What is needed is secular honesty: the honesty to admit that the existential mechanism you have built works very well for surviving daily life in the modern world, but cannot explain the deeper existential questions that lie beyond it.
Until then, the political right will keep fighting yesterday's wars, so long as it has no answer to the gap between science, which is logic, and faith, which is religion.
And until the information revolution, and the artificial intelligence approaching in the coming decades, have some far-reaching structural effect on politics, it seems the economic and identity-based left will keep creeping in and taking over the political sphere. It does so through the democratic, the human, the refugee, the wretched and justice: non-binding concepts, empty of empirical content, that console us in the gap between the reliable, consumable products of science and the small, inward beliefs that can still sustain some moral foundation in the world of the battered Cartesian subject.
Let us now claim that there never was any secularization. Can we go on claiming that? Yes and no. In a certain sense, one can say there was never secularization, because we all go on living and do not kill ourselves. But in the realm of meaning itself? In ritual itself? In the categories of religious life? There, one cannot claim it.
One can claim that we were transformed into something more universal and more conscientious. But one cannot claim that this universal conscientiousness, however Protestant it may be, is not injected into politics as though it were a Catholic function. It operates within a new democratic and sacrificial framework in which some mechanism of symbolic, identity-based and tax-based sacrifice still stands, in order to make us forget one thing: that we are victims of the confusion of living in the gap between logic and ethics.
Not victims of the economy or of consumption. Not victims of identity. Not victims of enslavement. Victims, first and foremost, of something philosophical, something of consciousness, which no ontic, political, economic or cultural moment will redeem.
Admitting this requires an honesty that even secular people lack. Some may blame Kant for the end of monism, but there is no need to take him too seriously. After all, Kant also worked from a hypothesis.
Look at knowledge, and see God.
You must believe in your hypothesis in order to build a thesis, and all of this happens before you know whether your object, or even your propositions, are real. You will have no chance of knowing anything decisively unless you believe enough to build a thesis capable of providing proof.
Then, once the thesis has been proven and you know something solid, thanks to the belief that drove it to realization, new questions immediately arise from that proof, because the new knowledge exposes you to an environment you had not known before.
And again you are required to believe, in order to build a new hypothesis about that new environment. This is the eternal cycle between faith and knowledge, a cycle that not even Popper's principle of falsifiability can negate.
So why do we forget it?
Because the psychological, the economic and the political are meant to make us forget the power of the maxim that unites logic and ethics.
And why?
Because the psychological moment exists to keep us from asking about the maxim of the soul and of knowledge before they meet the economic and the political, which distort it.
