Goodbye to the Public Sphere

28 October 2025

What are some reasons to say goodbye to the public sphere? (Permanently or for a while.) The public sphere being "collective decision-making at civic level and what directly feeds it" (politics, media, and amateur online "Discourse" included).

First, a big reason not to: "everything interrelates". Whatever you think is important, the bigger picture, including that discussed by the public sphere, directly or indirectly relates to it. I do think this is important, and discourages disengagement from the public sphere.

Here are two reasons for saying goodbye:

1. Politics can be more engaging than religion. We have two big industries (news media and partisan politics) that try to get us obsessed with politics. As above, politics have real eternal implications. But being obsessed with politics can lead us to overvalue what politics values. Politics tends to value secular well-being in the relative short term, not the religious and eternal. Politics is the quest for behavioral unity, with or without deeper agreement, generally involving coercion. What we impose on people has to be what we can "all" agree on, and what we tend to all be able to agree on are projects justified according to a secular worldview. We may be officially MSLians, VMH Christians, or whatever kind of theist, officially worrying more about people's eternal salvation than their short-term, secular well-being (or than that of ourselves or our in-group), but when we are enchanted by political discussions and information, we live as though we are atheists. So to avoid the enchantment, we might disengage, even though we risk losing touch with some things that are important.

2. Politics is baggage. MSL, and particularly VMH and ethical theism, add baggage to a person, making it harder to relate to other people. (And to some extent Christianity adds further baggage.) Do we want even more baggage? Maybe it's better to be apolitical, so that we can have a few more friends.