insisting on shared rituals and symbols, but demanding that these reflect only a secular and multicultural community, removing all traces of a specific ethnic or religious heritage, or demanding conversely that exactly such a heritage should be continuously reflected in a shared public worship.

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Our stance on all of these issues depends—or should depend, if we strive for logical consistency—on the way in which we conceptualize our desired sociopolitical order in its entirety; as an archipelago of communities of choice held together by basic rights and a free market economy, or as an ethnocultural national community; as a multicultural welfare state, or a libertarian paradise lacking in public worship as well as publicly financed welfare systems; as a pluralistic republic agreeing on practices of public reason, or as a democratic project embracing agonistic respect. Libertarian and neoliberal reactions against state encroachment, at least if grasped analytically rather than as actual empirical movements, focus on the dangers of the expansion of public control over the economy as well as administrative centralization, whereas multicultural conflicts pertain to wider cultural and symbolic issues, and may involve calls for decentralization as well as increased public regulation. Here, we may visualize a wider space of possibilities, ranging from consistently anarchist or libertarian positions on all of the above issues, to an extensive regulation of everything from economic production and exchange to education and the cultural and symbolic reproduction of identities. Another argument could thus entail that collective rituals should not be enforced since it is illiberal to force people to join in activities that they do not care to join. We have to distinguish between enforced rituals and those that are merely publicly endorsed. This point pertains to wider issues of public worship, including narratives as well as, for example, public holidays: why should the state force me to organize my work or that of my employees in this way or that; why not leave it to negotiation and individual decisions? For an anarchist, furthermore, public worship is as reprehensible as other elements of state regulation, but communal rituals, freely conducted, may still be desirable, as long as there is no coercion involved.75 This, however, again, is not an argument against collective worship per se, but against it being enforced or endorsed and similar arguments could be directed toward any measure: thus, even if the notion of enforcing collective rituals may sound quaint it is not stranger than, for example, mandatory military service or obligatory public education, both of which are and have been present, alongside similar measures, within several communities that are nevertheless counted as liberal democracies. Rather, it is the case that enforcing these seems supported by stronger reasons. Here, it becomes a matter of deciding whether the good such measures may

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bring seems to outweigh the bad of either endorsing or enforcing them, or not. Nietzsche writes, on Kant’s morality, that it demanded of the individual actions which one desired of all men: that was a very naïve thing; as if everyone knew without further ado what mode of action would benefit the whole of mankind, that is, what actions are at all desirable; it is a theory like that of free trade, presupposing that universal harmony must result of itself in accordance with innate laws of progress. Perhaps some future survey of the requirements of mankind will show that it is absolutely not desirable that all men should act in the same way, but rather that in the interest of ecumenical goals whole tracts of mankind ought to have special, perhaps under certain circumstances even evil tasks imposed upon them.—In any event, if mankind is not to destroy itself through such conscious universal rule, it must first of all attain to a hitherto altogether unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard for ecumenical goals. Herein lies the tremendous task facing the great spirits of the coming century.76

While this may not be a fair criticism of Kant, it is certainly interesting in the way it foreshadows the horrors of the twentieth century. There is also, however, the contemporary application of the Kantian triangle of free trade, democracy, and international institutions, which could be assumed to presuppose a harsh transitional period of the “evil task” of getting the wheels of industry turning, the more or less explicit assumption that capitalism, to get started, needs a period of brutal reforms, of the destruction of old social bonds, of vastly increasing discrepancies in wealth and status, of a cruel early phase of industrialization, before we arrive at the promised land of democracy and welfare. Furthermore, is it not exactly an “unprecedented knowledge of the preconditions of culture as a scientific standard” that we currently lack, when hoping for a basis of communal life in basic rights and a certain institutional and economic order? To understand human communities with any degree of theoretical precision, however, so that we would be able to really pinpoint the causes of crucial social and political outcomes such as revolutions, civil wars, religious and ethnic conflict or coherence, to trace the processes of causal mechanisms, and perhaps even to make more accurate predictions of future outcomes of present processes, would require a much more clear and comprehensive understanding of the nature of humanity, and how it plays out in the

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interaction of human beings with their surroundings, against the backdrop of the pressures (or path dependencies) of history; if we arrive at such an understanding, we would arguably be equipped with the tools to estimate with a greater degree of certainty the feasibility of any given political theory and concrete proposal, as well as the limits of our own potential knowledge of these things. However, as of yet, although we can draw upon emerging empirical evidence and scientific theorizing, we hardly have a clear and precise theory about the development of human communities, and the exact bounds of their possible configurations. The very observation of the prevalence of shared symbols and rituals and the similarities and actual interrelations between nationalism, civil religion, and explicitly religious elements, however, as well as the efficiency of some authoritarian regimes in utilizing such elements, it seems to me, constitutes not an argument against, but rather in favor of, all democratic political projects, endorsing shared symbols and rituals; rejecting them without good reasons entails leaving a potential political weapon exclusively to competing projects. Perhaps this is a question of the linkages between theoretical, mythical, and mimetic levels of thought, as theorized by Merlin Donald. Donald advances a view on the historical development of cognitive and linguistic levels, beginning with the mimetic, followed by the mythic and then the theoretic, the emergence of the latter of which he ties to transformations and innovations of the Axial Age. The argument here is not that these different layers exclude each other, but rather that one layer is added to the next in the historical development of cognitive capacities. The conclusion, concerning public worship, is that the mimetic elements, which are featured in it, tends to constitute community in an exclusive fashion and needs to be somehow reconciled with the universalizing potentials of the theoretic level: It is clear that these two cultural domains are difficult to reconcile. Yet they collide daily in a globalized economy. There is no alternative to this, and their reconciliation poses an urgent challenge in the modern world.77

We need not accept this particular theory, however, in order to appreciate the crucial role that symbols and rituals have played historically, in the constitution of human communities. As Harvey Whitehouse observes, “Anthropologists and psychologists have assembled systematic evidence that ritual participation increases trust and cooperation among participants, by acting as a costly and

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therefore hard-to-fake signal of commitment to the group.”78 Nevertheless, the way in which participants themselves interpret the ritual may vary widely, and a sense of a shared emotional, not to mention heuristic, response may well be illusory. “Rites of terror,” involving rare but traumatic experiences for the participant, may serve as paths of initiation or induction into a group, and result in great cohesion within it, while simultaneously increasing the hostility toward out-groups. This form of ritual is especially apt in creating cohesion in a smaller group involved in warfare and similarly risky activities, with a considerable temptation to defect.79 Routinized ritual repetition, conversely, serves to create less intense cohesion in larger groups—the “imagined communities” of Benedict Anderson’s analysis of nationalism, but this also obviously goes for religion as well—while decreasing reflexivity and innovation. Perhaps both kinds of rituals serve to increase social cohesion by fostering the belief of shared experiences, thereby impelling us to treat people we think share our own memories and feelings, as well as emotions, norms, and values, as kin?80 At any rate, routinized rituals allow for a larger in-group of purportedly shared experiences, where the display of outer signs of belonging would allow us to infer that a stranger can be trusted, but the intensity of communal cohesion would inevitably be lesser than that based upon a considerable time of direct experience with and of someone.81 So there seems to be a trade-off between the intensity of cohesion, and its extension: larger communities, united by routinized rituals, are able to expand trust and cooperation to strangers, simply by recourse to them displaying the relevant signs and behavior of belonging, which will however be less intensely felt; although there are some ways around this, by projecting the high-intensity cohesion of smaller groups onto the screen of a larger imagined community.82 This, however, obviously, does not imply that public worship is necessary in either its present forms, or other forms that may be more beneficial or desirable in relation to the analysis above. To summarize this analysis, we may observe that communities are demarcated by fundamental, constitutive boundaries which, pertaining to modern nation-states, are territorial as well as civic, and the desirable relations of which to human rights remains a topic of fierce debate. The continued presence of the symbols, rituals, and narratives of nationalism and civil religion gives rise to the question whether these should be abandoned or kept

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in place, and perhaps extended further, and how the relations of citizens to them should be publicly regulated. We thus encounter the familiar problems related to the degree of cultural cohesion or fragmentation, with multicultural protests against the homogenizing movements of nation-states, and struggles concerning recognition and the dynamic and dangers of collective identities. Here we appear to run into a tepid conclusion: abolishing public worship altogether seems uncalled for, and an unnecessarily risky strategy, so we keep it more or less in its current forms, but modify it in response to criticism. Either that, or we argue in favor of expanding it, perhaps in an attempt to foster closer communal ties, or to reinforce an established order. We should note that it is not necessarily the case that symbolic coherence is required, but rather, an underlying social and cultural homogeneity may render a symbolic and rhetorical incoherence easier to handle, as the result of the actual compromises of a highly homogenous society, whereas actual cultural conflicts cannot, of course, simply be compensated for by a coherent symbolic and rhetorical articulation of identity. Symbols and rituals do not necessarily clash with an emphasis on justice and rights, but empirically, have coexisted with and arguably supported these within democratic nationstates; contradictions abound however, within states, between the specific political and ethnoreligious heritage embodied by the public worship of liberal democracies, as opposed to norms and narratives of secularity and multiculturalism. While critics have pointed to contradictions between norms of multiculturalism and toleration, and the religious and ethnic traces of public worship, nation-states may be perceived either as obstacles to the full realization of human rights, or as necessary preconditions for it. In the former case, nation-states may be incorporated into an agenda for the future in which they are either transformed and integrated into transnational and perhaps global political arrangements, or abolished and replaced by them; in the latter case, they may take on the form of, for example, either ethnic, civic assimilationist, or multicultural nations. Another topic of fierce contestation is that of the desirable relations between and organization of constitutive and symbolic boundaries: thus, practices of public worship as well as the public communication of norms and narratives may take on many different forms, but only a consistently anarchist position self-evidently entails that they should be dispensed with altogether. Regardless of where we stand in the

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debate regarding the actual and desirable future of the state, however, the risk is that we let our stance on this issue overshadow further considerations on what kind of community we wish to inhabit, whether it be a state or a nonstate alternative. Similarly, whether we advocate open borders or extremely restrictive immigration policies or something in the wide spectrum in between these two, there are still many other questions to consider, concerning what kind of community we want to envisage. Calls for an intensification of macroregional integration or cosmopolitan, global cooperation, do raise the core question, explicitly and implicitly, by the tensions they lay clear, as to what the state should do, or more generally, what we should do in common, but again, in pondering these questions, we should strive to expose and examine as wide a range of conceptual alternatives as possible, even if just to consider and reject them. The situation surveyed above gives rise to interesting normative questions, pertaining to what to do about such publicly supported rituals and symbols as there are, but also to what to possibly replace them with, where a consistent abolishment of them appears not only to be a dubious strategy, pragmatically, but also risks obscuring, just as does the unreflected reproduction of them, wider questions of possible alternative practices. The problem is that even when such elements are politicized, and the question concerning their normative status is indeed raised, there still tends to be too little reflection on the possible wider alternatives, of which they merely form a set of possible instances. There are indications that routinized ritual practices maintain group cohesion and solidarity, crucially transcending the dynamics of personal interaction building trust in smaller groups, and abandoning them entails risking leaving a political tool exclusively in the hands of one’s opponents. Even if we would be skeptical about some particular way of theorizing the causes and consequences of rituals in relation to group cohesion and collective conflicts, there is a lot of evidence that symbols and rituals are indeed a pervasive feature of human social and political life, and that they continue to be used, in conjunction with mobilizing narratives, as a tool of power politics, and for this reason alone, it would be unwise to neglect them. However, if maintained, such practices risk either being reproduced without further reflection, or may become subject to contestation over issues of the symbolic reproduction of national identity in relation to the pluralism of ideological, religious, ethnic, and other cultural

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affiliations, along the lines of themes of representation, recognition, and misrecognition. Here, we seem pushed into a pragmatic cul-de-sac of continued negotiations and compromises, entailing that we hold on to public worship within the framework of existing nation-states, while modifying it in response to ongoing conflicts. This boring conclusion, however, need not be the end of the story: there are further possibilities to survey, provided that we examine more closely the elements which constitute public worship as well as human rights, what these could be considered as instances of, and how they could be deconstructed and reconfigured differently. The risk of getting stuck in either political theology or theopolitics, is that we get caught up, not only in these games of power and resistance in actual politics—as I have argued, there is nothing intrinsically flawed in either approach, but it depends on the context in combination with our own preferences—but that we gravitate conceptually around a certain limited set of possibilities. Abandoning public worship, empirically, entails abolishing it; transcending it conceptually, however, implies uncovering further theoretical possibilities by considering its constituent elements, as well as possible alternative formations and combinations of them, which could become incorporated into contemporary critical projects.

4

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4.1

Toward a topology of the exceptional

We set out from the problem of a political entity, already existing, searching for the meaning of its existence: its aims, its constitutive boundaries, and how to motivate these. Raising such questions can awaken unease, especially if we do so in pursuit of allegedly universally valid principles and criteria. Such principles or criteria may be criticized as being implicitly ethnocentric anyway, or as reflecting a version of a certain ethnic or wider cultural heritage, or it may be maintained that they are reductive in the sense that they theorize community and its desirable aims without really understanding what constitutes community—that is, human beings and human social interaction, as well as the interaction of human beings with the nonhuman—in enough depth. As an alternative, a community consciously rooted in a particular ethnic and religious heritage may appear an alluring image, for which we may borrow the name Burgenland, from Ernst Jünger’s novel Heliopolis, to signal a remnant of culture and tradition in a world threatened by technology and nihilism.1 Translated into a political vision for the contemporary Europe, we would imagine a revival of ethnic communities and tradditional customs, religious rituals and communal festivals, entailing a continent of cooperating, internally relatively homogenous communities, sharing a diverse but overlapping historical heritage. In relation to nation-states as well as Christianity, Europe may be said to occupy a peculiar position, globally. The modern paradigm of nation-states emerged in Europe, and through processes of colonialism and imperialism as well as diffusion, it eventually spread across the globe, reaching a peak in the foundation of the United Nations, the onset of decolonization, and the

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formation of postcolonial states, while simultaneously, in Europe itself, a process of macro-regional integration began where, once again, the continent stands out as the most extreme example. And while Christianity did not exactly emerge in Europe, it has spread from there globally, becoming the world’s largest religion, or set of religions, in the process. If Europe could be described, historically, as a Christian continent, it may also be described, in the contemporary world, as the most secular one.2 One may argue, however, that while Europe is indeed a secular continent to a unique extent, this secularity certainly has to be qualified: it is a relative phenomenon, and even though allegiance to ecclesiastical beliefs has declined, vast numbers of people believe in some kind of “higher force” or the like, and are, using a contemporary term, ietsists rather than atheists (i.e., they believe in “something” rather than nothing, although not necessarily anything very specific). Believing in “something” may seem intellectually unsophisticated (and the associated label New Age, which pertains to some of these rather vague beliefs, is one that is apt to awaken derision and contempt among, for example, vocal atheists), but the ambition is interesting: to transcend the dichotomy between religious and secular, construed in terms of adherence to certain collectively shared and doctrinally formulated beliefs. Europe is, if anything, a continent of third options. Here, social reformism and welfare systems have thrived like nowhere else, but in conjunction with the preservation, rather than the withering away, of states. Here, nationalism emerged, offering a third alternative to the dichotomy of public religion and a consistent political secularization. When facing the question of retaining, and perhaps extending, or abolishing the rituals and symbols of public worship, we are already facing a dichotomy in relation to an established third option, transcending an earlier dichotomy. Now, could we transcend the contemporary one of the division between abolishing, or retaining, the public worship of existing liberal democracies? Ultimately, we could come to consider what a consistently secular community, or a consummation of secularization, would actually entail, and whether common current conceptualizations of the religious and the secular narrow down the range of communal arrangements that we reflect upon. Here we would indeed do well to remember that while the secular could be conceived in opposition to the religious—as its absence, thus depending

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on how we define the religious—a movement of secularization could also be grasped as the transfer of elements from the religious to the secular. In this sense, a consistent secularization would entail, not the consistent removal of some elements from the public domain, but rather a completion of the transfer of elements to the public domain. The question then becomes which elements should be abolished and which would be desirable to transfer, but also to what an extent they should be transformed, as well as what their legal status and extent ought to be. If we are considering, not a simple transfer, but rather a process of transformation, explicitly religious practices as well as existing practices of public worship may serve as sources of inspiration for analogous elements, for possibilities of which existing practices may be viewed as mere examples out of many possible instances. There is not one, single process of secularization, but several: both empirically, in terms of path dependencies and diffusion across contexts, so that processes of secularization will vary, in terms of transfer as well as removal, but also pertaining to possible proposals and thus, finally, there are many variants sequentially, given a determined descriptive or normative end. Regardless of our preferred model of political organization, we should aim to think systematically, that is, in terms of the effects of the interrelations between elements, considering, as far as feasible, the effects of different setups of the latter. As we have seen, a great number of arguments have been advanced alongside the emergence and critique of modern ideologies, that primarily draw upon religious traditions as sources of inspiration for norms of interhuman relations as well as hopes and fears concerning the development of history. The transformative possibilities of collective human action have been vastly emphasized: to put it shortly, the capacity for collective human action in transforming the world has been stressed to a far larger extent than previously. This has entailed a range of different claims and strategies: calls for a revolutionary transformation, within one state or on a global scale, or a gradual transformation toward a just national or global community by means of democratic reformism, or in practices of prefiguration that embody fragments of the anticipated future within contemporary political reality, bypassing established institutions. This great ideational shift has hardly been without reasonable backing: the powers of humanity have indeed increased to a dramatic extent. Although recent decades have brought some setbacks—

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for example, increased bacterial antibiotic resistance, ecological crises—these have, thus far, not dramatically altered the fact of the vast increase in human power over the nonhuman. In contemporary debates, human rights and human dignity have advanced to the forefront of utopian hopes and critical considerations. Crucially, however, Kant’s notion of human dignity, rooted, ultimately, in the notion of the sacredness of the moral law, may be criticized as being unduly anthropocentric, in more ways than the obvious restriction of human rights to human beings.3 The Kantian legacy in human rights discourses on dignity has opened up a tension between autonomy, on the one hand, and dignity in the sense of dignified behavior as well as the marks of a certain social position, on the other: while some stress the role of human rights in protecting individual autonomy, others remark that genocides and similar measures tend to be preceded by a discursive dehumanization, and accompanied by a practical one, both striking at the dignity of human beings, by equating them with contemptible animals, and denying their social position, that is, treating them as if they occupied the lowest conceivable rungs of the social ladder.4 This entails that protecting autonomy may conflict with protecting dignity: for example, my undignified behavior may be seen to threaten the dignity of a group, thereby contributing to its dehumanization, and my description of others may likewise be considered to contribute to their dehumanization. In other words, autonomy comes into conflict with dignity both pertaining to free speech and the like, and when it comes to what my own behavior signals about the group I belong to. All of the above, however, still pertain to aspects of the “sacralization of the person”—what about the sacralization of the nonhuman? Human rights may indeed be criticized on the grounds of being anthropocentric, and we could consider whether the sacralization of the person should be extended toward a sacralization of nonhuman domains, resting upon analogous arguments to those made in favor of the fundamental rights of human beings. The most obvious topics to address, when debating the relevance of transhuman relations in the context of an emerging global space and its specific problems and pathologies, are indeed those of ecological crises, and of the way in which we treat animals. Here, a case could be made that a narrow focus on interhuman relations ought to be remedied by expanding the circle of moral concern, as Peter Singer argues, and perhaps by

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preserving natural domains by recourse to their beauty, or their importance to living organisms.5 No matter where we stand in relation to Singer’s peculiar and shifting utilitarian positions, it has to be admitted that the expanding circle is a powerfully elegant figure of thought, in its lucid simplicity. Treading down this path of thought, however, we will run into more technical issues on where to draw the limits of our expanding circle, and to what extent organisms apart from human beings ought to be endowed with what rights, and why, and how this in turn will reflect back upon how we think about the rights of human beings. Do we base our arguments upon secular moral philosophy, or perhaps on an ecotheological understanding of creation and the responsibility of human beings?6 If there is a gradation in rights and moral concern, does that also imply that some human beings would be protected to less an extent than today? These are exactly the kinds of questions that a thinker like Singer encounters and, at times controversially, takes on, under the umbrella heading of the “unsanctifying” of human life.7 Furthermore, however, several thinkers have embraced notions of sacred nature, resting upon a scientific understanding of the physical universe.8 It is not difficult to understand how an appreciation of the magnificence of the universe, the emergence of life and complex cultural phenomena, and the elegance of scientific theorizing, can contribute to a sense of awe and reverence, which might evoke a language of the sacred; although it should be pointed out, conversely, as a prominent contemporary religious naturalists indeed admits, that a scientific grasp of the world may just as well, “elicit alienation, anomie, and nihilism.”9 A deeper understanding of the natural sciences could lead to a kind of reconciliation with the darker aspects of the reality that they reveal, but need not do so. What is perhaps most interesting about the prospects of invoking the sacred when describing nature outside of any specific religious tradition or community, however, is the question of the analogy between the dignity of human beings, which human rights are supposed to protect, and the dignity of nature, which may potentially complement and further develop the impetus behind the drive to universalize a set of rights. To grasp this, let us consider the case of animal rights: the horrific living conditions of animals in the agricultural industries may call not only for an extension of animal rights, but perhaps also a reflection on the connections between the ways in which animals are portrayed in film, television, and

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literature, and the ways in which we treat them. This would simply reflect an extension of the tension between on the one hand autonomy—with the attendant debates on ability, liberty, and domination, and the relations between different kinds of rights—and on the other hand dignity, in the sense of a dignified status, which is already inherent in debates on human rights and their legal application. Briefly put, while some critics denounce the notion of dignity as fundamental to human rights as superfluous and confusing, and better swapped with autonomy, others, as we have seen, imply that dignity in terms of respect and a dignified behavior may be crucial to hold on to, since genocides and similar measures tend to be preceded and accompanied by the dehumanization of the victims, describing these as animals or nonhumans, and treating them as if they belong to the lowest conceivable rung of the social ladder.10 Accepting the latter line of argument, however, raises difficult questions, not only in the sense that such an understanding of dignity gives rise to tensions between dignity and autonomy, but also in the sense that we may ask about its implications for transhuman relations: If some kind of basic rights should be extended to animals, need we not also reflect on the way in which animals are publicly portrayed, by way of analogy? Can animals be discursively “de-animalized,” like humans can be dehumanized? If so, what about wider nature: maybe there is a problem in the way in which we describe nature, analogous to the issues of the portrayal and treatment of human beings? If discursive dehumanization indeed accompanies genocides, it does not seem too far-fetched to ask whether the fact that we have spent the last few hundred years describing animals as machine-like objects has something to do with them being treated as such in the agricultural industries, and we might perhaps even question whether there is some connection between the quantification and objectification of nature, space, and time, and the ecological problems now facing us—that is, should we to combat, not only hate speech, but perhaps also the objectification of animals, and even that of inanimate domains? These questions remain speculative, but they are not prima facie absurd; of course, we could maintain in both cases that we should strive to protect free speech and address problems with well-founded arguments—the point here is simply that accepting the need to protect dignity when it comes to human beings, does open the question as to why an analogous argument could

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not be made for nonhuman domains. Maintaining the argument about the need for protecting human dignity, discursively and in terms of behavioral patterns, does seem to raise difficult questions concerning the dignity of the nonhuman and the way in which we communicate about and interact with the wider surrounding world, potentially including inanimate phenomena. Quite a lot of philosophical theorizing during the twentieth century and up until today has been concerned exactly with the questions of how to think about the nonhuman, and even inanimate, and how this may impact on how we perceive and physically interact with it. Thus, Heidegger impels us not to think of inanimate beings as objects, preferring things instead, cautioning against conceptualizing and perceiving these reductively, and forgetting about the nuanced trajectories of phenomenological variation that constitutes our actual experience of them, while Adorno criticizes the conceptual reduction of the non-identical, visible in philosophical systems, but also in the capitalist logic of monetary exchange.11 These concerns about the interrelations between how we think and communicate about the nonhuman, and how we perceive and interact with it, while perhaps appearing obscure, are actually not that far removed from mainstream, contemporary concerns within debates on human rights and dignity. And even if we do not go that far in contemplating an extension of dignity, we still have to face issues of demands for dignity and the striving for recognition as arguably more of a human universal, spatially and temporally, than liberal notions of autonomy. It is far from clear how autonomy and dignity should be related; even if we may defend a focus on dignity as a means of safeguarding autonomy over time, we could still desire to be more vigilant in defending dignity in the present, potentially at the expense of autonomy. Also, what about the range of theories of justice, not only geographically, but also in terms of what is to be redistributed, and why? What, for example, about the entire sexual and emotional economy of interpersonal relations?12 This is a matter of concern not only to feminist critiques of presupposed and under-theorized family structures and sexual norms, but pertains more widely to questions of social relations and human well-being: should we, for example, publicly aim to alleviate the suffering of the lonely, and if so, how? Or is it a question of the social structures that result in some people becoming isolated, and if so, how should that be addressed? Should we encourage people to

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alleviate the loneliness of those feeling isolated, for example, or should we help people by, not only distributing rights, opportunities and material resources, but also in developing their capabilities for a full, rich human existence, endowed with emotional maturity, critical, cognitive capacity, and the capacity for imagination, creativity and recreation?13 Furthermore, while the expanding circle is a compelling figure of thought, the actual empirical development within the Western world throughout the last few decades has been one, rather, of a shift of focus, where rights have been extended to new groups, while socioeconomic inequality has increased.14 This is not merely a matter of past and present trends of precarization and the hollowing out of the middle class in the restructuring of the means of production, but also of the frightening shadows cast by a future many envision as one of vastly amplified automation; in the end, some fear that human beings may become increasingly unnecessary to the workings of the global economic and technological system: our situation may become more and more analogous to that of animals in the agricultural industries and if so, one may only hope that self-conscious AI:s see fit to preserve some human beings in the wild, as it were.15 Here we may foresee more benevolent scenarios, peaking in human apotheosis through the singularity,16 or an existential nightmare, which need not result from anything resembling human malevolence—as indeed is the fate of many animals today who, even though evolutionarily successful, likely lead dreadful lives, and in comparison to which, the fate of human beings in science fiction movies like The Matrix appears surprisingly relaxed. And that is provided there is some use for us beyond being abolished or tortured, as is the fate of human beings in many a science fiction scenario. Yet another strand of critique may entail the expression of doubt whether character, personality type, or some corresponding concept, could not be a ground for discrimination, as social networking becomes ever more important in the pursuit of a stable income, and as we can easily observe how meritocratic criteria become extremely elusive in some spheres of human agency. Suppose that the ability to overcome physical death becomes a question of material means, so that the rich and powerful, and those considered particularly valuable for their contributions to humanity, are allowed to live on, while the rest perish. Now suppose that this ability emerged already in the early modern era. And now consider the people who would nonetheless simply

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have died, because they were neither rich, nor famous or that appreciated: the point here, apart from the obvious elements of social stratification which would be even more sharpened in this scenario, is that human beings have a hard time to judge long-term influence and value, and that short-term and long-term estimations of what is valuable seem to work according to different logics, which is a confounding factor for advocates of strict meritocracy, as is the dynamic of social adherence to established norms and practices, as opposed to creative innovation. It does not seem unreasonable, then, to ask whether some people are marginalized and discriminated against on account of being original and creative, or on grounds of lacking social skills, and we may well wish to consider how to handle the disruptive and simultaneously creative influence of originality and invention, without which, John Stuart Mill complained, “human life would become a stagnant pool”?17 Such critiques could conceivably become politicized, even if that would seem farfetched today, as indeed previous waves of politicization on grounds of justice have at some point in time seemed far-fetched, only to later appear natural. Meritocracy is no easy thing in those spheres of human activity where criteria of excellence, or what indeed constitutes a merit, are fluid, difficult to specify, and context-dependent. Perhaps there is the risk of aiming for meritocratic precision, where the attempted increase in it makes radical innovation more difficult, since the latter often consists exactly in introducing new criteria, and new ways of doing things? More broadly, one may read Nietzsche as pointing to a conflict dynamic of human history no less than Marx did: in the latter case, owners of the means of production against the exploited; in the former case, creative innovators against the communal adherence by the majority to certain received norms, narratives, and practices, resulting from previous innovations, which are now reproduced without reflection.18 In both cases, even if we do not agree with all the claims made by these thinkers, it is difficult to deny that the dimensions of conflict that they highlight remain relevant. Innovations that appear obscure and of marginal if any value to a predetermined contemporary agenda incorporating its own notions of what is valuable and meritorious, may turn out to be of huge long-term value while, conversely, the fine-tuning of established projects, which appear to be of self-evident relevance, may rapidly become an exercise in obsolete concerns. There are clearly different logics at

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work here, on different time-scales, and much deeper reflection is needed if we are to institutionalize meritocracy in the name of fairness—indeed, the more pluralism of institutions and criteria is replaced with a centralization of one version of meritocracy according to predetermined standards, the more such a deeper reflection, often sadly lacking, is called for. As for public worship, the fundamental political significance of the playperformance-continuum is that of the realization, but not the actualization, of potential: if rituals rein in the impulses toward the reversal or dissolution of hierarchies and the allocation of social positions, and contain liminality and the eruption of antagonism, they also realize, rather than actualize, potentiality, that is, alternative arrangements, or other worlds. The subjunctive of the “as if ” becomes the physically enacted “as this”: ritual spaces and works of art allow for the realization of other worlds in a concrete physical form, but only as art, as ritual, as feast, as play. Potential is realized, but not actualized: this becomes a question of, as Richard Schechner puts it, “performed dreams.”19 This is not to say that such “performed dreams” cannot, over time, transform communal existence: they may be visualized as spaces of interaction, or membranes, between creative innovation, and concrete, physical manifestation—the feast, the ritual, the work of art, the festive and tumultuous political event—may inspire and spur on social transformation. Apart from this potential, however, communal gatherings could be deemed desirable in themselves, as spheres enabling a temporary exit from customary roles, a coming together beyond the division of work, and a different experience of time. A reflection on public rituals from this perspective could thus reveal potential spheres of human flourishing which may form parts of proposals for desirable forms of community: here, it is not the case that collective rituals are either antagonistic toward or supporting certain projects, or that we ourselves either affirm or reject public worship, but rather that analogous practices may be conceived of as elements of a desirable communal life, as paradigmatic fields of human flourishing. Furthermore, these elements are involved in the transformation of community, both in the sense of structuring the path from outside to inside cultural boundaries, and in the sense of potentially engendering a transformation of the community as a whole. Here, however, we encounter and return to wider considerations pertaining to the communal organization of phenomenological exploration. Regardless of whether any

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kind of organized religion resembling present ones will persist or not, it cannot credibly be denied that people continue to enter into extraordinary states of consciousness as a result of both experimentation with hallucinogenic substances, techniques such as meditation, prayer, dancing, fasting or other ascetic practices, or even spontaneously; something that may also serve to give rise to speculative impulses which, in a cultural context suffused with scientific theorizing as well as a myriad of religious and philosophical legacies, fragment into a host of different interpretations, which may not solidify into one distinct practical and theoretical existential stance, but neither simply dissipate.20 Either way, at least some and perhaps all human beings are endowed with the capacity to enjoy intense experiences of awe, wonder, luminosity, and what one witness called “liquid love.”21 Even if we do not believe that states of consciousness, that are actively pursued  within some religious traditions, and are incorporated into the heuristic traditions of many of them, call for any kind of religious belief, this does not necessarily entail that they should be dismissed as insignificant, or that  the pursuit of them should not be publicly supported. Extraordinary experiences or states of consciousness could be considered desirable independently of religious beliefs, and religious beliefs may thrive without them. The two have been conjoined in many of the traditions and institutions we call religious, but in some, one or the other has not in fact been a major focus. Even for those standing outside of any religious community or tradition, however, the failure to acknowledge the beauty of overwhelming phenomenological shifts and “mystical” states of consciousness as one of the most magnificent products of human evolution is a stance that does not fit well, it seems to me, with the label humanism. It might be argued that if they are brought on by some kind of deprivation, they are therefore not desirable. This, however, amounts to a genetic fallacy: an experience of ontological togetherness, intense luminosity, fiery ecstasy, or liquid love is neither more, nor less, desirable depending on whether it was brought on by, say, malnutrition and lack of sleep, or not. Also, we should distinguish analytically between encounters—the experience or impression of conscious, communicating beings beyond ordinary reality— on the one hand, and what I propose to call hyperreal events, where ordinary reality is experienced with an excessive intensity, on the other. While the former may be accused of being illusory, and while their content will appear

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dubious to those not convinced of the existence of the realities and beings they disclose, the latter elude such attacks, and do not really entail any controversial claims beyond the possibility of experiencing the same consensus-reality, but drastically differently: the same beings, objects or organisms, but in intense wonder and luminosity. Do extraordinary states of consciousness, that have been so significant to the emergence and reproduction of some traditions, automatically belong to these, and only these, and does it go without saying that they can provide nothing of relevance to contemporary, non-religious, political, and philosophical projects? Of course, some, and not necessarily religious skeptics, may argue that the active pursuit of them entail the escape from political confrontation, the avoidance of responsibility for the shared world, or at best the attempt at bridging between the needs and desires of individuals, and the demands of a capitalist economy.22 There are, however, many potential phenomenological connections between practices we call “religious” and behaviors that even an atheist would gladly label as “moral”: in the former case, meditation, prayer, asceticism, reflection upon the mysteries of divinity, and in the latter, kindness, altruism, empathy. Also, it is clear that there is potentially a linkage between experiences of luminous wonder and morality, if such experiences are accompanied by a profound sense of connection to the surrounding world, both animate and inanimate. For some, a sense of dissolving boundaries between the self and the surrounding world, and an impression of all things coming together and being interconnected, may indeed give rise to a heightened altruism, and an abstention from violence. Others accept such experiences within a received framework of interpretation, and remain committed to an institutional setting with its own cultural and legal norms, policies, and political projects. It should be noted, however, that there are further possibilities here: what is unique about some religious norms is exactly that they are decisively influenced by “mystical” or other similar, extraordinary states of consciousness. We could, however, conceive of both religious and secular (depending of course on the exact definition we give to these terms) sets of norms, either inspired by such states of consciousness, or not being so, and further divide the former depending on whether they were inspired by experiences which can be classified as at least seeming to be experiences of encounters with other, conscious beings, and those that cannot.

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There is no immediately obvious reason why a spectrum of extraordinary experiences and states of consciousness which some religious traditions have actively pursued, and which have been symbolically foundational to many, could not become valuable to any major, secular ethical perspective or political project, or that their pursuit should not be publicly sanctioned. Some states of consciousness and attempts at communicating their content are incorporated into the pragmatic and heuristic frameworks of religious traditions, while others are not. Experiences of luminosity, liquid love, and the experience of a dissolution of boundaries between the self and the surrounding world, could be interpreted as providing an apt metaphor for taking the interests of other beings into account, or conceivably serve as powerful ethical impulses, bereft of any connection to religious revelation or any particular metaphysical beliefs; or they may be interpreted as a reminder of the way in which we may perceive beings radically differently, and result in a deeper appreciation of how what we deem to be desirable, or good, may change as a consequence. They may awaken us to wonder and awe, or impel us to approach the world ecologically and holistically, or simply be enjoyed hedonistically and egotistically, or as sources of emotional strength, encouragement, and determination. The symbolic boundaries of religious communities are connected to special obligations, reproduced through narratives and practices of worship. Disconnecting these ties, however, does not imply that they could not be reconnected differently, in new constellations of analogous elements, and we could conceive of a wide range of alternatives. The above raises even wider questions concerning possible communal arrangements. If sacred boundaries may, but need not be, publicly sanctioned by modern states, oscillating movements between the division of work and a communal gathering beyond it can but need not be handled by way of such demarcations. By this movement of oscillation, I point here to regular, routinized shifts between the division of work and a communal coming together beyond it. Hence, I am not really referring to one movement only; rather, there is the possibility of several such oscillating movements, which may be ritualized and habitual to a greater or lesser extent, and such movements may or may not be tied to communal narratives. They may also be commodified and publicly endorsed or enforced, or prohibited. This opens up the possibility of further questioning the relation between the forms of practices I have described, and

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norms of exchange. In one of the more celebrated tracts of the social sciences of the first half of the twentieth century, Marcel Mauss chronicled the practices of reciprocal gift-giving of non-modern communities, and in so doing, offered what could be seen as both an attractive contrast and an alternative to the vices of capitalism, inequality, and commodification.23 Indeed, the reach of commodification is one of the vital questions to be posed here, as are the ones concerning public support and mandatory as opposed to voluntary participation. It is thus only fitting that Hubert Dreyfus should suggest that the Woodstock Festival could be seen as a concrete example of Martin Heidegger’s new god, a coming together beyond the confines of economic competition and commodification, and promising new ways of life and novel patterns of enjoyment and celebration.24 A prominent contemporary anarchist thinker like David Graeber has drawn upon Mauss, as well as upon direct democratic practices within small-scale communities across the world, in order to inspire contemporary critical notions. Thus, Graeber implies that we can and should disconnect the elements of state, symbolic boundaries, and collective gatherings.25 Within states, as well, we could consider whether we should publicly support communal gatherings to a greater extent, not as part of public worship, but for rather different reasons: for example, we might consider the satisfaction of desires through commodity consumption undesirable, or we might want to shift the emphasis from such activities exactly toward noncommodified communal gatherings. What we are grappling with here are the interconnections between constitutive and symbolic boundaries, norms of exchange, and the movements of oscillation between the world of work and division of labor, and the communal coming together beyond them. These questions are neither abstruse nor obsolete but go to the very heart of the functioning of contemporary liberaldemocratic, capitalist nation-states. If practices of exchange may be reciprocal or commercialized, come to be constituted as gifts between friends or allies, or as commodities in an exchange between strangers, then patterns of communal oscillation and practices of demarcation of sacred domains may likewise be organized in countless ways. There is also, however, the more general question of demarcations of time and space as opposed to their being put to use efficiently in systems of production, and here, capitalism has gradually unfolded on a global scale to colonize yet greater domains of space and time as resources

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for production and commodification. Conflicts surrounding instances of the demarcation of sacred domains can be found in regards to industrialization (capitalist and otherwise), for example with the reduction of holidays during the Industrial Revolution, or in the exploitation of areas previously considered to be sacred or taboo.26 As Hartmut Rosa pertinently points out, there is a tendency for the world of work to colonize the world of supposed free time: In the initial stage of industrialization, a separate world of work had to be created, and shielded from the concerns of the human lifeworld, but now, the work ethic and its time discipline has so permeated the entire existence of technologically advanced societies that there is no need of a clear separation anymore. To this should be added the trend among some companies to make the work-environment at least seem more creative and playful.27 What this detour has accomplished theoretically is to bring us closer to posing outright the questions concerning the interconnections between constitutive boundaries concerning territorial delimitations and criteria for membership, cultural boundaries, collective enjoyment, and practices of exchange. Attempting to theoretically address liberal democracy and the nationstate without seriously considering these elements precludes questioning, let alone offering alternatives to, the dominant contemporary modes of organizing them. One suggestion would be to translate all collective gatherings into an issue of private individuals freely coming together, in either commodified or non-commodified forms according to their preferences, while no ambiguous, symbolic boundaries of the community are really in need of publicly sanctioned reproduction. Yet, while this is an intelligible theoretical response, it must not be confused with the supposed realism or pragmatism of defending the status quo. There are no, nor have there ever been any, such modern states: this is not the actual order of liberal democracy, but rather one of its utopian projections, that may legitimize or challenge it. The word ritual may mean a whole lot of things to different people: as a descriptive concept, it may mean widely distinct things to different researchers, and for those participating in or observing an alleged ritual, it may also mean very different things, emotionally and cognitively. The relevant question for my purposes, however, is what we can pluck from this abundance of elements that could be desirable for contemporary political projects. Rituals could be perceived as containers of something desirable, such as transitional passages

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between existential and political positions, as enabling the experience of autonomous time or flow, as structuring collective gatherings reproducing community and allowing for a domain beyond the division of labor and the world of work, as temporarily reversing or dissolving the order of social and political hierarchies, but also as antagonistic fields of competition enclosed by norms, in themselves reproducing a communal order. Ultimately, symbols and ritual practices exemplify a greater range of possibilities: that of establishing exceptional domains beyond ordinary activities and customary usage and exchange, and surrounded by norms of reverence, respect, or avoidance. Thus, this does not only entail that artifacts or sites, that is, spatial domains, are set apart, but temporal intervals may also be enclosed by protective boundaries, as may symbols, norms, and narratives. Furthermore, such boundaries need not be absolute, but may be porous and negotiable. They do not necessarily close off physical movement or discursive questioning in an absolute sense, but may, rather, simply demarcate an appropriate mode of behavior. Furthermore, the boundaries they demarcate are concrete and physical as well as conceptual and discursive: there is an entire topology to be mapped here, whereby artifacts, sites, and symbols, as well as norms, narratives, and concepts, are demarcated from ordinary use and common strategic concerns. Finally, if there are what we could call antagonistic ritual spaces, most obviously in sports, which symbolically manifest and reproduce a global order of nation-states, we may also think of the domain of democratic deliberation: already legally regulated, albeit to a different extent, in liberal democracies, deliberative arenas could be conceived of in antagonistic (or to speak with Chantal Mouffe, agonistic, that is, non-violent) terms.28 As for contemporary spaces of political competition and contestation, there are, on the one hand, the ritualized parliamentary spaces tied to the specific rituals and symbols of civil religion, and on the other hand, there is the wider sphere of public deliberation—in both, nominally religious or secular sacred values may perform a socially binding function, and may be withdrawn from ordinary utilitarian considerations and surrounded by cultural and legal demarcations, hence restricting the extent of free deliberation.29 The problem here, however, is not simply that certain norms or narratives are reproduced without reflection or critical examination, but rather, entire constellations of norms and narratives may form nexus points of political discourse, arrived at from

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explicitly differing normative vantage points. Such a nexus constellation may be open to reinterpretation, while exemplifying an underlying pattern of action, which itself goes unexamined. For example, the norm of elites pursuing aggressive wars may be reproduced without critical examination, even if the possibility and desirability of a specific war is indeed considered. This is a question of the range of the sacred, in terms of protective circles and demands for reverence or respect, and to put it succinctly, it becomes a question of whether it is the sphere of open deliberation itself that should be surrounded by a protective circle, or whether discursive delimitations within the debate are required. Furthermore, discursive delimitations may take on the form of, say, penalizing formal or informal logical fallacies, or prohibiting certain kinds of verbal attacks, or avoiding certain subjects. We could conceive of more or less extensive legal regulations on public discourse and proponents of free speech may argue against prohibitions concerning any topics, to counter the dangers of the unreflected adherence to certain norms, narratives, and aims, whereas demands for respect and reverence could be supported by questioning a clearcut division between physical violence and linguistic attacks, and pointing out that genocides and similar measures tend to be preceded by the discursive dehumanization of victims. We also face the familiar trade-offs between what is conducive to immediate communal integration as opposed to what is beneficial to the long-term survival and reproduction of the community as a whole, and the different logics of internal competition and advancement within a group, as opposed to external competition with other groups: we encounter, that is, the tension between cohesion and conscious adaptation. Some people may experience a deep sense of alienation, regardless of their own access to status or material resources, experiencing a profound discontent about the shared world, and desiring to reshape it into something more closely aligned to their own preferences. This is hardly surprising: people not only want access to resources to use, or status or recognition in relation to other people, but they also want to inhabit an environment in which they feel they can flourish, or at least one that does not actively disturb them. Since we are, as Aristotle put it, “political animals,” we act cooperatively, and create shared normative and physical environments.30 But we do not share equally in the creation of these environments, and they fit some people better than others, since there are individual differences, cognitively, emotionally, and in terms of

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how we perceive sensory reality. There is thus little surprise that we should find conflicts springing from the fact that any shared social world will serve some people better than others, in terms of access to resources and recognition, but also by recourse to its general environmental features, shaped by formal and informal norms for interaction with other beings. Critical commitments may thus result from a sense of alienation in relation to the surrounding society, and be driven by the existential strategies of what I propose to call avoidance, escape, and bridging. The existential strategies of avoidance and escape entail a reluctance to enter a shared world, brought on by a deep distaste for adult society and the imperatives it carries with it, which may be counterbalanced by a deep sense of joy when successfully escaping it into subcultural worlds, phenomenological explorations (perhaps aided by psychedelic drugs) and virtual realities. As such, there seems to be nothing particularly immoral, or universally irrational, about these strategies. Do they not simply reflect different preferences, in themselves as valid as any other? The problem, however, is that these strategies arguably reflect a refusal to accept responsibility for shaping the shared world, and for protecting whatever one deems positive or desirable about it (at the very least, it provides the material resources necessary for survival, and for the prolonging of one’s own existential projects). In a situation where one really cannot exert any impact on the shared social structure, such strategies may appear morally feasible. But I do not think most people are quite there, at least in contemporary liberal democracies. Also, I think these strategies are labile in the sense that, for most people, they still demand a degree of accommodation (in order to acquire resources, if nothing else) with a world one may despise. These strategies, however, are closely akin to a very common one, which I call bridging. Here, one does accept the world, accepts responsibility for one’s place in it, but attempts to bridge the gap between the imperatives and features of the shared world, and one’s own preferences and demands. Bridging the gap, physically and mentally, is a very common activity. For example, creating a private world of rich sensations to compensate for the perceived poverty of public spaces, or engaging in virtual adventures to counterbalance an existence of routine work. There is nothing really wrong with such strategies in themselves, as long as they do not lapse into the contrary flaw of those of avoidance and escape: to completely accept the shared world as a given.

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Now, these existential strategies may be more or less successful—what interests me is their political relevance. Here, there are two opposite risks: the one of committing to a destructive political project with ill-founded aims, and the one of accepting the status quo or relinquishing all responsibility for it. Both have of course been noted before. As for the former, a critical stance emanating from a deeply felt rejection of some aspects of the shared world may incorporate a flawed assumption about the changes needed in order to alleviate the sense of existential alienation. We are fallible creatures, after all, prone to all kinds of cognitive errors. I may wrongly believe I am unhappy about one thing, while actually being unhappy about another one. At a deeper level, we may consider how aims and narratives themselves emanate from certain cognitive and emotional patterns and intuitions, or are imported from without, and perhaps come to conversely impact on more basic patterns. Legitimate complaints may develop, individually and socially, into overarching narratives and mobilizing myths, which become destructive in relation to their cognitive and emotional origins. Or perhaps we find existential meaning and emotional satisfaction in a certain relational dynamic—for example but not necessarily with other human beings—and wrongly believe that if we maximize the potential for it, we will flourish, failing to foresee other resulting effects. This is not to disparage any proposed solution out of hand, but we should carefully examine our own motives as well as the aims we take on as our own, and seek to understand in depth whether they reflect what we really want, or whether they are actually illusory. In the absence of secure knowledge, a degree of humility and the openness to further reflexivity is called for, even if we are politically and pragmatically committed to a certain course of action. Also, since most people are not actively engaged in politics, it is enough for a small minority to be fundamentally wrong about something and commit to it wholeheartedly, to wreak havoc on millions. Minorities and even single human beings, if highly committed, can exert vastly disproportional influence. One way of counterbalancing the potentially destructive effects of this situation, is to incorporate a balance of powers into constitutional arrangements, but another crucial feature required to scrutinize critical commitments is an open debate, and the risks of criminalizing or culturally marginalizing certain arguments and positions is not only that of suppressing extremes, but also that of freezing the middle-ground, of petrifying a range of nuanced, pragmatic

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responses, and dividing the field of debate exactly into opposing extremes, of conflicting theopolitical projects espousing contrary sacred domains on a ground of contestation, resting upon a shared critical focus. To sum up, then, previous research has pointed to the demarcation of temporal and spatial domains that are charged with a perceived significance that can be perceived as both benevolent and dangerous, and in both cases potentially contagious, that are tied to norms and narratives that are symbolically constitutive for communal identity, and that are set apart and surrounded by restrictions and prescriptions concerning human behavior in relation to them. Some of these restrictions and prescriptions, furthermore, are legally sanctioned, and reproduced with little reflection. All of these themes remain relevant in relation to existing practices and legal and cultural norms of actual, liberal-democratic nation-states. Hence, to pose the questions as to their normative status is not merely to deal with hypotheticals, but rather with possible alternatives to actually existing norms and practices. These domains form charged cul-de-sacs of mainstream, liberal-democratic theorizing, constituting some of its most crucial theoretical limits. They point to the remains of potential arrangements beyond the scope of liberal democracy in its contemporary, supposedly secular form. This gives rise to questions concerning the relations between liberal democracy and these elements, empirically as well as normatively—whether there are good reasons to keep existing practices in place, whether they should be extended, or rather abolished altogether. There remain traces of sacred delimitations even within ostensibly secular political contexts, forming an entire topology of the exceptional: of norms and narratives, symbols and rituals, sites and artifacts, but also of phenomenological shifts and trajectories out of the ordinary, of intense experiences of wonder and luminosity, and of the perceived dissolution of the boundaries between the self and the surrounding world. Indeed, there is an entire topology of the exceptional, a constantly shifting landscape, spiked with peaks of extreme politicization, as well as plains of depoliticization, domains removed from contestation. All of the elements extracted by the preceding analysis may be thought of as publicly enforced, endorsed, or regulated, or conversely not being so. They could be incorporated into patterns of exchange and circulation as commodities or gifts, and pursued metapolitically, by way

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of practices of prefiguration, or envisaged as following from political reform or revolutionary transformation. Different setups would have different systemic effects, where the elements would impact on each other and the setup as a whole. We could also attempt to consider how different combinations would impact on the success of a political entity in adapting to its social and ecological environment, in competition with other entities. As a consequence, we could ask similar questions concerning all of the elements of the preceding analysis: what about the justification of constitutive boundaries and the reproduction of cultural ones, the organization of the oscillation between the division of labor and a communal coming together beyond it, or logics of commodification and reciprocal exchange, or the pursuit of intense phenomenological shifts and their attendant institutions and traditions of interpretation—all of these may be considered in relation to competitive political space and an environmental context which may become subject to decisive changes. I have attempted to elevate issues inherent in debates on public worship to a higher level of abstraction, in order to reflect upon a broader range of possible arrangements; abstraction, however, also entails an at least attempted de-contextualization, a lifting of a certain topic out of its specific time and space. Thus, questions of the range of application of shared practices and the coercive enforcement of them emerge, once we think beyond the borders of the nation-states. These questions, however, turn back toward the constitution of any community, at any scale. While the aim of transcending existing nation-states geographically and institutionally poses specific challenges for those who advocate cosmopolitan developments, we still have to consider the same fundamental question as to what constitutes a desirable community, regardless of its territorial boundaries and criteria for membership; regardless of whether we advocate some version of cosmopolitanism, or multiculturalism within existing states, or, conversely, civic, cultural, or ethnic nationalism, or even ethno-federalism, there are still a host of other questions that need to be addressed, pertaining to the public reproduction or lack thereof of symbols, narratives, and rituals, of the potential demarcation of sacred values and domains outside of such practices, of the way in which resources are circulated, and the oscillation between the world of work and of the collective coming together beyond it is organized, as well as of the potential significance of phenomenological trajectories that are commonly tied to existing institutional

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and interpretative religious frameworks, and of how all of these elements are connected to each other, and with what motivation.

4.2 Ethos, spiritual decompression, and fatal politics We set out from the problem of Kakanien, as portrayed by Robert Musil in his satire on the last years of the Habsburg Empire, a problem of an already existing political entity, the aims of which come under scrutiny, and a problem, of course, which is relevant more generally: the European Union, as well as its member states, or any state, may be similarly questioned. Musil, however, touched on a wider range of problems pertaining to the ambiguous fields of religion and politics, problems involving questions of genealogies as well as analogies, and pointing to fields of phenomenological exploration as well as norms, narratives, symbols, and rituals. The debate on the political impact of religion calls for a clearer definition of the three elements involved, that is, religion, political, and impact. The point of departure of this work was the debate on the impact of Jewish and Christian traditions on existing liberal democracies. Most immediately visible, perhaps, is the issue of religious beliefs and communities clashing with forms of rule— that is, in the case of liberal democracies, what if religious beliefs clash with the norms, processes, and policies of a liberal democracy? The latter term in itself points to a tense coexistence of a liberal emphasis on basic rights and the demands for majority rule characteristic of democracy, and incorporates a series of elements of basic rights, constitutional arrangements, processes and representative democratic rule. Hence, religious challenges may be more or less fundamental and extensive: it may thus be, for example, a question of a desire to completely overthrow existing democratic forms of rule, of transforming their sets of basic rights, of demanding a narrowing down of the applicability of certain rights—for example, freedom of speech—or of a sweeping change of policies at a more superficial level, not calling for any more profound transformation, or simply an issue of protesting against a specific policy. What, however, about the relevance of religious traditions for those not committed to them? Some thinkers have suggested that we may draw upon,

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and be inspired by, religious traditions, even if we ourselves do not share their beliefs, or belong to them institutionally. Thus, religious traditions could serve as an inspiration for contemporary critical approaches within existing liberal democracies, even if we accept the fundamental arrangements of the latter. Furthermore, however, this is not merely a question of hypotheticals, of the potential impact of religious elements, but also of already adopted elements: contemporary liberal democracies already sanction elements which, even when they are considered as secular, are clearly related to religious ones, historically and genealogically and by way of analogy. Thus, there has been a fierce debate, during the last century and up until the present one, on the way in which Jewish and Christian traditions have inspired critical approaches focused on a radical transformation of interhuman relations, involving hopes for justice and emancipation, and on the potentials and fallacies of theories on the end (in both senses of the word) of history. There are also, however, connections, in terms of both genealogy and analogy, between the practices of collective worship of religious communities and supposedly secular liberal democracies; in the latter case, we may speak of practices of public worship. Thus, existing liberal democracies publicly sanction norms, narratives, symbols, and rituals of nationalism as well as civil religion. How, however, could this situation serve to inspire a contemporary critical approach? Critical thinkers have highlighted contradictions and tensions between opposed components, focused on paradigmatic spheres of human flourishing, deconstructed concepts and conceptual dichotomies, and proposed concepts of their own. They have also, however, been accused, at times, of utopianism, of failing to take the competitive nature of the political environment into account. All of these points remain relevant to my own critical endeavor. Thus, critics have pointed to tensions between the fundamental impulse of human rights, and its extension and application: if all men are to have equal rights, why are some human beings excluded on the seemingly arbitrary basis of their race, gender, sexuality, and so on, and why are animals excluded from serious moral consideration? There are thus degrees of ethical closure, pertaining to the extension of moral consideration, and some argue for an expanding circle of rights and moral concern. Others, however, point out that moral concerns may be based upon different fundamental intuitions, and hence, if there is a horizontal closure, a contraction of the circle of moral

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concern, there may also be a vertical closure, a delimitation of the range of sources of moral concern. We may distinguish here between ethics and ethos, not as a dichotomy, but as a polarity, where any actual formulation may tend more toward one or the other: thus, by ethics I refer to a clearly argued and ordered normative thinking drawing upon fewer fundamental intuitions, whereas an ethos encompasses a jumble of explicit and implicit norms and intuitions including aesthetic considerations of what is deemed to be beautiful and hence desirable. The problem for both multicultural states and cosmopolitan proposals, and generally attempts at universalizing some norms, is that universalization tends to give rise to questions concerning which intuitions should be fundamental to any universalizing aspirations and why. Those opposed to a certain universalizing tendency may thus argue that it is too thin to be worth defending, and perhaps also constitutes a threat to their own preferred ethos; conversely, those marginalized by a certain ethos may be happy to see it wither away, while considering a universalistic ethics a force, for them, of emancipation. Any ethos, indeed, comes with calls for sacrifice, of other beings and of aspects of the self. Sacrifice is physical as well as intrapsychic, and violence, in a competitive space, is exerted externally, but also directed against alternative possibilities of an established form of existence. Both dimensions of potential ethical openness or closure are relevant to debates on public worship. Thus, those favoring the free movement of people across the globe may complain that there are no good moral reasons for the present shape of the constitutive boundaries—territorial borders and criteria for membership—of existing nation-states. Such critics may thus call for an increased porosity of these boundaries. Other critics, however, point to contradictions between constitutive and cultural boundaries: thus, a supposedly secular democracy may reproduce elements of public worship with clear traces of a particular ethnoreligious heritage; also, political rhetoric may incorporate instances of implicit ethnocentrism or nationalism clashing with explicit claims to multiculturalism, toleration, post-nationalism, or universalism. There may thus also be contradictions between action and reflection pertaining to ethical closure. Hence, some may advocate transcending the nation, either spatially— through the addition of layers of political decision-making, or the abolition of national borders—or conceptually in existing states, that is, through replacing

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the nation with another political ideal within the same boundaries. Others, however, may defend the nation as a desirable ideal and a means of realizing, rather than restricting, human rights and the dignity of human beings. Critics of multiculturalism may argue that several cultures co-existing in a state results in their mutual weakening, or that a common force weakens all of them and that only one, coherent, state-supported culture can withstand that force (e.g., capitalism, egalitarianism, nihilism) or perhaps that one of the cultures allowed by the state to go on, or even being supported by it, weakens all the others, or some or one of them that is deemed particularly crucial to maintain. This, however, is also a question of the generative forces of culture: if extraordinary phenomenological trajectories and states of consciousness are seen as important generative forces, perhaps they should also be protected by the state? If, however, such elements are not deemed to be valuable generative forces in the present, that is not necessary. It should be noted that this distinction cuts across the one between religious and non-religious, in the sense of organized religion or established religious traditions. Either way, however, we should take a stance on public worship, on its abolition, continuation in its present form, or transformation, as well as its locus. Thus, for example, those espousing cosmopolitan ideals and proposing projects of moral or political cosmopolitanism may well wish to combine these with practices of public worship, while those favoring some post-national ideal within existing states may want to abolish public worship altogether. In the former case, however, we may observe the tensions between the symbolical and ritualistic reproduction of national communities and the ambitions of proponents of transnational politics; and in the latter case, the presence of narratives, symbols and rituals in a wide range of human communities and political projects across space and time may give rise to some skepticism as to the feasibility and wisdom of seeking to abolish existing publicly sanctioned practices, thus leaving a potentially potent political tool exclusively to competing projects. To the extent that nationalist narratives are challenged, and established grand narratives lose their force, this also poses a question, concerning to which extent the present world is pervaded with a liquid sacred, at least as a potential. Several agents may attempt to capture this potential. Even if accepted, however, a cautionary approach, accepting present national boundaries as well as the continuation of public worship, need not result in a

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boring conclusion: elements of public worship may be grasped as constituting instances of the sacralization of spatial, temporal, and conceptual domains, and we could thus consider constellations of analogous practices. If the nation, as a symbolic entity, can be seen to incorporate residues of the sacred, this should also alert us to the wider possibilities of a politics of the sacred, outside of both organized religion, as commonly understood, and nation-states. Questions of the sacred point to several areas of further investigation, concerning phenomenological shifts and explorations, individually and communally, normative constraints and demands for an at least outward display of reverence or respect in relation to certain spatial and temporal domains, and distinctions between pure and impure both physically and conceptually, uncovering an entire topology of the exceptional. Raising the issue of rituals exposes a wider terrain of practices of repetition, play, ambiguity, and the organization of communal gatherings beyond the division of labor; such gatherings, it should be noted, may be commodified or not, and publicly sanctioned or not, and it could be argued that we find, here, paradigmatic spheres of human flourishing. Also, spheres of political and public debate may be perceived as more or less ritualized spaces for rhetorical and conceptual competition, and there is a tension between calls for open deliberation and demands for the discursive protection of human dignity, as well as the desire to preserve communal coherence. Do we need grand narratives of communal identity, and if so, can we consciously craft and decide between them? Although totalitarian regimes have used propaganda, at times efficiently, they have not really invented the major narratives, the dramatic discursive shifts and formations, which they have ultimately drawn upon, and neither did the mighty Christian churches invent the core of Christianity, even if they relied upon and embellished it, and the same holds true for official forms of nationalism; they, too, draw upon symbols and narratives created by often controversial figures, by artists, academics, and free thinkers, not by elephantine bureaucracies. Narrative inventions emanate out of sudden insights, periods of flow, extraordinary moments of inspiration or even visions and hyperreal events; this is not the stuff that can be conjured up by controlling committees, only tensely reined in by them, and there is the constant risk of reinterpretation and the emergence of groups that challenge established frameworks of interpretation. This is not to say that propagandistic techniques

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cannot be put to use efficiently in order to achieve political means, but the great narratives, the ones that become really successful, draw upon the, often posthumous, influence of creative figures, frequently relatively marginalized or even violently punished by their contemporaries. Indeed, the tension between the emergence and the communication of norms, narratives, and symbols plagues both ideological and religious institutions, resulting in the best case in the amicable division in different strands based upon the same basic narrative, in the worst case in accusations of heresy and violent infighting and competition, crystallizing around questions which, to the uninitiated, may appear comically trivial. Open deliberation, however, may force people into a deepened reflection on the origins of norms and narratives. A pragmatic approach to not only maintain an open debate, but also increase its quality, could focus on concrete, easily implemented reforms like deliberative training in schools and universities, agreements countering some common fallacies of informal logic, and the like. This could be motivated by recourse both to principles of fairness and utilitarian considerations on the outcome of democratic decision-making: it is arguably fairer to allow a more equal access to public deliberation, and more extensive deliberation, if reined in by norms of honesty and mutual respect, might be plausibly expected to improve decision-making, and to aid not only in the channeling and aggregation, but also in the formation, of preferences. Furthermore, an insistence on open deliberation may be argued to be crucial to preserving the capacity for conscious adaptation to changing circumstances. As for phenomenological exploration, we may wonder what its normative implications should be. We may, of course, endlessly speculate, and even accepting some God, this does not entail knowing what God is: we may accept “God” as a phenomenological reality without knowing what this God is and whence it comes, and we may even distinguish between the faith in (a) God, entailing a relation of trust, and the belief in a certain conceptualization of the divine; it is fully possible to have faith in God without a clear belief, or conversely, entertaining a belief in God, without retaining faith. There are many existential and speculative possibilities here, and the world’s religions have done a decent job, taken together, of uncovering some of them. To put it diplomatically, many people would probably agree that what we call religion is to a considerable extent a matter of joining together certain types of intense experiences or states of consciousness—which can be classified

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and studied from phenomenological as well as neurological perspectives, and which may or may or may not be induced by supernatural agents—with certain metaphysical beliefs, which may or may not be mistaken. Ironically, however, it is not necessarily the case that “organized religion” clings to “mystical experiences” which, without them, we could and should simply do away with: rather, it is probably the continued presence of religious traditions and metaphysical beliefs, and doubts about exhaustively naturalistic explanations, that obstruct the emergence of an alternative consensus on such experiences—in a community of convinced atheists or agnostics, they could potentially be incorporated into another consensus on their interpretation, and continuously explored, and this could even, conceivably, carry dramatic consequences in terms of normative and institutional outcomes. As long as there is a plurality of radically different interpretations and beliefs about them, however, they will probably primarily remain the province of particular groups and individuals. The ordinary, everyday language of things and mundane tasks is often found wanting when trying to communicate extraordinary states of consciousness; nevertheless, theological literature is full exactly of descriptions. As Lars Gustafsson points out in his brief novel The Tennis Players, you can make a map of Texas using the crumbs of a cookie31—but in what sense will it accurately show Texas to the beholder? There are no sunsets, no heat of the desert, no plants, animals, or people, no seemingly endless freight trains slowly chugging toward the horizon, nor the flames of distant oil refineries dramatically blazing in the darkening evening skies on the outskirts of Galveston, in this little map made of crumbs. In this sense, the literature of phenomenological exploration is filled with cookie crumbs; indeed, multitudes of volumes of entire traditions may amount to little more than shoddily construed maps made of crumbs, seeking to illustrate something unfathomably different. The question is to what an extent such a description is deemed to be too reductive and thus to be avoided, not to trivialize or pollute what is described. The only way to fully map the phenomenological reality of human existence would be to draw a Borgesian, imperial map, rather than one constructed out of crumbs—that is, to replicate it.32 The question of communicability, however, should not be grasped as a dichotomy, but as a polarity, where more or less exhaustive attempts

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may be offered. Furthermore, the issue here is more general, and pertains potentially to any phenomenon: the stable things of everyday language are phenomenologically open to trajectories of change, to a metamorphosis of the intensity of perception. Indeed, it is exactly the intensity of some experiences which may reveal, upon closer inspection, that the very same logic pervades everyday existence and ordinary language: any reference will be, in a sense, absurdly reductive in relation to what is referred to. To put it succinctly, “God” could be understood as being the most obvious instance of a more general problem. However, if we fail to even recognize that there are instances, trajectories and extended moments of phenomenological excess, we are advocating what we could call compact perception, we are claiming that such excess is either non-existent, or only exists pathologically, and is, as it were, invalid: to be ignored, combated, glossed over, or at least, should never carry serious normative or institutional implications. We may evoke the concept of spirit to point to a fascinating dynamic, if we interpret spirit along the lines hinted at by Roberto Unger, but beyond his interhuman perspective: “We are unlimited, or infinite, with respect to the practical and discursive settings of our activity.” Unger writes: “They are limited, or finite, with regard to us. Our excess over them is what, in a traditional theological vocabulary, we call spirit.”33 I would agree with the understanding of spirit as the excess over any delimited interpretation, but add that spirit may point to phenomenological surplus as well. We encounter spirit in phenomenological overflow, in discursive surplus over any set institution and interpretation, and in collective action to found new orders beyond the existing. In all of these areas, the sacred as the delimitation of certain domains— spatial, temporal, conceptual—surrounded by demands for protection and norms of reverence or avoidance may be perceived as capturing and reining in the dangers of spirit. In communal exuberance or collective effervescence, we encounter alternative normative and institutional arrangements and positional roles, that are nonetheless reined in, and assigned a determined space within the reproduction of an existing order. In phenomenological hyperreal events, we encounter different ways of perceiving the same things. In discursive challenges, we encounter alternative interpretations and possibilities beyond existing, customary ones. All of these areas point to the dynamic of sacred capture of spiritual excess or overflow. This capture may be grasped as entailing

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practices of spiritual decompression, of a subjunctive realization without actualization. But all of them may also spill over into actualization, and hence they are dangerous to existing orders, and this risk, this ambiguity, is reined in—until it no longer is. Finally, not to lapse into utopianism, we should consider the global environment in which we now act politically, and whether looming crises will carry a dramatic impact on our forms of social and political organization. Periods of crisis mark turning points, forking paths toward the survival of an order in its current form, its disappearance, or radical transformation. Conflicts between social coherence and calls for adaptation may become fiercely visible, as threats of collapse appear.34 Catastrophe needs not coalesce with collapse, and collapse not with catastrophe. Collapses need not follow from catastrophes: while a catastrophe is the sudden intrusion of an unforeseen event that threatens the reproduction of an existing order, collapse is, in a sense, the natural order of things: any order relies on processes of constant reproduction, which may become routinized to the extent that they are taken for granted, and stability comes to be erroneously perceived as lack of movement, while in reality, collapse is what follows from inaction. Order rests not on passivity, but on constant reproduction, and reproductive processes need to be adjusted, if the structural presuppositions on which they rest are transformed, as a result of the very processes of reproduction themselves, or due to or in interaction with other factors. When reproduction no longer occurs, or when conditions change, so that it no longer serves to reproduce order, collapse naturally emerges, gradually or suddenly. Collapse is the natural condition, which must be continuously averted, postponed. The timespan of collapse is thus difficult to frame precisely, since it is only some more or less clearly defined endpoint which retroactively transforms certain conditions into aspects of a collapse. If adaptation is gradual, order sails like a ship of Theseus, appearing impressively impregnable. Sudden, radical adaptation, however, renders the natural order of things appear starkly visible as it always actually is. Three overarching themes point to the future fate of the existing sociopolitical order in Europe, and perhaps to even greater existential risks. These themes could be summarized under the headings of ethnicity, equality, and ecology. Ethnicity is used here as a term gathering together related issues and debates on race, ethnicity, culture, and religion, which all intersect

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with questions of gender and sexuality, and where some criticize racism, xenophobia, misogyny, and misrecognition, while others fear terrorism, civil strife, and the dangers of the growth of ethnic and racial minorities and the demographic trends of multicultural countries. Debates on equality, which also intersect with the themes of gender, race, ethnicity and recognition, point to rising disparities in wealth and income, precarization, and the hollowing out of a broad middle class, and fears of the coming onslaught of automation. Ecological questions, finally, pertain to the risks of resource depletion— not necessarily literally, but it could be a matter of a resource becoming prohibitively expensive without the emergence of a sufficient replacement— species extinctions and the crises of pollution and climate change. All of these three overarching themes are related to the issues uncovered by an analysis of public worship as well as the excavation of wider, analogous possibilities tied to existing practices of it. Everything is interconnected—a cliché which is readily received in an epoch of global exchange and massive flows of goods, money, and people, as well as an increased ecological awareness. Indeed, several theoretical metaphors have been proposed to capture this insight, such as the rhizome, the network, or the mesh.35 Fate is frequently symbolized by a thread, allowing for the trivial observation that all things are indeed connected, tied together. Different experiences, interpretations, and articulations of beings, however, allow for and preclude different ways of binding them together. Politics does not only comprise a struggle over the division of the world and its bounties, but also over the experience, conceptualization, and articulation of beings, allowing for different ways of tying them together, or what I propose to call fatal politics. This is an understanding of politics, then, as transcending a mere struggle for resources, involving the conceptualization and articulation of what beings are, but also the differences in the phenomenological spectrum of perceiving them, allowing for different kinds of interconnections to be made between them. A fatal horizon entails a diachronic opening up toward a temporal perspective, but simultaneous synchronic closures. For example, capitalism and liberal democracy entail the interpretation of beings, time, and space in terms of commodities to be exchanged, and human beings as citizens tied together by rights and legal duties. This opens up the possibility of a fatal horizon of a global movement toward the diffusion of liberal democracy and capitalism as the end

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of history.36 Similarly, the interpretation of human beings in terms of race, religion, or ethnicity may open or close certain fatal horizons as well as ways of interconnecting them in a communal order, and different ways of interpreting human beings as well as animals allow for or prohibit ways of treating them and integrating them into technological systems, while claiming for example that a site is sacred may forbid its integration into a chain of production. What I call fatal politics thus pertains to the way in which certain interpretations of beings allow for different ways of binding them together into communities, or conversely closes off such possibilities. The attempted dissolution of stable categories of identity or existence into ambiguity, however, is also an important feature of contemporary political struggles. If fatal politics is the struggle over how to interpret beings, there is a peculiar struggle to destabilize stable categories, typical of the postmodern era. The term queer is sometimes used, pertaining to human beings, in line with the general anthropocentric bias of modern politics. We could also use the term weird, however, a word which is derived from the ancient Anglo-Saxon wyrd, or fate. Weird politics, then, aims for ambiguity and deconstruction. While the term identity politics is a common one in contemporary debates, fatal and weird politics are also relevant in a broader sense, however, relating not only to interhuman relations, but also to the relations between human beings and the nonhuman. If we remain within a broadly liberal framework, we are concerned with questions of meaningful autonomy and its spatiotemporal extension and presuppositions. Complete freedom of movement is worthless to most people if there is nowhere to go. Autonomy, to be meaningful, presupposes the capacity to move, as well as the existence of something to move within, and experience: it presupposes, that is, capable agents as well as a world to explore, and the latter consists of other people, organisms, environments, and artifacts that emerge to us relationally, that is, dynamically. Regardless of whether and how we believe our ways of conceptualizing and communicating about the nonhuman impacts on our ways of acting in regard to it, transhuman relations constitute a crucial part of actual human existence, not only in the obvious sense that we are dependent on them for nourishment and survival, and for the constant reproduction of our biological existence, but also in their phenomenological and emotional significance to us. This is not to deny that our relations to other human beings hold an important and, to most people, privileged place.

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Nevertheless, we should not fail to consider other relationships too, especially in an era when technology and industrialization have increased the power of humanity over the surrounding world, and when mass production and commodification have radically altered our ways of relating to artifacts as well as to natural phenomena, time, and space. A meaningful existence consists in allowing for an appreciation of time beyond the confines of strategic action. It consists in a relating to space as something more than simply a measurable resource to be efficiently utilized, and to things as more than mere consumer products to be used and discarded. It also consists, for many people, in recurring collective gatherings, and a shared symbolic identity as belonging to a community transcending notions of basic rights. All of these elements have been handled by religious communities as well as nation-states; none of them are destined to remain within the confines of these entities, as we currently understand them. Since secularization may refer to both the removal from and the transfer of elements to the public domain, we may conceive of a series of possible constellations of interrelated components, which may or may not be publicly sanctioned. As a consequence, we may imagine a host of alternative conceptualizations of community, some within, and some beyond, a contemporary, broadly liberal and democratic focus. Thus, the Reasonable Republic embraces constitutional patriotism and civil religion, that is, symbols and rituals directly tied to its democratic form of rule, but bereft of any particular religious or ethnic traces. It enforces meritocracy and human rights, including socioeconomic rights, and has institutionalized deliberative democracy at local, regional, and national levels, where open deliberation is protected by generous free speech legislation, prioritizing the openness of the debate itself, rather than concerns about dignity. The Republic is relatively open to immigration, but places a great emphasis on civic education of immigrants and natives alike, and on rites of passage toward civic responsibility for adult citizens. Limited animal rights have been implemented, forbidding the mistreatment of animals, but an agricultural industry is nevertheless in place, and animals are integrated into advanced technological systems, and used to yield nourishment for humans. There are areas of protected wildlife and natural habitats, albeit of limited extension. Ecotopia, however, has gone considerably further than that: not only are fossil fuels forbidden, and all electricity generated by renewable sources, but the

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eating of animals is prohibited as well; the agricultural industry is exclusively oriented toward vegetarian products, there are extensive areas of protected wildlife, and the dignity of animals is upheld through legislation against de-animalization and speciesism in public debates as well as works of art. Public, non-commodified oscillation takes on the form of collective festivals, artifacts are required to be built to be lasting, and there are severe taxes on waste. The Multicultural Archipelago has neither a flag, nor a national anthem; rather, each community that has joined its political union may uphold its own public holidays, collective rituals, and symbols, as long as they meet certain criteria—the community has to have a certain number of members, and its culture must not actively disparage or express hostility toward other publicly recognized cultures. That being said, the Multicultural Archipelago encompasses religious, ethnic, and racial communities, and a community may restrict membership according to religious, cultural, ethnic, or racial criteria that make voluntary membership impossible for some people regardless of their behavior, although most of them choose not to. There is no standardized, state-run education system, but rather, education is a matter for the communities, which may also regulate the use of language, dress codes, and media transmission within their territories, in order to strengthen and protect their culture. There are communities of vegans and vegetarians in the Archipelago, but also communities that enforce religiously based laws on what is to be eaten, how the animals are to be treated, and the food is to be prepared. In all of the communities, however, certain basic rights are upheld, common to all. The Ethnoarchy, however, is a community of extensive participatory democracy alongside an equally extensive institutional structure of public worship, of protected symbols, rituals, norms, and narratives, celebrating a particularistic ethnic heritage. It is possible to immigrate to and become a citizen of the Ethnoarchy for those considered to belong to its ethnic community, even if they happen to be born elsewhere, but also for those of other ethnicities who agree to shift their primary allegiance and loyalty to the ethnos of the Ethnoarchy, and to adopt and cherish its customs. The Ethnoarchy publicly acknowledges several religions, since its ethnos has historically been divided into them: membership of and participation in the rituals of one of the

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recognized religions is compulsory, and no other religions are allowed. The Neo-Pagan Nation, however, encompasses several ethnic groups, which public policy aims to morph into an overarching meta-ethnicity by way of a pagan revival, complete with extensive communal rituals and festivals, as well as a publicly supported pursuit of extraordinary states of consciousness, which are interpreted as visions of the unity of the people with its land, and used to impel experiencers and others to accept a shared responsibility for it, also entailing the duty to guard its customs, laws and external borders. Sacred sites, in the midst of beautiful landscapes, are not closed off to movement, but publicly recognized and tied to the neo-pagan religion of the nation. There are laws prohibiting cruelty to animals, but meat and milk are viewed as fundamental to the strength of the people, and as gifts of the gods. Commodified exchange is complemented by extensive welfare measures, which are legitimized as an exchange of gifts between people honoring a shared, sacred heritage. The Freehold is a libertarian meta-community of communities: thus, there is no state regulation or sanction on holidays, narratives, symbols, or rituals, and there is absolute freedom of expression. Those who so desire may declare whatever symbols or holidays they wish, and negotiate with employers about them. Some of the constituent communities of the Freehold, such as The Covenant and The Congregation, are indeed religious communities with extensive rituals and religious rules, the adherence to which, however, is a matter of voluntary choice in moving there; thus, the vast landowners who founded those communities, only sell land to people who agree, by means of contract, to adhere to those rules, by way of a clause that impels to do so. The state only intervenes to protect the self-ownership of all citizens against foreign and domestic threats to it, but does not prohibit people from selling themselves into slavery, thus voluntarily giving up their self-ownership by means of a contract. The Alliance of Altruistic Atheists was founded by religious skeptics who, upon obtaining a large tract of land, successfully formed an independent state, the constitution of which specifies that it lacks any official religion, and that religious beliefs and practices are solely private matters. Thus, the alliance does not forbid the expression of religious belief, but no religion is publicly recognized or ascribed any peculiar status or economic advantage; neither are religious believers given any special rights or legal exceptions, and

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the population of the Alliance remains overwhelmingly atheist. The alliance provides a large amount of foreign aid, in the way deemed most efficient as a result of empirical research, and allows for the immigration of refugees; while some have expressed caution concerning large-scale immigration of religious believers, fearing that it could result in religious revivals and the emergence of religious intolerance, most citizens of the Alliance expect even intense religious commitments to fade over time, due to its generous welfare system, strict meritocracy, and general existential security—on the whole, it is argued, this will render organized religion a negligible political or even cultural force for the foreseeable future. Immigration for economic reasons, however, is only allowed to fill in gaps in vacant, qualified positions of work, as it would otherwise be perceived as a threat to the regulated labor market and extensive welfare system of the alliance. The Philosophers’ Politeia is also a secular state in the sense of not publicly recognizing or favoring any community or tradition of organized religion, but maintains practices of public worship, bereft of any explicit religious traces, as a means of communal cohesion and integration, as a consequence of an analysis of their role throughout history, and roots in human psychology and biology. Furthermore, exploration of extraordinary states of consciousness, by means of meditation as well as psychedelic drugs, is publicly funded and institutionally organized, in order to obtain scientific knowledge of the causes, consequences, and phenomenological character of such states, and it is generally agreed upon not only that the pursuit of them has been a valuable element of religious practices throughout human history, albeit hardly exclusively so, but also that they potentially bestow beneficial psychological benefits on the experiencer, provided that they are safely regulated. The Politeia provides extensive basic rights to humans and animals alike, and the consumption of meat is prohibited as immoral; however, since the Politeia cherishes free speech, derogatory portrayals of human beings and cultures as well as animals in the media and public debates are allowed, but frowned upon by most people. Areas of natural beauty are preserved and protected by the state, as are cultural practices that are likewise deemed to be carriers of profound experiences of beauty and existential meaning. The state sanctions ecological developments in all areas of life, and thus aggressively pursues ecological modernization. The Politeia is an egalitarian society with an extensive welfare system and redistribution of

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resources, and its non-discrimination policies are based on an awareness of the need to take the varying psychological traits and creative skills of people into account, and to consider the difference between the short- and long-term effects of any activity. The above are merely some sketches, or a few faint stars in a vast logical space of further possibilities, countless of which are neither liberal, nor democratic. In the end, the language of the sacred functions above all as a signal: bringing up the sacred, and taking it seriously, usually indicates that some domain of political existence is politicized, opened up for public contestation and collective conflicts, and thereby also for critical reflection. Conversely, denying that a discourse on the sacred contributes anything of relevance to an understanding of or normative approach toward contemporary politics usually amounts, within the discourse in question, to the depoliticization of certain domains, the arrangements of which are thereby taken for granted and thus removed from reflection and contestation. Raising issues well beyond the confines of the dominant questions of contemporary political debates may appear an esoteric practice, something which, at best, amounts to little more than abstruse thought experiments; and yet, the future is crafted conceptually exactly out of thought experiments.

Notes

Chapter 1 1 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften: Aus dem Nachlaß (Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2000), p. 1657. My translation from the German original. 2 Robert Musil, “‘Nation’ as Ideal and as Reality,” in Burton Pike and David S. Luft (eds.), Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 102–03. 3 See Genese Grill, “The ‘Other’ Robert Musil: Robert Musil and Mysticism,” in Philip Payne, Graham Bartram, and Galin Tihanov (eds.), A Companion to the Works of Robert Musil (Rochester: Camden House, 2007), pp. 333–54. 4 David Luft, “Introduction,” in Robert Musil (ed.), Precision and Soul: Essays and Addresses (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1990), p. xxvii. 5 I am referring to the famous quote by Steven Weinberg originally made in an address at the April 1999 Conference on Cosmic Design of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington, DC: “for good people to do evil – that takes religion.” 6 See José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994), but also, for example, Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart, Sacred and Secular: Religion and Politics Worldwide (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2007). 7 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. The German text, with an English translation by G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), p. 36e. 8 See for example, Norberto Bobbio, Liberalism and Democracy (London: Verso, 2005), for a succinct overview of this theme. 9 See for example, Jon Elster, “Introduction,” in Jon Elster and Rune Slagstad (eds.), Constitutionalism and Democracy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–17.

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10 See for example, Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Giogio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005). 11 Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen. Edited by Richard Tuck and Michael Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 181. 12 See John Locke, “A Letter Concerning Toleration,” in Ian Shapiro (ed.), Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 211–54. 13 John Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 66. 14 Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration. 15 See for example, Michael Huemer, The Problem of Political Authority: An Examination of the Right to Coerce and the Duty to Obey (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013); Robert Jackson, Sovereignty: The Evolution of an Idea (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007); and Ian Clark, Legitimacy in International Society (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 16 Locke, Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, pp. 152–53. 17 See for example, Robert Dahl, “The Concept of Power,” in Roderick Bell, David V. Edwards, and R. Harrison Wagner (eds.), Political Power: A Reader in Theory and Research (New York: Free Press, 1969), pp. 79–93; Steven Lukes, Power: A Radical View (London: Macmillan, 1974); Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (eds.), The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1991); Jeffrey C. Isaac, “Beyond the Three Faces of Power: A Realist Critique,” in Thomas E. Wartenberg (ed.), Rethinking Power (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 32–55; Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 1990); and Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 18 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince (New York: Dover Publications, 1992), p. 40. 19 Plato, The Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Book VII. 20 Peter Singer, A Darwinian Left: Politics, Evolution, and Cooperation (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). 21 John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 138. 22 Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009), pp. 69–70. 23 See for example, Jason Brennan, Against Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).

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24 See for example, Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, Unfit for the Future: The Need for Moral Enhancement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) and Patricia Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us About Morality (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), pp. 71–81. 25 See for example, Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (London: Bloomsbury, 2014). 26 Peter Mair, Ruling the Void: The Hollowing-out of Western Democracy (London: Verso Books, 2013). 27 Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow (London: Vintage, 2017), p. 356. 28 Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (London: Penguin Books, 2010), pp. 40–41. 29 See for example, the theoretical framework presented by Francis Fukuyama in The Origins of Political Order: From Prehuman Times to the French Revolution (London: Profile Books, 2012). 30 See for example, Alvin Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), Chapter 13. II. 31 A succinct summary of these arguments, and a contemporary naturalistic take on religion, can be found in Ingmar Persson and Julian Savulescu, “The Limits of Religious Tolerance: A Secular View,” in Steven Clarke, Russell Powell, and Julian Savulescu (eds.), Religion, Intolerance, and Conflict: A Scientific and Conceptual Investigation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 236–52. 32 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 87. 33 As does Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion (Boston and New York: Mariner Books, 2008), pp. 74–77. 34 See for example, David Bentley Hart, The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2013). 35 See Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology (New York: Viking, 2005). 36 See for example, Victor J. Stenger, God: The Failed Hypothesis. How Science Shows That God Does Not Exist (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2008), for a good summary. 37 See for example, Richard Swinburne, The Existence of God (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Richard Swinburne, Is There a God? (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); and Plantinga, Warranted Christian Belief. 38 See Norris and Inglehart, Sacred and Secular.

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39 Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), p. 164. 40 See Hermann Lübbe, Säkularisierung: Geschichte eines ideenpolitischen Begriffs (Freiburg/München: Verlag Karl Alber, 2003). 41 Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto (London: Pluto Press, 2006), p. 38. 42 Within Christian traditions, it has often been pointed out that the outward display and the inner disposition may well be disjointed. See Talal Asad “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” in Pamela J. Stweart and Andrew Strathern (eds.), The International Library of Essays in Anthropology: Ritual (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), p. 237. 43 Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012), p. 25. 44 See for example, Ernst Bloch, Erbschaft dieser Zeit (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1985); Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages (London: Pimlico, 1993); Melvin Lasky, Utopia and Revolution: On the Origins of a Metaphor (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1976); Bernard McGinn, The Calabrian Abbot: Joachim of Fiore in the History of Western Thought (New York: Macmillan, 1985); Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Prophetic Future: A Medieval Study in Historical Thinking (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 1999); Mattias Riedl, Joachim von Fiore: Denker der vollendeten Menschheit (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 2004); and Jacob Taubes, Abendländische Eschatologie (München: Matthes & Seitz Verlag, 1991). 45 Eric Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism (Washington DC: Regnery Publishing, 1997). 46 Voegelin, Science, Politics and Gnosticism, p. 64. 47 See ibid., pp. 64–67. 48 Ibid., p. 61. 49 Warwick Gould and Marjorie Reeves, Joachim of Fiore and the Myth of the Eternal Evangel in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), p. 3. 50 See for example, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Teil 4: Philosophie des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1986), pp. 80–81 and Philip K. Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings. Edited and with an introduction by Lawrence Sutin (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), pp. 281–313.

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51 Paola Mayer, Jena Romanticism and its Appropriation of Jakob Böhme: Theosophy – Hagiography – Literature (Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1999), p. 12. 52 See Andrew Weeks, Boehme: An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth-Century Philosopher and Mystic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), p. 129. 53 Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), p. 265. 54 For a telling relatively recent example, see John Gray, Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (London: Penguin Books, 2008). 55 Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967), p. 43. 56 Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute – or, why is the Christian legacy worth fighting for? (London and New York: Verso, 2001), p. 2. 57 Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1991), p. 188. 58 Georg Lukács, Record of a Life: An Autobiographical Sketch (London: Verso, 1983), p. 63. 59 Ernesto Che Guevara, The Motorcycle Diaries: Notes on a Latin American Journey (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2003), p. 165. 60 See for example, Martin Buber, The Prophetic Faith (New York: Collier Books, 1949) and Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1971). 61 Peter Singer, Animal Liberation: The Definitive Classic of the Animal Movement (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), pp. 7–8. 62 See Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Milton Park: Routledge, 2005). 63 Today, the notion of metapolitics is typically associated with the radical right, while that of prefiguration is associated with the radical left. Both can be conceptualized in different ways by their adherents, but I do not intend to delve deeper into these debates. For the former concept, see for example, Alain de Benoist and Charles Champetier, Manifesto for a European Renaissance (Budapest: Arktos, 2012), p. 9 and Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (London: Arktos, 2013), p. 46. For the latter, see for example, Luke Yates, “Rethinking Prefiguration: Alternatives, Micropolitics and Goals in Social Movements,” in Social Movement Studies, Vol. 14, No. 1, 2015, pp. 1–21. For the notion of heterotopia, see Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces. Heterotopias,” available online at www.foucault.info/documents.

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64 See Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 13 and Aristotle, History of Animals: Books I-III (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 15. 65 Jens Bartelson, The Critique of the State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. ix. 66 See Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1998), p. 110. 67 Niall Ferguson, Civilization: The West and the Rest (London: Penguin, 2012), p. 217. 68 Cf. the letter from Engels to Conrad Schmidt in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Werke, Bd. 37 (Berlin: Dietz, 1967), p. 436. 69 Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 2006). 70 See for example, David Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2004). 71 See for example, Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002) and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), pp. 228–98. 72 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value: A Selection from the Posthumous Remains. Edited by Georg Henrik von Wright in Collaboration with Heikki Nyman. Revised edition of the text by Alois Pichler (Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1998), p. 9e.

Chapter 2 1 See for example, F. G. Whelan, “Prologue: Democratic Theory and the Boundary Problem,” in J. R. Pennoc and J. W. Chapman (eds.), Liberal Democracy (New York and London: New York University Press, 1983), pp. 13–47. 2 See for example, Malcolm Anderson and Bort Eberhart (eds.), The Frontiers of Europe (London: Wellington House, 1998); Thomas M. Wilson and Hastings Donnan (eds.), Border Identities: Nation and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jan Zielonka (ed.), Europe Unbound: Enlarging and Reshaping the Boundaries of the European Union (London: Routledge, 2002); Harald Baldersheim and Lawrence Rose (eds.), Territorial Choice: The Politics of Boundaries and Borders (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2010); and Jaroslaw Janczak (ed.), De-Bordering, Re-Bordering and Symbols on the European Boundries (Berlin: Logos, 2011).

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3 Hans Joas, The Sacredness of the Person. A New Genealogy of Human Rights (Washington DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013), p. 5. 4 Harari, Homo Deus, p. 24. 5 See for example, Andrew Macdonald, The Turner Diaries (Fort Lee: Barricade Books, 1996), and especially the ending, for a vision of global transformation following from hyper-antagonism along racial lines. 6 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 7 Michael Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism: Classical Political Economy and the Secret History of Primitive Accumulation (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2000). 8 David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009), pp. 167–69. 9 Peter Singer, The Expanding Circle: Ethics and Sociobiology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). 10 Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Vintage Books, 2012). 11 Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, p. 25. 12 Paul Taçon, “Identifying Ancient Sacred Landscapes in Australia: From Physical to Social,” in Robert Preucel and Stephen Mrozowski (eds.), Contemporary Archeology in Theory: The New Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2010), p. 79. 13 Guy Beck, Sonic Theology: Hinduism and Sacred Sound (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993). 14 See Jean Holm, “Introduction: Raising the Issues,” in Jean Holm and John Bowker (eds.), Themes in Religious Studies: Sacred Writings (London and New York: Pinther Publishers, 1994), pp. 1–9. 15 Dawn Marie Hayes, Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe (New York and London: Routledge, 2003). 16 René Guénon, The Reign of Quantity & the Signs of the Times (Hillsdale: Sophia Perennis, 2001). If nothing else, there is certainly a “reign of quantity” within contemporary academia. 17 See Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2010) and Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 18 Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: The Free Press, 1995), p. 44.

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19 And Durkheim was of course criticized by subsequent scholars like Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard and Steven Lukes (1973), to name two of the more prominent. See Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard, Theories of Primitive Religion (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965) and Steven Lukes, Emile Durkheim: His Life and Work (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973). 20 Morton Klass, Ordered Universes: Approaches the Anthropology of Religion (Boulder, San Fransciso and Oxford: Westview Press, 1995), p. 22. 21 See Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy: An Inquiry into the Non-rational Factor in the Idea of the Divine and its Relation to the Rational (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950); Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane: The Nature of Religion (Orlando: Harcourt, 1987); and Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, pp. 208–18. 22 Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving (New York: HarperCollins, 2006), p. 28. 23 Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead (New York: New American Library, 1993), p. 16. 24 See Allan G. Grapard, “Geosophia, Geognosis, and Geopiety: Orders of Significance in Japanese Representations of Space,” in Roger Friedland and Deirdre Boden (eds.), NowHere: Space, Time and Modernity (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), pp. 383–86. 25 See Barbara Ehrenreich, Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever’s Search for the Truth about Everything (New York: Hachette, 2014), pp. 104–21. 26 W. T. Stace, Mysticism and Philosophy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1973), p. 131. 27 See for example, Robert Forman, “Introduction: Mysticism, Constructivism, and Forgetting,” in Robert Forman (ed.), The Problem of Pure Consciousness: Mysticism and Philosophy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), pp. 3–49. 28 Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007), p. 9. 29 Dennett, Breaking the Spell, p. 251. 30 Ibid., p. 256. 31 See Andrew Newberg, Principles of Neurotheology (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010) and Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors (London: William Heinnemann, 2001). Newberg, it should be noted, is not too happy about the term neurotheology, but has come to accept it; see his preface to Principles of Neurotheology, p. IX. 32 David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, p. 9. 33 See for example, Ninian Smart, “Understanding Religious Experience,” in Steven Katz (ed.), Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), pp. 10–21.

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34 Lev. 10:8-11 (New International Version). Cf. for example, Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge, 2002). 35 See for example, Haidt, The Righteous Mind, pp. 170–77. 36 Daniel Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life (New York: Touchstone, 1996), p. 465. 37 Jack Goody, “Against ‘Ritual’: Loosely Structured Thoughts on a Loosely Defined Topic,” in Sally Moore and Barbara Myerhoff (eds.), Secular Ritual (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977), p. 27. 38 See Asad, “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” pp. 233–40. 39 See for example, Jan Platvoet’s “broad operational definition of ritual of the family resemblance type” in “Ritual in Plural and Pluralist Societies: Instruments for Analysis,” in Jan Platvoet and Karel van der Toorn (eds.), Pluralism and Identity: Studies in Ritual Behaviour (Leiden: Brill, 1995), p. 26. 40 See Maurice Bloch, Essays on Cultural Transmission (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2005), p. 124. 41 Gerd Baumann, “Ritual Implicates ‘Others’: Rereading Durkheim in a Plural Society,” in Daniel de Coppet (ed.), Understanding Rituals (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 97–115. 42 See Asad “Toward a Genealogy of the Concept of Ritual,” p. 237. 43 Hans-Georg Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 31. 44 Gadamer, The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays Ibid., pp. 40–42. 45 Robert Bellah, Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2011), p. 590. The term flow is borrowed from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 46 Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge, 2001), p. 13. 47 Richard Schechner, The Future of Ritual: Writings on Culture and Performance (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 41. 48 Schechner, The Future of Ritual, pp. 40–42. 49 See for example, Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennet Simon, Ritual and its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), chapter 3. 50 See Victor Turner, The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1970), p. 105. 51 Žižek, Violence, p. 172 and Johann Gottfried von Herder, Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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52 Maximilien de Robespierre, Slavoj Žižek presents Robespierre: Virtue and Terror (London: Verso, 2007), p. liv. 53 Cf. Hans Kohn’s classical The Idea of Nationalism: A Study in its Origins and Background (New York: Macmillan, 1951). 54 See for example, George Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017), for an overview. Also, there are many interviews and discussions easily available online, involving, for example, Jared Taylor, a prominent contemporary proponent of what he calls race realism and white advocacy. 55 See for example, Isaiah Berlin, “Two Concepts of Liberty,” in David Miller (ed.), The Liberty Reader (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2006) pp. 33–57; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005); and Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 2013). 56 See for example, Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) and Martha Nussbaum, Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 57 See for example, Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). 58 Peter Singer, “Environmental Values,” in Peter Singer (ed.), Unsanctifying Human Life: Essays on Ethics (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), pp. 306–23. 59 See for example, Quentin Skinner, “The Republican Ideal of Political Liberty,” in Gisela Bock, Quentin Skinner, and Maurizio Viroli (eds.), Machiavelli and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 293–309. 60 Quotations from, respectively, Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London and New York: Verso, 2002), p. 5 and Anthony D. Smith, Nationalism: Theory, Ideology, History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 27. 61 Jürgen Habermas, “The European Nation-state – Its Achievements and Its Limits. On the Past and Future of Sovereignty and Citizenship,” in Gopal Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation (London and New York: Verso, 1999), p. 287. 62 Craig Calhoun, “Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere: Interests, Identity, and Solidarity in the Integration of Europe,” in Pablo de Greiff and Ciaran P. Cronin (eds.), Global Justice and Transnational Politics: Essays on the Moral and Political Challenges of Globalization (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT Press, 2002), p. 285.

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63 William N. Parker, Europe, America and the Wider World: Essays on the Economic History of Western Capitalism, Volume 1: Europe and the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), p. 231. 64 See for example, Anderson, Imagined Communities; Carlton Hayes, Nationalism: A Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1960); John Smith, Quasi-Religions: Humanism, Marxism and Nationalism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994); and Smith, Nationalism, to name a few. 65 See Maurice Bloch, Essays on Cultural Transmission, p. 124. 66 John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), p. 64. See also Charles Taylor, A Secular Age. Cambridge (Mass.) and London: Harvard University Press, 2007), pp. 208 and 714. 67 Durkheim was of course aware of the possible analogy between totem and nation: see Josep Llobera, “Durkheim and the National Question,” in William Pickering and Hermínio Martins (eds.), Debating Durkheim (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 134–58. 68 Robert Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” in Robert Bellah (ed.), Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York: Harper & Row, 1970), p. 172. 69 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Collected Writings of Rousseau: Vol. 4 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994) and Robert Bellah and Phillip Hammond, Varieties of Civil Religion (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1980). 70 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage, 1995). 71 See for example, Hayes, Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, p. 5. 72 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 205. 73 Cf. Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A New Theory of Modernity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), pp. 5–6. 74 See Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007), p. 32. 75 “Two British families killed by ‘Putin the terrorist’: UK banker and lawyer died in Ukrainian jet atrocity . . . with their wives and FIVE children,” in Mail Online News, July 20, 2014, alleged statement by Tracey Withers. 76 See for example, Jeffrey Alexander, “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy,” in Jeffrey Alexander, Bernhard Giesen, and Jason Mast (eds.), Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics, and Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 29–90. 77 See Bartelson, The Critique of the State, Chapter 2. 78 See for example, Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), for a clever example of an argument from structural environment.

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79 According, indeed, to the classical definitions offered by for example, Gellner, Nations and Nationalism, p. 1 and Elie Kedourie, Nationalism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 1. 80 See for example, David Miller, On Nationality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). 81 See Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (London: Phoenix, 2006) and Elaine Pagels, Beyond Belief: The Secret Gospel of Thomas (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), as well as Hart, Atheist Delusions. 82 See for example, Philip Rousseau, Ascetics, Authority, and the Church in the Age of Jerome and Cassian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978). 83 Jaspers may have failed to correctly remember Hegel’s term Angel, confusing it with Achse; see Hans Joas, “The Axial Age Debate as Religious Discourse,” in Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 10.

Chapter 3 1 Hannah Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” in Hannah Arendt (ed.), Between Past and Future (London: Penguin, 2006), pp. 269–70. 2 Arendt, “The Conquest of Space and the Stature of Man,” p. 273. 3 Paul Harris, “Man on the Moon: Moment of Greatness that Defined the American Century,” in The Observer, August 25, 2013. 4 See Karl Jaspers, Vom Ursprung und Ziel der Geschichte (Zürich: Artermis Verlag, 1949). 5 See Shmuel Eisenstadt, “Introduction: The Axial Age Breakthroughs – Their Characteristicts and Origins,” in Shmuel Eistenstadt (ed.), The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1986), pp. 1–26. See also for example, José Casanova, “Religion, the Axial Age, and Secular Modernity in Bellah’s Theory of Religious Evolution,” pp. 191–221 and Charles Taylor, “What Was the Axial Revolution?” both in Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 30–46. 6 1 Cor. 12:13, New International Version. 7 See Johann P. Arnason, Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, and Björn Wittrock (eds.), Axial Civilizations and World History (Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2005). 8 Henry Bamford Parkes, Gods and Men: The Origins of Western Culture (New York: Vintage Books, 1959), p. 71. 9 Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 471.

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10 See for example, Norrin M. Ripsman and T. V. Paul, Globalization and the National Security State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). 11 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 250. 12 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science. With a Prelude in German Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 109. The “overman” also appears as a shadow, “a shadow of that which must come”; Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 13 Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 82. 14 Alain de Benoist, On Being a Pagan (Atlanta: Ultra, 2004), p. 5. 15 See Guillaume Faye, Archeofuturism: European Visions of the Post-Catastrophic Age (La Vergne: Arktos, 2010). Faye has harshly criticized the Nouvelle Droite environment from which he emerged, and which he departed in the 1980s. It is not my intention here, however, to trace all the nuances, which are considerable, of this conflict. Faye provides an account of his stance on this conflict in the first chapter of Archeofuturism. 16 Eric Voegelin, The New Science of Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952). 17 Jürgen Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union: A Response (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2012), p. 75. 18 Habermas, The Crisis of the European Union, p.89. 19 Ibid., p. 95. 20 Ibid., p. xii. 21 Ibid., p. 59. 22 Makau Mutua, “Savages, Victims, and Saviors: The Metaphor of Human Rights,” Harvard International Law Journal, Vol. 42, No. 1, 2001, pp. 204–05. 23 Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper, “Introduction,” in Julie Peters and Andrea Wolper (eds.), Womens Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (New York and London: Routledge, 1995), p. 2. 24 See for example, William E. Scheuerman, “Reconsidering Realism on Rights,” in Claudio Corradetti (ed.), Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights (Dordrecht: Springer, 2012), pp. 45–60. 25 Priscilla B. Hayner, Unspeakable Truths: Facing the Challenge of Truth Commissions (New York: Routledge, 2010). 26 Koen de Feyter, Human Rights: Social Justice in the Age of the Market (London and New York: Zed Books, 2005), p. 2.

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27 See Bartelson, The Critique of the State. 28 See for example, David Miller, “Against Global Egalitarianism,” The Journal of Ethics, Vol. 9, No. 1–2, 2005, pp. 55–79 and Thomas Nagel, “The Problem of Global Justice,” Philosophy & Public Affairs, Vol. 33, No. 2, 2005, pp. 113–47. 29 David Held, Cosmopolitanism: Ideals and Realities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2010), p. 143. 30 Chris Rumford referring to Robert Fine in Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), p. 9. 31 Derek Heater, World Citizenship: Cosmopolitan Thinking and its Opponents (London and New York: Continuum, 2002), pp. 26–27. 32 Richard Beardsworth, Cosmopolitanism and International Relations Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), p. 11. 33 See for example, Daniel Bray, Pragmatic Cosmopolitanism: Representation and Leadership in Transnational Democracy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011). 34 See Bruce Russett and John Oneal, Triangulating Peace: Democracy, Interdependence, and International Organizations (New York: Norton, 2001). 35 See for example, Rawls, Political Liberalism. 36 Immanuel Kant, “Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason,” in Immanuel Kant (ed.), Religion and Rational Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 213–14. For a more recent take on the potential of rituals in renegotiating boundaries, see Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennet Simon, Ritual and its Consequences. 37 Jean-Claude Piris, The Lisbon Treaty: A Legal and Political Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 23. 38 Cf. Fukuyama, The Origins of Political Order, p. 14. 39 See for example, Thomas W. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reforms (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2008). 40 Natasha Lennard, “I don’t Stand with Russell Brand, and Neither Should You,” Salon.com, October 25, 2013. 41 Jonathan Friedman, “Champagne Liberals and The New ‘Dangerous Classes’: Reconfigurations of Class, Identity, and Cultural Production in the Contemporary Global System,” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Social and Cultural Practice, Vol. 46, No. 2, 2002, pp. 33–55. 42 Calhoun, “Constitutional Patriotism and the Public Sphere” pp. 278–79. 43 See for example, Bartelson, The Critique of the State and Ripsman and Paul, Globalization and the National Security State. 44 See for example, Ripsman and Paul, Globalization and the National Security State, pp. 54–81.

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45 See for example, Joseph Carens, The Ethics of Immigration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), for an argument in favor of free movement, drawing upon a parallel between the injustice of feudalism and the injustice of people being born into more or less privileged environments in a world of border restrictions. 46 Cf. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 204e. 47 See for example, Ernesto Laclau, On the Populist Reason (London: Verso, 2005); Benjamin Arditi, Politics on the Edges of Liberalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007); Cas Mudde and Cristóbal Rovira Kaltwasser (eds.), Populism in Europe and the Americas: Threat or Corrective for Democracy? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); and Benjamin Moffit, The Global Rise of Populism: Performance, Political Style, and Representation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016). 48 Rosa, borrowing an expression from Paul Virilio, in Social Acceleration, pp. 56 and 272. 49 See for example, Mouffe, On the Political. 50 See for example, Roger Griffin, “Interregnum or Endgame? The Radical Right in the ‘Post-fascist’ Era,” Journal of Political Ideologies, Vol. 5, No. 2, 2000; Cas Mudde, The Ideology of the Extreme Right (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); Tamir Bar-On, Where Have All the Fascists Gone? (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007); Tamir Bar-On, Rethinking the French New Right (London: Routledge: 2013); David Art, Inside the Radical Right. The Development of Anti-Immigrant Parties in Western Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), as well as Alain de Benoist’s polemical reply to Bar-On in “Alain de Benoist Answers Tamir Bar-On,” Journal for the Study of Radicalism, Vol. 8, No. 1, 2014, pp. 141–68. 51 Faye, Archeofuturism, pp. 20 and 77, 187. 52 See for example, Elisabetta Cassina Wolff, “Apolitìa and Tradition in Julius Evola as Reaction to Nihilism,” European Review, Vol. 22, No. 2, 2014, pp. 258–73. 53 Julius Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World (Rochester: Inner Traditions, 1995), pp. 338–44. 54 Michael Ignatieff, Human Rights as Politics and Idolatry. Edited and Introduced by Amy Gutmann (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 81. 55 Jon Stewart in “A Relatively Closer Look – Hitler Reference,” on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, June 16, 2005. 56 Julien Hervier’s The Details of Time: Conversations with Ernst Jünger (New York: Marsilio Publishers, 1995), provide a fascinating insight into Jünger’s mind. There

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Notes are also several biographies and other books on Jünger, for example Paul Noack’s Ernst Jünger: Eine Biographie (Berlin: Alexander Fest Verlag, 1998). Several of Jünger’s own works, such as Annäherungen: Drogen und Rausch, and his works from both world wars, also contain fascinating autobiographical portraits and interludes, including, at times, encounters with famous figures of the twentieth century.

57 Evola, Revolt Against the Modern World, p. 3. 58 Karl Marx, Capital: Volume I: A Critique of Political Economy (London: Penguin Books, 1990), p. 125. 59 Quoted here from Peter Hudis, Marx’s Concept of the Alternative to Capitalism (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2012), p. 74. 60 For a succinct presentation of the ideas and emergence of the alt-right, see Hawley, Making Sense of the Alt-Right. 61 See for example, Richard B. Spencer (ed.), The Great Erasure: The Reconstruction of White Identity: Radix I (Washington Summit Publishers, 2012). 62 Faye, Archeofuturism. 63 Iain M. Banks, The Player of Games (New York and London: Orbit, 2008), p. 154. 64 Maurizio Viroli, For Love of Country: An Essay on Patriotism and Nationalism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 185. 65 Cf. for example, Viroli, For Love of Country, p. 65. 66 Montserrat Guibernau, The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), p. 95. 67 Cf. Christel Lane, The Rites of Rulers: Ritual in Industrial Society: The Soviet Case (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 68 Jan Platvoet, “Ritual as War: On the Need to De-Westernize the Concept,” in Jens Kreinath, Constance Hartung, and Annette Deschner (eds.), The Dynamics of Changing Rituals: The Transformation of Religious Rituals within their Social and Cultural Context (New York: Peter Lang, 1994), p. 262. 69 See Turner, The Forest of Symbols, p. 105, for a now classic analysis of liminality and rites of passage. 70 Gene Sharp, From Dictatorship to Democracy: A Conceptual Framework for Liberation (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2011), p. 125. 71 Buber, The Prophetic Faith and Schmitt, Political Theology. It should be noted exactly that I borrow these concepts and put them to my own usage. 72 See Charles Taylor, “The Politics of Recognition” in Amy Gutmann (ed.), Multiculturalism: Examining the Politics of Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 25–74.

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73 See Slavoj Žižek, Violence (London: Profile Books, 2009). 74 See for example, Rogers Brubaker, Nationalism Reframed: Nationhood and the National Question in the New Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) and Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Odysseys: Navigating the New International Politics of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 75 Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, pp. 74–75. 76 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 25. 77 Merlin Donald, “An Evolutionary Approach to Culture,” in Robert Bellah and Hans Joas (eds.), The Axial Age and Its Consequences (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), p. 70. 78 Harvey Whitehouse, “Ritual, Cognition, and Evolution,” in Ron Sun (ed.), Grounding Social Sciences in Cognitive Sciences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), p. 269. 79 Whitehouse, “Ritual, Cognition, and Evolution,” pp. 270–73. 80 Ibid., p. 278. 81 Ibid., pp. 277–79. 82 Ibid., pp. 273–75.

Chapter 4 1 See Hans Krah, “Die Apokalypse als literarische Technik. Ernst Jüngers Heliopolis (1949) im Schnittpunkt denk-under diskursgeschichtlicher Paradigmen,” in Lutz Hagestedt (ed.), Ernst Jünger. Politik – Mythos – Kunst (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004), pp. 242–43. 2 Cf. for example, Grace Davie, Europe: The Exceptional Case. Parameters of Faith in the Modern World (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 2002) and Peter Berger, Grace Davie, and Effie Fokas, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and its Variations (Burlington: Ashgate, 2008). 3 See Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 4 See Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), pp. 156–60. 5 Singer, The Expanding Circle. 6 See for example, Roger Gottlieb (ed.), This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (New York & London: Routledge, 1996).

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7 See Singer, “Environmental Values.” 8 See for example, Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred and Dennett, Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, p. 520. 9 Ursula Goodenough, The Sacred Depths of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. xvi–xvii. 10 See Rosen, Dignity, pp. 119–20 and 158–59. 11 See Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper & Row, 1977) and Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialektik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997). For a good example of a more recent critique along these lines, see Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010). 12 See for example, Susan Okin, “Are Our Theories of Justice Gender-Neutral?” in Robert Fullinwider and Claudia Mills (eds.), The Moral Foundations of Civil Rights (Adams Drive: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986), pp. 125–43 and Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988). 13 See for example, Nussbaum, Women and Human Development. 14 See for example, David Graeber, Debt: The First 5000 Years (New York: Melville House, 2012), pp. 361–91 and Thomas Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). 15 See Harari, Homo Deus, pp. 356–408, for a brief summary of some such fears. 16 See for example, Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near. 17 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 129. 18 See Brian Leiter, Nietzsche on Morality (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 28. 19 Schechner, The Future of Ritual, p. 262. 20 An interesting example is provided by Philip K. Dick’s ruminations on his extraordinary visions and how to interpret these; see The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, for a fascinating sample. 21 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 255. 22 See for example, Rosa, Social Acceleration, p. 87. 23 Marcel Mauss, The Gift: the Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1990). 24 See Hubert Dreyfus, “Heidegger on the Connection between Nihilism, Art, Technology, and Politics,” in Charles Guignon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, Second Edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 345–72.

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25 See Graeber, Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology, pp. 74–75. 26 See Perelman, The Invention of Capitalism, p. 17. 27 Rosa, Social Acceleration, p. 172. 28 See Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (Milton Park: Routledge, 2005). 29 See for example, Philip E. Tetlock, “Thinking the Unthinkable: Sacred Values and Taboo Cognitions,” Trends in Cognitive Sciences, Vol. 7, No. 7, 2003, pp. 320–24 and Scott Atran and Jeremy Ginges, “Religious and Sacred Imperatives in Human Conflict,” Science, Vol. 336, No. 6083, 2012, pp. 855–57. 30 See Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, p. 13. 31 Lars Gustafsson, Tennisspelarna (Stockholm: Modernista, 2013), p. 55. 32 Cf. Jorge Luis Borges, “On Exactitude in Science,” Collected Fictions (London and New York: Penguin Books, 1998), p. 325. 33 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, The Religion of the Future (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2014), p. 2. 34 See for example, Jared Diamond’s, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 211–76, for an interesting example on social cohesion and environmental change, which works hypothetically regardless of its empirical accuracy. 35 Cf. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (London & New York: Continuum, 2003); Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society. The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Vol. 1 (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1996); and Timothy Morton, The Ecological Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 36 Cf. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: The Free Press, 1992).

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Index Adorno, Theodor W. 113 alienation 26, 34, 111, 123–5 alt-right 94 anarchism 34–6, 90, 94, 98–9, 103, 120 Anderson, Benedict 65, 102 animal rights 30, 43, 110–12, 129, 138–42 antiquity 42, 53–4, 72, 79 anthropocentrism 82, 110, 138 apocalyptic 4, 26–7, 29, 95 apparatchik 32 Arab Spring 96 Arendt, Hannah 34, 75, 79 Aristotle 123 Armstrong, Neil 75–6 asceticism 47, 117–18 Asia 3, 19, 77 atheism 17, 48–50, 108, 118, 134, 141–2 Augustine 23 Auschwitz 92 authenticity 11–12, 21, 39 authority 8–9, 14, 43 autonomy collective autonomy 71 and democracy 6, 21, 71 and dignity 82, 110–13 freedom of movement 89, 130, 138 freedom of speech 12, 34, 51, 110, 112, 122–3, 128, 133, 139, 142 fundamental autonomy 42 individual autonomy 6, 58–60 liberty as source of morality 43 liberty: external and internal threats 6 meaningful autonomy 21, 56–9, 97 and nationalism 60 negative liberty 58–60 over time 6, 56–9 positive liberty 58–60 republican liberty 58–60 and transhuman relations 138–9 Axial Age 73, 77–8, 80, 101

Babel, Isaac 47 Bacon, Francis 9 Banks, Iain M. 95 Bellah, Robert 55, 63 Benjamin, Walter 78 Benoist, Alain de 81 Billig Michael 64 Bloch, Ernst 29 Böhme, Jakob 24 boundaries constitutive 39–40, 57, 66, 68–71, 102–3, 120–1, 127, 130 cultural 37, 40–1, 66, 70, 86, 89, 116, 120–2 ontological, transcendence of 62, 64, 118–19 reproduction of 40–1, 62, 66, 120–1, 127, 130 territorial 58, 71, 86, 89, 126 Boyer, Pascal 49 Breuilly, John 62 broad-spectrum politics 32 Buber, Martin 29, 97 Buddha 78, 80 Buddhism 16, 48, 50 Calhoun, Craig 61, 88 capitalism 22, 87–8, 90, 93, 113, 118, 131, 137 alternative to 36, 93, 120 global 84, 100, 120–1 Casanova, José 5 catastrophe 14, 136 Charlottesville, Virginia 94–5 China 77, 101 Christianity and Buddhism 50 emergence of in Antiquity 72, 77, 132 and the emergence of modern ideologies 3, 19–29, 128–9

Index and Europe 107–8 and human rights 82 Nietzschean critique of 81 and rituals 53–4 and the sciences 15–18 civil religion 22–3, 63–4, 66–7, 96, 101–2, 122, 129, 139 climate change 137 collapse 14, 18–19, 136 collective effervescence 46, 135 commodification 93, 119–21, 127, 132, 137, 139, 141 compact perception 135 Confucianism 78 consent 9 Conservative Revolution 90, 93 constitutional patriotism 61, 70–1, 139 consumerism 65 contract theory 9 cosmopolitanism 58, 61, 82–9, 104, 127, 130–1 crisis 39, 136 Critchley, Simon 23, 44 critical strategies 33–8 Daoism. See Taoism de-animalization 112, 140 death camps 42–3 deconstruction 34, 38, 105, 129, 138 dehumanization 110, 112, 123 deliberation 12, 31, 71, 76, 86, 122–3, 132–3, 139 democracy and authenticity 12–21 and civil religion 63–4 and constitutive boundaries 40, 103–4, 121 and cosmopolitanism 61 and deliberation 112–23, 133 direct 120 and the European Union 87 fundamental tensions of 6–7, 71 and the Kantian triangle 86, 100 and liminality 56 and multiculturalism 98–9, 103 and mysticism 46–7 and nationalism 71 and petrification 90 and political theology 96–7, 101

179

and populism 89–90 and public worship 30–1, 36–8, 50, 53, 56, 69–72, 103–4, 121, 129–30 and purity and pollution 51 religious challenges of 3–6, 7, 14–19, 128–9 and space 76 and the state 87–8 and strategies for change 31–2, 87, 109 and theopolitics 96–7, 101 and the topology of the exceptional 126 Denmark 88 Dennett, Daniel 49, 51 depoliticization 126, 143 Descartes, René 9 Dick, Philip K. 24 dignity and autonomy 110–12 human 12, 41, 82–3, 110–11, 131–2, 139 nonhuman 111–13, 140 Diogenes of Sinope 85 discrimination 83, 96–7, 114–15, 143 division of labor 30, 34, 42, 54, 120–2, 124, 127, 132 Donald, Merlin 101 Dreyfus, Hubert 120 Durkheim, Émile 46 ecology 1, 136 economic growth 1, 14, 32 economy demands of capitalist, and individual needs 118 emotional and sexual 113 free market 99 globalized 101 industrial 88 mixed market 90 slave 42 ecotheology 111 Eisenstadt, Shmuel 77 Eliade, Mircea 46 Engels, Friedrich 22, 27, 33 equality as critical theme 90, 136–7 and deliberation 133

180 of dignity, ethical concern, and rights 41, 83, 123 and meaningful autonomy 21 socioeconomic, and inequality 34, 58, 76, 114, 120 and the state 87–8 eschatology and death camps 42–3 and the emergence of modern ideologies 4, 23–30, 80–1 and nationalism 64 ethical closure 39, 41–4, 129–30 ethical-eschatological engines 28 ethical universalism 25–6, 36, 41 ethnicity the circle of ethical concern 41–2 and conflict 89, 100 and cosmopolitanism 85–6 as critical theme 136–8 and Europe 107 and nationalism 57–8, 60, 63, 68, 71, 91, 95, 98, 103–4, 127 and potential future communities 139–41 ethos 128, 130 Eurasia 3, 77 Europe 1–3, 19, 26, 38, 46, 61, 70, 81, 87–9, 91, 95, 107–8, 136 European Union 2, 39, 87, 128 Evola, Julius 91, 93–4 exchange of commodities 113, 120–1, 126–7, 141 of gifts 120–1, 126–7, 141 existential strategy of avoidance 124–5 of bridging 124–5 of escape 124–5 expanding circle 43, 110–11, 114, 129 exploitation 26, 32, 42, 95, 121 expulsion 42 faceless, the 42 faith 3, 15–19, 72, 86 and belief 133 fascism 90–2, 96 fatal horizon 137–8 fatal politics 128, 137–8 fate 136–8

Index Faye, Guillaume 81, 91, 95 feminism 2, 113 Ferguson, Niall 33 festival 54, 95, 107, 120, 140–1 flow (time) 55, 122, 132 Frankfurt School 20 freedom of speech. See autonomy French Revolution 56 Friedrich, Caspar David 48 Fromm, Erich 47 Gadamer, Hans-Georg 54–5 Gautama, Siddharta. See Buddha gender 98, 129, 137 genocide 1, 92, 95, 110, 112, 123 Germany 39, 88, 90 Gnosticism 11, 24, 72, 81 God 2, 15–19, 50, 63, 80, 82, 86, 120, 133, 135 gods 16, 64, 141 Goodenough, Ursula 45 Goody, Jack 53 Gould, Warwick 24 Graeber, David 120 Guénon, René 45 Guevara, Ernesto Che 28 Guibernau, Montserrat 96 Gustafsson, Lars 134 Habermas, Jürgen 20, 61, 82 Habsburg Empire 1, 39–40, 128 Haidt, Jonathan 43 Harari, Yuval Noah 41 Harris, Paul 76 Harris, Sam 50 Hart, David Bentley 50 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 9, 24 Heidegger, Martin 113, 120 Held, David 84 Herder, Johann Gottfried 56 heterotopia 31 Hielscher, Friedrich 93 historicity 26, 67, 70 Hitler, Adolf 92 Hobbes, Thomas 7–9, 36 holidays 98–9, 121, 140–1 Holocaust 83, 92 homo faber 48 homo sacer 42

Index Huizinga, Johan 55 human rights 23, 26, 36, 38, 61, 84, 86, 92, 102–3, 105, 129, 139 and constitutive boundaries 56–8 and human dignity 82–3, 110–13, 131 as sacralization 41 hyper-antagonism 41 hyperreal events 117–18, 132, 135 identity communication of collective 53, 62, 68, 98, 103–4, 126, 132, 139 groups 58, 69 and weird politics 138 ideologies and global space 80 and historical subjectivity 43 of the interwar era 90–3 narrow range of, in present debates 89–90 and religion 2, 4, 5, 19–29, 51, 81, 109 and symbols and rituals 96, 104–5, 133 and teleology 65 Ignatieff, Michael 92 incorporation 42 India 77 industrialization 100, 121, 139 Industrial Revolution 14, 121 industrial societies 14, 36, 53, 69, 76, 88, 91 injustice 26, 96 Iron Curtain 76 Islam 45, 77–8 Jaspers, Karl 73, 77 Jesus 10 Jews 77 Joachim of Fiore 23–4 Judaism 3, 77–8, 128–9 Jünger, Ernst 93, 107 justice 1, 23, 26, 29–30, 42, 83, 86, 90, 129 and creativity 115 range of 113–14 and symbols and rituals 95–6, 103

181

Kakanien 1–2, 39, 128 Kant, Immanuel 9, 86, 100, 110 Kantian triangle 86, 100 Kauffman, Stuart 45 Koselleck, Reinhart 26 legitimacy 1, 6, 9, 11, 21, 71 Lenin, Vladimir 33 Lennard, Natasha 88 liberalism 9, 21, 27, 58, 71, 82, 85, 88, 97, 138 liberation theology 19 libertarianism 32, 42, 60–1, 82, 95, 98–9, 141 liberty. See autonomy liminality 56, 116 liquid love 117, 119 liquid sacred 131 Locke, John 8–9 Löwith, Karl 27 Luft, David 3 Lukács, György 27 Machiavelli, Niccolò 9–11 Marcuse, Herbert 27 Mayer, Paola 24 Marx, Karl 9, 10, 11, 22, 27, 33, 42, 78, 93–4, 115 Marxism 27, 33–4, 42, 60–1, 82–3, 90, 95 Mauss, Marcel 120 Mediterranean Sea 101 Mediterranean world 72 metaphysics 12, 15, 16, 18, 67, 82, 86, 119, 134 metapolitical 31, 126 Mill, John Stuart 115 misrecognition 97, 105, 137 mortality 15–18, 114–15 Mouffe, Chantal 122 multiculturalism 2, 58–9, 90–1, 95, 97–9, 103, 127, 130–1 multicultural societies 8, 65, 89, 130, 137, 140 Musil, Robert 1–3, 128 Mussolini, Benito 91 mystical experiences 2, 11, 46–50, 117–18, 134 mythical thinking 101

182 mythic time 65 mythology and ideology 27, 51–2, 125 and religion 15, 17–18, 51–2, 82 nationalism ambiguity of 60–1 banal 64 basic creed of 69 civic 57, 63, 70–1 ethno- 57–9, 63, 71 in Europe 61, 70, 87–8, 108 force of 61–2 and human rights 56 liberal 71 and multiculturalism 90–1, 94–5, 130 official 63, 132 and religion 2, 54, 61–2, 66, 101 and the symbolic reproduction of community 66–8, 96, 102–3 National Socialism 90–2 neoliberalism 91, 99 neurotheology 49 Newberg, Andrew 49 New Right (Nouvelle Droite) 81, 94 New Yorker, The 87 Niekisch, Ernst 93 Nietzsche, Friedrich 9, 80–1, 100, 115 nihilism 107, 111, 131 North Africa 3, 19 North America 3 oscillation (between the world of work and a communal coming together beyond it) 119–20, 127, 140 Otto, Rudolf 46 Parker, William 61 Parkes, Henry 78 philosophy 9, 20, 23, 32, 49, 61, 80, 91, 113, 117–18 emergence of 73, 78, 80 moral 111 political 8–9, 57, 86 Plantinga, Alvin 18 Plato 11, 78 Platvoet, Jan 96 political animal 32, 123

Index political correctness 51, 89 political theology 97, 105 power, different forms of 8–11 prefiguration 31, 35, 109, 127 prophets 10, 24, 78, 81 public worship 8, 30, 36, 63–6, 70–2, 75, 101 and analogous elements 109, 116, 119, 127, 132, 137 analytical risks of 37–8, 102–5 and cosmopolitanism 84–9 normative questions of 69, 95–9, 120, 129–31 and play 55 and potential future communities 108, 116, 139–41 purity and pollution 51–3, 57 race 42, 57, 91, 129, 136–8 racism 91, 137 radical right 41, 89, 91, 94–5 Rammstedt, Otthein 65 Rand, Ayn 48 rape of the Sabine Women 42 Rawls, John 12, 32 real socialism 36, 90 recognition, struggles of 37, 97–8, 103–5, 113, 123–4, 137 Reeves, Marjorie 24 religion, questions of definition 3–5 republicanism 6, 58–9, 70–1 rituals antagonistic 56, 122, 132 and civil religion 22–3, 63–4, 96, 122, 129, 139 of conflict and exclusion 96 and cosmopolitanism 86–7 and democratic projects 96–7, 101 enforced and endorsed 99 and European integration 2, 87, 107 and human flourishing 116, 132 and misrecognition 97–8 and nationalism 2, 5, 22–3, 40–1, 53, 56, 62, 65–7, 70–1, 84, 96, 103 and potential future communities 116, 139–41

Index and public worship 7–8, 30–1, 36–7, 51–2, 56, 69, 71–2, 95–9, 103–4, 108, 127, 129, 131 questions of definition 53–6, 121–2 rare and routinized 102 rites of passage 56, 96, 121–2, 139 of role reversal 56, 116 and strategies of containment, reversal, or transformation 85–6 and the topology of the exceptional 122, 126, 132 totemic 62 Robbespierre, Maximilien de 57 Roman law 42 Roman Republic 34 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 87 Rosa, Hartmut 121 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 63 rule of law 6, 12 Russell, Bertrand 14, 17 sacralization 39, 44 of human beings 37, 41, 56–7, 110 of nations 37, 40–1, 56–7, 61–2, 64, 96, 132 and symbols and rituals 30 sacred ambiguity of 44–6, 52–3, 132, 143 demarcations 30, 37, 119–21, 126–7, 135, 138, 141 nature 111 values 122–3 sacrifice 52, 130 Scaevolite 32 Schechner, Richard 55, 116 Schmitt, Carl 97 Scholem, Gershom 29 secularization ambiguity of 2, 5, 31, 67 consummation of 108 the nation–state 69 as removal or transfer 22, 109, 139 and Thomas Hobbes 8 Serbia 96 sexuality 72, 98, 113, 129, 137 Sharp, Gene 96 Shepard, Alan 75 Ship of Theseus 136 Shoah. See Holocaust

183

Singer, Peter 11, 29, 43, 110–11 singularity, the 18, 114 social democracy 82 Socrates 10 sovereignty 6, 8, 76, 83, 88, 131 Soviet Union. See USSR space competitive political 36, 127, 130 global 72, 75, 79–80, 110 ritual, subjunctive, liminal 56, 116, 132, 135 social organization and interpretation of 20–30, 47–8, 112, 137, 139 sociopolitical 31, 35, 76, 122 spirit 28, 77, 135 spirits 16, 18, 29, 47, 64, 68 spiritual decompression 128, 135–6 Stace, Walter Terence 49 Stakhanovite 32 state definition of 66–7 future of 87–9 Stewart, Jon 92 Swinburne, Richard 18 symbols and civil religion 22–3, 63–4, 67, 96, 122, 129, 139 and cosmopolitanism 86–7 and democratic projects 96–7, 101 and European integration 1–2, 87 and misrecognition 97–8 and nationalism 2, 5, 22–3, 40–1, 53, 56, 62, 65–7, 70–1, 84, 96, 103, 132 and national socialism 92 and pollution/purity 51 and potential future communities 139–41 and public worship 7–8, 30–1, 36–7, 51–2, 56, 69, 71–2, 95–9, 103–4, 108, 127, 129, 131 and strategies of containment, reversal, or transformation 85–6 and the topology of the exceptional 122, 126 taboo 8, 30, 52, 121 Taleb, Nassim 14 Taoism 78

184 Taubes, Jacob 29 technological change 4, 33, 79, 107, 121 and democracy 70 and the future of humanity 13, 18, 114, 138–9 teleology 4, 28, 65 temporality autonomous 54 modes of 65 theology and modern ideologies 5, 8, 20–6, 66 and mystical experiences 72, 134 and spirit 135 theopolitics 97, 105, 126 topology of the exceptional 37, 107, 126, 132 totalitarianism 27, 29, 42, 132 totemism 52, 62, 66 transcendence 61–2, 64–5 transcendent, the 64 transgression 64 Trump, Donald 94

Index Turner, Victor

56

Ukraine 65, 96 Unger, Roberto 135 United Nations 107 United States of America 94 USSR 96 utopianism 14, 35–6, 83, 88, 9, 110, 121, 129, 136 Viroli, Maurizio 96 Voegelin, Eric 23–4, 81 Weimar Republic 90 weird politics 138 welfare state 60, 87, 96, 99, 100, 108, 141–2 Whitehouse, Harvey 101 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 16, 38 Xenophobia 137 Žižek, Slavoj

12, 27, 56