Oddly enough it seems to me the sacredness of Life extending to one's political opponents is not a rarity but definitely something being eaten away at. It's a bit crazy to say but "Murder is Wrong" may become a lodestone for the remaining sane among us regardless of our political inclinations.
Indeed, it's something that I think is definitely slipping away though. Basically, a new story every day at how this erodes though.
Hmmm...I do think you are on to something about needing to cultivate the "irrational" part of ourselves, that deeper-Darkness/higher-Light.
No one wants to really explore that, because it is antithetical with the idea that we are fully rational.
There's definitely something to be said about our inner narrator, our connection to stories and how this impacts our consciousness, and how this all ties into the deeper self.
Well, condsidering that the aim, now-a-days seems to be to get a materialistic as possible, via neuropsychology and the like, something so abstract is not regarded as particularly true, let alone particularly important.
But your reply does make me wonder if the idea of Sacrifice as part of our relationship with the numinous does falter and affect the Ground.
Sure, but even as our relationship to the practical. There is practical pay-off for sacrifice. In fact, that is plausibly why we regard it with a numinous quality. Society would not work, if not for our "compact with the future" and that compact is largely sealed with sacrifice.
Why the Ground is of so much importance, finding the transcendent (or at least agreed upon) principles and promoting them - comes back to the cultivation of opponents. Media should do a better job of showing people who disagree able to argue peacefully - where I think Reason/Logic has the important but not necessarily preeminent role.
Media only reflects what makes money, not what is necessarily real or true though.
Without transcendent Ground there is no human society, possibly not even a robotic/android one either. Though I sometimes wonder if our future synthetic children might be the better inheritors of the future than humans could be...
I certainly hope they are, for our sake.
There does seem to be a need, at least among moderns of the West, to argue that their pre-rational/irrational commitments are (or will be) satisfied by evidence. That's what Quilette and what one takes as its liberal counterforce, Vox, seem to run on.
But I wonder if that's true beyond the confines of the dedicated interlocutors in Internet spaces. Does your average moderate or even conservative/liberal worry too much about the importance of Reason? I suspect there may be a silent majority more interested in being Reasonable which includes but isn't exclusive to the easily manipulable claim of Rationality.
Re: Sacrifice I do think even going back to the 90s there was something accepted about the archetypal importance of giving something. The Ancients seem to figure its importance more deeply than we do. Perhaps that is why a sacrifice made for the support of a Principle on one's own part is so convincing, or at least I feel it used to be.
And along those lines that is the problem with media, Patreon pundits, and the like - they tell their readership what they want to [hear], b/c to do otherwise is to sacrifice readership, monthly payments, etc. Quilette, Vox, National Review, to say nothing of Youtube punditry, all seem to engage in this gaming.
I'd love for someone to come along and do this sort of thing with a promise to never ask for money, but then again I'm not doing it either so...
