I’m increasingly convinced by the argument that democratic governance can only function within populations that posses strong Transcendental Coherence, which itself remains beyond the realm of the explicitly political.

Absent said coherence, democratic mechanisms will increasingly fall into the trap of trying to weigh in upon axiomatic moral issues.

Such forms of governance will repeatedly try to derive universal oughts from the “is” to which they attend at any given moment, and in so doing will increasingly fragment the population’s transcendental reference frame.

Yet without a shared transcendental reference frame, there can exist no shared phenomenological scaffolding upon which a population may collectively weave its experiences into the mutually compatible meanings that comprise a shared history.

And absent a shared sense of history, a shared narrative lineage, we humans tend to quickly collapse back to biological lineage as the primary mode of group-based phenomenological coherence.

The implication here is that democracy cannot function adaptively and will not survive absent a strong transcendental consensus.

From this logic flow two primary modes of addressing the issue, that of homogenizing domination and that of emergent synthesis.

The former is older than humanity itself, and rides directly upon the coattails of inter-lineal violence. In the domain of achieving Transcendental Coherence this mode looks like your typical warfare between lineages of unrelated (or significantly divergent) transcendental orientation.

The “emergent synthesis” option is relatively new, and certainly more fragile. But it is the only option available to those who wish to avoid perennial religious warfare and who agree, at least in principle, that governance should exist as an emergent function of a population’s beliefs, perspectives, and decisions.

The synthesis in question need not conflate or confuse disparate traditions of transcendental orientation. Rather, it should first seek to enumerate a shared set of transcendental principles.

These principles would then exist as a kind of cataphatic meta-attractor, around which disparate lineages could choose to incorporate should they wish to be included within societies that implement emergent forms of governance such as democracy.

Of course, Modern Liberalism tried something similar in its quest to define the novel category of Human Rights.

But the concept of Human Rights raises up the image of Humanity as a transcendental justification for its own Being, and thus by its narcissistic self-reference undermined its capacity for transcendental orientation.

Thus Modern Liberalism, predicated as it is upon secular concepts such as Human Rights, will eventually lead, as many times as it’s tried, to the failure mode first described in this post.

Truly, if one cares about “Democracy”—if that is something you care about; if not, we can have a different conversation—one should pour one’s efforts into envisioning, defining, and bringing about the Emergent Synthesis described above.

This post-liberal synthesis may, likely will, involve some of Modern Liberalism’s memetic threads.

But this pattern will not, cannot, be woven from cultural threads that ignore or reject the relevance of their own transcendental lineage.

So long as such lineages refuse to acknowledge that democratic governance requires a strongly overlapping transcendental orientation, they will remain incapable of the meta-synthesis required to avoid the rising tides of inter-lineal religious violence within and between the world’s nations.