OK, let’s try coming at this from a slightly different angle…

There is this quality, which human cultures can invest in particular roles and objects and spaces and behaviors, that we call Sacredness.  It’s hard to pin down exactly what Sacredness is – certainly Jonathan Haidt botched it very badly – but, well, we know it when we see it.  It’s the thing that makes something powerful and meaningful in-and-of-itself.  It’s the thing that makes weddings and funerals and Christmases automatically full of predictable kinds of resonance.  It’s the thing that grips at your soul when you see a [cathedral / redwood tree / rocket-ship launch / insert your favorite cultural holy symbol here]. 

Sacredness is an enormous force for good in the world.  It kindles wondrous flames in the heart.  It brings us together in the mutual experience of that kindling.  By and large, we should wish for there should be sacred things.

But there is also a terrible problem, which is this: Sacredness exists only in shared concept-space, and thus it demands homogeneity of us.  You have to have the same background as everyone else, or you can’t appreciate the ritual; you have to do the ritual the same way as everyone else, or it won’t hit the right notes.  On a macro scale, this is the kind of thing that pushes divergent cultures into war, because people will kill and die to ensure that the Sacred Thing stays properly Sacred.  On a micro scale, it means that you have to be on the same page as everyone else, because that’s the only way to wash your soul with Sacredness.  If the ritual just doesn’t work for you, because you’re weirdly-shaped in whatever way, then you’re totally fucked.  Even if the ritual does kinda work for you, you have to go back to it whenever you want Sacredness in your life, and maybe that’s not exactly what you want to be doing – maybe you have your own projects, your own interests, that matter more to you – but tough shit, those things don’t mean anything to anyone, go put on a wedding dress or a Christmas sweater if you want to have any shot at experiencing the magic. 

This problem cannot be completely solved, even in theory.  Sacredness has to exist in shared concept-space – it’s the sharing, the collective-recognition and collective-reinforcement, that produces sacred power in the first place.  It’s already (more or less) true that, in the privacy of your own bedroom, you can be and do whatever you want.  Somehow this fails to satisfy, at least by the standards of cathedrals and rocket-ship launches.

But we can find a middle ground.  Or, at least, we can try.  We can create a shared cultural vocabulary, a universally-accessible suite of understandings, that allow us to invest Sacredness into each other’s private individual selves.  We can say “you are not who I am, you do not do what I do – but I see who you are and what you do, and you are a part of the glory of the world, and I honor you.”

The rituals can be built to allow for tremendous amounts of variation and customization. 

This is pretty much what I want from the world.

Sacredness is the concept that gets you past empty contractarian liberalism. 

It’s very easy to say “yeah, whatever, man, do your own thing, no skin off my nose.”  But it turns out that getting to do your own thing is the beginning of what’s needed, not the end.  The world is full of people who are wholly empowered to do their own things, and who have been driven to violent madness by the despair of their lives.  No man is an island.  We want to do our own various things, and have that matter. 

Identity is the concept that gets you past the madness of ideological combat. 

You want to be the person you want to be – which is reason enough for you to follow your path, and reason enough for the world to honor it.  You don’t have to prove that you have some special Objectively Approved Justification.  You don’t have to prove that your dream is especially important because you’re oppressed, or saving civilization, or battling the powers of Hell, or anything.  It’s enough to be a human working at a dream. 

Which is a very good thing.  Because it turns out that trying to establish the Objectively Approved Justification for your particular shtick is almost certainly going to lead to war.