Two Experiences of Sociability, Christian and Secular
10 June 2024
Traditional human communities were constructed on the basis of socio-cosmic matrices of exchange (ancestors, agricultural fertility, kinship exchange, macro or micro-cosmic correspondences, all cyclical in some sense). The exchange of values within these diverse “sociabilities” bound their communities together, not preventing them to wage wars and make peace on the basis of a common cosmology. In many parts of the world the advent of the nation state put a partial end to the shared social morphology of traditional communities and thus was effected the destruction of their hierarchies of values. Was Christianity partially responsible for this incoherence? Has secularism cuts us off from these horizons of transcendence?