Mass culture does not do the sacred well.
Whether politically or personally, difficult human deeds are aided by big-picture beliefs validating our daily chores and heroic sacrifices. Even denying that there is a meaningful big picture assumes there is one.
“There is hardly any human action,” Alexis de Tocqueville notes, “that does not originate in some very general idea men have conceived of the Deity, of his relation to mankind, of the nature of their own souls, and of their duties to their fellow creatures. Nor can anything prevent these ideas from being the common spring from which all the rest emanates.”
These very general ideas—or questions about them—permanently shape and haunt human life, publicly and privately, and ideas aren’t all equal.
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