ABSTRACT
If this is orthodoxy for a signifi cant strand of liberal thought in the West then what will follow in this book is heresy.
e following argument should not be seen as a rejection of all Enlightenment values and aspirations. Indeed, at its heart is both the recognition that societies based on the unthinking acting out of collective passions can be dangerous and violent places and an emphasis on the need for critical refl ection on the forces that shape social life. But its heresy, if such it is, is to argue that the aspiration for a wholly rational social order fails to understand fundamental structures through which human society becomes possible. e liberal faith described above pathologizes aspects of social life that are necessary and inevitable, and in doing so fails to understand the true nature of collective forms of morality. If we are to build genuinely better societies or, at the very least, mitigate against our capacity for destructiveness in the name of what is good, we need to set aside the vision of society described above to recognize the enduring power of the sacred. In doing so, we shall see that human society is necessarily bound to collective notions of what is sacred that compel social action through powerful moral sentiments. Although deeply rooted in the history of human society itself, such sacred forms are not infantile preoccupations that can be abandoned in the maturity of Enlightenment. ey continue to evolve through modernity, taking new, complex forms that create powerful tides of moral emotion around our individual and collective lives. To understand the sacred – its necessity, its possibilities and dangers, and its modern forms – is the central task of this book.
