There is a sense of doom leading up to the 2012 elections.
A sense that America is doomed.
Ever more voices arise declaring they shall not live under socialism or communism.
Regardless what next year's elections outcome will be.
Political historian Larry Schweikart asserts that America is more divided now than it was during the Civil War.
Yet even such dire words cannot express the real severity of the division.
For even while America's economy fails, the division cannot be understood merely in terms of failing economics.
Nor is it only America so divided.
Like a crack of doom, the rupture runs unabated through all Western culture.
All Western discourse and public spheres are collapsing beneath an astonishing and crushing stupidity.
An utter ideological corruption destroying us economically, dividing us socio-politically and disintegrating our very identities as Western people.
From America's credit crisis and Europe's defaulting economies to Norway's home-grown terrorist murders, one way or another, a surging wave of calamity attests the West's clashing ideological antagonisms.
Less flagrant yet more fatal, half the people in Western societies revile rather than speak to the other half.
And while coming to blows through violence in the streets, through mass unrest and murders and civil wars runs counter to our tolerant and democratic traditions - nevertheless there appears no logical possibility remaining to compromise or resolve our most fundamental divisions.
Just imagine two neighbours.
Any neighbours living next door.
Next door to you, most likely.
There are routine greetings.
Climate is mentioned daily, sometimes twice or thrice when there's weather to speak of.
But when it comes to values, beliefs, who we are, what we stand for or against? Silence.
Rather than declaring who we are, it's more as if we have nothing whatever to declare.
Yet the appearance of terminal shallowness is deceiving.
In covert fact, all too many neighbours seethe internally.
Grow more outraged from one day to the next.
From one hour to the next.
But silently.
Knowing how easily genuine self-expression could hurl us at each other's throats.
We have no option but struggling to maintain placidly shallow appearances.
No peaceful option.
We agree something is terribly wrong.
But because we so fundamentally disagree what is wrong, we cannot really talk about it.
We can't even mention what's really wrong without exposing how fundamentally we disagree.
How violently.
And while it isn't just neighbours so fundamentally divided - our media and governments are equally divided - it is the utter division between neighbours tearing Western social fabric from its once vibrant richness to today's ragged shreds.
It isn't just Democrats and Republicans gone too ideologically far to compromise as the future crashes and burns in the balance.
It's all of us in the Western street.
In every Western neighbourhood.
Between two neighbours, one fundamentally believes, beyond any shadow or capacity for doubt, that Western society is being decimated by unscrupulous, unrestricted, unregulated, laissez-faire neoliberal piracy.
That the corporatist state not only disenfranchises and victimizes - but viciously assails and vilifies precisely those most disenfranchised and victimized by it.
That the essential language of our shared responsibilities has been undermined by a reactionary rhetoric of purely personal responsibility designed to deny voice, extinguish breath and exact every recourse from the trammeled.
A reactionary rhetoric designed to inculcate and to inseminate even the poorest and hungriest with the venomous ideology of purely personal responsibility for their own hunger and poverty.
Designed to contradict the very existence of circumstances and social forces beyond all personal responsibility or control.
Forces that can and too often are contrived to crush, savage and vitiate particularly the vulnerable.
Between two neighbours, the other believes no less fundamentally that Western society is being decimated.
Not by failing social responsibility, though.
To the contrary.
By the failure of personal responsibility.
By the rabid and virulent assault, across Western welfare states, not only against our core Western values and the means of honest production - but against the very meaning of productivity.
Against any sane production of meaning.
Thus, the worst failure is due not just to entrenchment of individual irresponsibility and generational dependence on government.
It is not just how big government runs amok.
Western societies used to be sufficiently productive to propagate, to lift and to carry entire classes of not-workers.
Worst is the prevailing cult of personal irresponsibility that has come about in the permanent shadow of false entitlement.
The performance of victimhood.
The condemnation of achievement as illegitimate privilege.
Because no society can survive so radical an inversion of its scruples and fundamental values.
An inversion that makes individual life a ward of the state, enshrines human parasites over the bodies of honest workers and elevates narratives of victimhood to tramp the tale of human achievement into meaningless corruption.
That's what's worst.
Tramping what is most valiant and meaningful in sewage of shame.
Extreme views? Most individuals do not subscribe to views that extreme? Perhaps not yet.
Not knowingly.
But certainly this contradictory, divided understanding of the function of responsibility in fairness and social justice sunders us individually no less than it ruptures our economics, media and politics.
There is no conspiracy sufficient to divide us.
No left or right wing conspiracy in Western media.
No left or right wing conspiracy in western politics.
There's only our fundamentally divided understanding of responsibility in fairness and social justice.
Our views growing ever more extremely divided, cleaving and embittering us as neighbours, inexorably yet routinely reflecting in our institutions.
We know it, too.
Though we don't much like thinking about it, this is all terribly familiar.
Like a seeping sore, festering in, and due, to ignorance.
Beyond vague allusions to far left and right, even adequate terminology is lacking from our language.
Despite how, in everyday reality, Western society is staved by ideological clashing between neo-liberalism - no hale liberalism could have suggested the abnegation of all collective responsibility - and neo-Marxism - no sane interpretation of Marxism could have imagined the abnegation of all individual responsibility.
The everyday reality is that Western culture is torn by ideologies no less extreme than either the communisms or fascisms of the 20th century.
Alas, it is precisely because we so stolidly strive to ignore the gaping rupture in Western culture that we fail to not only address it - but even to recognize its most crucial, critical character.
How totally Western our ideologies are.
How they afflict all Western culture.
How they afflict only Western culture.
Principles of fairness, equality and social justice have long been fundamental Western values.
They have been our brightest ideals, illuminating and making it possible to live, to work, to dispute and to decide together - without coming to blows - in myriad pluralistic, marvelous, historically unprecedented ways.
We can and do agree we have to be fair in the West.
In large part, fairness defines what it means to be Western.
Fairness, the ideal, unites us.
But, simultaneously, we cannot agree what fairness really means.
We clash always more zealously over questions of fairness in practice.
And while ideal fairness unites us - false, absurd and harmful ideologies of fairness divide us utterly.
Today, one of two neighbours can no longer conceive personal responsibility.
Every material disparity provokes railing against the unfairness, the inequality and the social injustice of it.
The other neighbour has no concept of social responsibility.
The typical response to disparity, regardless how extreme, is: "Get a real job.
You bum.
" On the left, ideological oblivion to personal responsibility corrupts ideal fairness into wanton addictions and depraved dependence on unsustainable entitlement.
On the right, ideological oblivion to collective responsibility mangles fairness to suit some false meritocracy where citizens might as well die in the streets through no fault of their own.
No fault other than having been overwhelmed by circumstances outside their control.
The West is divided beyond rupture.
Crumbling institutionally, fragmenting constituently.
There's no hope bonding together again.
Not unless we first recognize and genuinely appreciate how united we stand for ideal fairness.
And second, not unless we cease discounting both individual and collective irresponsibility when questioning fairness in practice.
The left must realize that personal irresponsibility multiplies disparities beyond any scope of social redress.
The right must comprehend that collective irresponsibility aggravates disparity beyond all possible individual remedies.
It is past time to appreciate fairness as our common ideal - and get over our ideologies of it.
Otherwise it's too late for Western culture and societies.
Altogether.
If only it were possible to recognize fairness as our ideal.
In actuality, there is bound to be more skepticism - even more-so as we cling to our patently divisive ideologies.
How and why has fairness become so fundamental in Western culture? The correct answer is deceptively simple.
Western culture is rooted in fairness because it is no longer rooted in faith.
But there is bound to be incredulity that Western culture is no longer rooted in faith.
Nor can simple answers explain how and why faith gave way to fairness.
In order to explain, the tale must be told.
The tale of faith grudgingly, bitterly, haltingly - unavoidably - giving way to fairness.
The story of the origin of fairness as the Western ideal.
It began, like so many stories, somewhat arbitrarily long since.
Certainly church and faith ruled one thousand years back.
Absolutely and unequivocally.
Increasingly during the past millennium, though, Western culture broke trust with church and faith-based knowing.
As a culture, we abandoned absolute, god-given truths - and replaced our trust in provisionally evident, fallible truths.
Truths that hinge on available evidence.
Truths that change from one day to the next.
That alter as new evidence continues arriving.
Which it does.
Continually arrive.
Every single day.
We do recall past prophets leading to our present materialism.
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Darwin.
Yet even as we remember those most instrumental transforming Western culture, we fail to appreciate the scope of our cultural transformation.
How the epistemic shift from faith-based to evidence-based knowing spanned a millennium, how tectonic it persists as we speak - how thoroughly it implicates the totality of our ways of knowing.
More so than anything else, how it defines Western culture.
However unrecognized, the implications of the shift in our ways of knowing are astounding.
It was not just burgeoning science and technology entailed by hobbling faith with evidence.
Freedom, democracy, tolerance, fairness and social justice were no less entailed.
Today's cultural principles and core Western values could not have existed while faith-based knowing prevailed.
Could not exist in the context of cultures where fundamentalist faith in absolute god-given truths triumphs.
Cannot survive in societies ruled largely by temple, church or mosque.
Whatever biblical violence was originally required making god's truths manifest to the people - there could be no questioning, no debate once god's own truths had been revealed.
There could only be yet greater violence - reflecting some presumably greater god's truths - or obedience and submission to god's social orders.
One's proper assigned place in society was necessarily ordained as anything in god's divine creation and the ordering of nature.
Questioning could signify only confusion to god's will.
Debating could only mean resistance to god's plan.
Diabolical enmity to god himself.
But after Copernicus, Galileo and Newton? After Darwin drove that last spike through god's coffin while making such complete monkeys out of us? Nietzche confirmed god dead and, as a culture, we lost every faith in the truths god gave.
It was alright, though.
It was better that way.
That novel new way of knowing.
Because our faith alone had once been blind.
Whereas, by hobbling faith with evidence, the West could begin to see.
Western people could begin to understand.
Absent definitive, pre-ordained, indisputable truths to sanctify every social injustice, questioning and debating became not only possible and meaningful - but absolutely necessary.
The tectonic transformation in our way of knowing gave rise to everything we now take as granted.
Pluralism and constitutionally lawful dissent, human rights and tolerance, freedom and democracy, fairness, equality and social justice.
Indeed, when it came to questions of politics, public morality, the individual's place in society, it was humanitarian fairness, equality and social justice we turned to for answers.
When questioning public morality in the West, in a very real sense, fairness replaced god.
Now we've come to terminal disagreements about what fairness really means.
And because ideal fairness has displaced divinity, our disagreements are as terminal and fundamental as the divisions over divine revelations in faith based cultures.
Consequently, we can have either cultural breakdowns, paralysis, fragmentation, reformations and ultimately sectarian violence.
Or we can begin to recognize and appreciate the common commitment to ideal fairness.
Appreciate what is so positively unique to Western identity.
Begin realizing our division is not so much over ideal fairness - as it is about the ideological perversions of that admirable principle.
That's the imperative message to launch out there.
Fairness demands both personal and social, individual and collective responsibility.
Neither may be removed.
The idolatry of irresponsibility - be it personal or social irresponsibility - must cease.
The perversion of fairness must desist.
Stop desecrating the ideal with these ideologies.
Stop before the self-destruction gets biblical.
As in Soddom and Gommorrah.