How do the religions, the centrist institutions of the ancient world, work to manage public emotions? How do they moderate the impulse to govern through fear and anger rather than with courage and fairness?
The honor/shame system operates by first co-opting the public emotions and then by dominating them. The rule by honor/shame strong men fell into confluence with the governance of the people by religion because they both speak through the same language to the arenas of public emotion. The language of conflict is easier to embrace and to convey than the language of inspiration.
The question is how to craft a language of inspiration that resounds more powerfully and more clearly than the language of conflict? That is the challenge for Obama as he tries to alter the terms of discourse against the Clinton camp or the Tea Party; and that is the challenge of the Modern Orthodox against the diatribes and the conflict-mongering of the ultra-Orthodox: how to speak to public emotions in words of peace but not of lassitude.
The methods of the fundamentalists is to make the central issue for public concern the question of how the members of the ministry are being treated. The fundamentalists obscure the distinction between the teachings of the religion and the persons and the power of the men who minister those teachings.
The fundamentalists undermine the action of delegation. As such the fundamentalists are irreverant.
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