The loss of sanctity

The middle distance is what Trow (Within the Context of No Context, George W. S. Trow, 1980) calls the domain of comfort, that cultural territory between the grid of intimacy (immediate family) and the grid of the 200 million (the maximum, national scale). Trow says television is hollowing out that middle distance by reshaping it to the imperatives of one's own demography rather than to one's place in one's generation's history. 

That middle distance, in biblical terms, is what the mitigating institutions of shabbat and miqdash are all about; and therefore the middle distance of Trow's cultural comfort is really the intermediate domain where sanctity resides. 

The hollowing out of the middle distance Trow is talking about really amounts to a process of eradicating the possibilities of sanctity within American society, within the modernist, Western society. Eventually, those who understand well the processes of degeneration represented by such a hollowing out will lose their sanity. 

The loss of sanctity results, in the end, in the madness of the best and the brightest in a society.