Sacred Wars on a Shared Spaceship

Hard-& vs Soft-& in the Profane & Sacred Balance

“The ego-based self-interest and the empathy-based other-interest are joint, nonseparable, and absolutely interdependent — and while self-interest is more primal, both are essential; balance in said dual interests is the condition of human flourishing  (See FAQ for more on Dual Interest Theory – DIT – in Metaeconomics)”

Note:  This essay grew out of interaction with the Sonnet 4.6 version of Claude AI (Anthropic), starting with the comment/question:  “The current "war effort" involving a coalition of Israel-US teamed up against Iran-Hamas-Hezbollah has just stirred my curiosity to find out more about what is driving said effort, and, what the consequences might be? So, I am looking for credentialed research by academics, legitimate think tanks, and other kinds of both secular and religious organizations that might help me understand what might have motivated what seems to be a rather drastic approach to solving interaction problems among said parties? Also, it would seem "bombing" an entity to solve an ideological/theological disagreement is something out of the 12th-15th century, and lacks credibility here in the 21st century? What am I missing?” The questioning and interaction continued over several days and many hours, producing over 100-pages in the “chat.” The following is a synthesis, reflecting an integration as between DIT & Claude searching a variety of other credentialed sources across many fields beyond Metaeconomics.  Any errors remain mine, and, if you see something that needs more work, please let me know. I am still learning, and, yes, still curious. Gary D Lynne.

I. The Framework: Profane & Sacred, Soft-& and/or Hard-&

Dual Interest Theory (DIT) in Metaeconomics begins with a foundational claim about human nature: Every human being has evolved and is constituted by two interests that are joint, nonseparable, and absolutely interdependent. The first is the ego-based self-interest (the incentive) — the primal drive toward individual survival, material acquisition, and personal advantage, grounded in the oldest evolutionary circuitry of the brain. The second is the empathy-based other-interest (the ethic) — the equally evolved capacity for modeling another’s experience from the inside, for genuine care, for freely chosen participation in something larger than the individual self. Adam Smith spoke to the Station of the Impartial Spectator and John Rawls to the Veil of Ignorance, both places for helping find the shared other-interest represented in the empathy-based ethic to temper the ego-based incentive.

DIT maps this dual structure onto the classical distinction between the Profane — the domain of material life, monetized exchange, market competition, and ego-driven acquisition — and the Sacred — the domain of shared meaning, spiritual commitment, community obligation, and empathy-based ethics. Crucially, DIT insists that these two domains are not opposites. They are a “&” — the Profane & Sacred operating jointly and interdependently, each requiring the other to function.  For the DIT analytical structure illustrating the balancing problem in the Profane & Sacred, see Figures 1 and 2 in the paper “Cargo-Cult Economics to Metaeconomics:  Toward a Humanomics with a Theory.”

The Market Forum — commerce, exchange, material production — is the primary arena of the Profane. It requires an ethical context provided by what DIT calls the Other Forums: the dozens of familial, civic, religious, cultural, and political institutions — from book clubs and religious congregations to political parties and constitutional governments — in which the shared other-interest is cultivated, negotiated, and maintained. These Other Forums constitute the Sacred’s institutional presence in everyday life. The Market Forum and the Other Forums are not competitors. They are constitutive partners, as in Market & Other-Forums, Market & Community: Government, or simply Market & Government.  

But, it is a particular kind of Government, and, it is separate from Religious Control.   The “:” points to an inclusive, representative Government  --- representing We (All) the People, and, sure Religion can play a role in influencing the people, but not in controlling said people. It is the kind of Government made possible in various forms of Democracy that formed after about 1648, during the Enlightenment, including the Constitutional Republic put into play with the 1787 US Constitution. And, on religion:  It is separate State & Church, the Profane & Sacred with a soft-& in play.

The Soft-& and the Hard-&

DIT draws on Hungarian-American psychologist Andras Angyal to distinguish two fundamentally different ways the Sacred and Profane can be related. Angyal identified three developmental orientations: Autonomy (the self-asserting outward), homonomy (the freely chosen are influenced by and perhaps surrender to something larger than the self), and heteronomy (the external imposition of authority upon the individual). In healthy development, autonomy and homonomy complement each other. In pathological development, heteronomy replaces homonomy — what should be freely chosen becomes coercively commanded. And, in reality, the ideal systems have a focus on the freely chosen (liberty and freedom) integration of autonomy & homonomy, with heteronomy coming into play only when the self-control --- the third force in the circuitry of the human brain --- to balance autonomy & homonomy fails.

The Soft-& is the relationship in which the Sacred influences the expression of the Profane through freely chosen ethical commitment, community participation, and empathy-based norms reflected in the shared other-interest. The Sacred sets ethical boundaries, and gives context to  the Profane through genuine homonomy. This is the foundation of constitutional democracy, rule of law, and pluralistic civil society.  Individual liberty and freedom, dignity and opportunity for We the (Ordinary) People prevails.

The Hard-& is the relationship in which the Sacred commands the Profane through theological dictate, political imposition, and coercive authority. The individual’s own autonomy (soft-)& homonomy balance is overridden by externally imposed heteronomous force. The Market Forum is subordinated to theological dictate  in an Other Forum dominated by religious proclamations. Democratic negotiation is replaced by divine mandate.

Angyal’s clinical observation is decisive: The hard-& move converts what should be freely chosen homonomy into coerced compliance — and in doing so, destroys the authentic sacred content it claims to protect. The hard-& evacuates the sacred of its empathy-based ethical substance while preserving its vocabulary as a political weapon. This is the central DIT finding that the analysis confirms across three religious traditions and their associated factions.

II. The Westphalian Settlement: History’s First Successful Soft-&

To understand the current conflicts among Abrahamic religious factions, one must first understand the 1648 Peace of Westphalia — in DIT terms, the first successful large-scale institutionalization of the soft-& at civilizational scale. After thirty years of catastrophic religious warfare in Europe, in which approximately one-third of the German-speaking population perished, exhausted parties arrived at a constitutional settlement. What Westphalia established was not the elimination of the sacred from political life. It was the conversion of competing hard-& Christian political theologies — each claiming divine mandate to command the political order — into a framework of sovereign equality in which the sacred retains influence without exercising command.

The subsequent Enlightenment project — separation of state (profane) and church (sacred),  constitutional and other forms of democracy, universal human rights, international law — extended this soft-& logic progressively outward. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights represents its most ambitious global expression: A framework in which the shared other-interest of all humanity — the empathy-based golden rule universalized — provides the ethical foundation for a world order in which sovereign states coexist without any single sacred tradition commanding the whole.

The critical historical failure of Westphalia was its partiality. It was a settlement negotiated among Western European Christian traditions — not with the Islamic, Jewish, or other traditions. Its subsequent export through colonialism imposed the Westphalian state system on civilizations that had never consented to it, dismantling their own profane & sacred profane architectures in the process. The hard-& factions driving the current conflicts are, in significant part, the political consequences of that colonial imposition — the sacred-dispossession reaction that DIT predicts when the Market Forum, operating without adequate concern for the Other Forum, colonizes and destroys the communal institutions that sustain the shared other-interest.

III. The Islamic Hard-& Factions: From Qutb to Hamas

The intellectual architecture of radical Islamic political theology flows, in its modern form, from Egyptian scholar Sayyid Qutb (1906–1966), whose two-year encounter with American materialism converted a sophisticated cultural critic into the theoretical father of the hard-& Islamic state. Qutb’s diagnosis was partially valid. In Social Justice in Islam, he observed exactly what Putnam later documented empirically: A society in which the Market Forum had so thoroughly colonized the Other Forums that even family, religious community, and civic life had been reorganized around commercial values. The Profane had overwhelmed the Sacred. This was a genuine soft-& failure.

Where Qutb made his catastrophic error was in his prescription. He proposed solving the profane dominance problem by imposing sacred dominance — replacing one hard-& with the opposite hard-&. His central concept, jahiliyyah — the condition in which divine law does not govern — became the theological instrument for declaring the entire existing world order invalid and subject to sacred overthrow. The soft-& of the genuinely balanced Profane & Sacred,  as encouraged by the Enlightenment, and in classical liberalism like represented in the moral philosophy of the time ---  Adam Smith especially as it relates to economy --- never appears in his framework. Rather than such soft-&, the hard-& of Islamic factions represented in Al Qaeda, ISIS, Hezbollah and Hamas came into being.

Al Qaeda attacked the Market Forum as symbol and system — the World Trade Center a symbolically precise strike at the most visible monument of global Market Forum dominance. ISIS attempted to build the hard-& sacred state as total replacement reality, producing the economic collapse the DIT framework predicts when the Sacred obliterates rather than balances the Profane. Hezbollah represents the most sophisticated profile — maintaining a functioning profane infrastructure of hospitals and schools while projecting hard-& sacred violence outward, which is precisely why it has outlasted Al Qaeda and ISIS as a political force. The Hamas profile is distinct because its sacred (Jerusalem, divine promise) is inseparable from its profane (statehood, territory) in a fusion that makes purely material and purely theological solutions equally inadequate.

What all four share is the structural signature of the Islamic hard-&: The rejection of the Westphalian soft-& as capitulation to jahiliyyah, and the refusal of the golden rule’s universal radius — the expansion of the empathy-based other-interest to include those outside the sacred community.

IV. The Jewish Hard-& Factions: From Kook to Kahanism

The Jewish religious nationalist hard-& factions originate in the theological vision of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), whose original framework was a genuine soft-& proposition: Secular Zionist pioneers were unwitting instruments of divine redemption whose nationalist project the sacred should nurture from within. His son Zvi Yehuda hardened this into a full hard-& after 1967. The Six-Day War’s territorial conquest was experienced as a messianic event — the land becoming sacred to the same degree as the Torah, making profane political compromise theologically impermissible. This is Angyal’s transition from homonomy  (soft-&) to heteronomy (hard-&) visible in real historical time across two generations.

The current Israeli governing coalition includes political heirs of this tradition holding direct authority over West Bank policy, whose theological commitment to territorial maximalism makes negotiated settlement with Palestinian claims theologically impermissible. Haredi ultra-Orthodoxy presents a different hard-& profile — sacred withdrawal rather than territorial command — generating the material deprivation DIT predicts when the Sacred obliterates the Profane. Paradoxically, mainstream Haredi theology was originally anti-Zionist, insisting that Jewish sovereignty before the Messiah’s arrival violated divine law — an internal Jewish critique of Religious Zionism that structurally mirrors the authentic Christian critique of Christian nationalism: The sacred vocabulary weaponized in service of a profane political project.

The Hazony project provides the most sophisticated intellectual scaffolding for the global hard-& movement across traditions. His Hebrew Biblical nationalism proposes the ancient Israelite nation-state as the universal model of political organization while building the transnational institutional network — conferences, think tanks, publications — connecting Israeli nationalist intellectuals with American Christian nationalists, European authoritarian leaders, and Catholic integralists. The structural DIT contradiction is precise: A framework claiming soft-& universalism (all nations deserve self-determination) while functioning as hard-& particularism (specifically structured to protect one nation’s claims against the reciprocal constraints that universal self-determination would require).

V. The Christian Hard-& Factions: From Deneen to Christian Nationalism

Notre Dame political philosopher Patrick Deneen’s Postliberal project is, in DIT terms, a sophisticated Catholic version of Qutb’s diagnosis with a parallel structural error in its prescription. Deneen correctly identifies a failed version of classical liberalism’s Market Forum, without adequate Other Forum influence,  has produced the profane colonization of the sacred — the dissolution of family, community, and religious life under commercial values. Both Deneen and Qutb see the Enlightenment separation of state and church as the source of civilizational decay. Both propose the hard-& reintegration of religious authority and political power, in effect calling for a reintegrated state (hard-) & church.

Orbán’s Hungary provides the empirical test case. The growing visibility of Christianity on the Hungarian landscape has not corresponded with increasing religiosity or religious practice. Christianity has been made symbolically integral to the nation-state without citizens going to church more. The sacred has been converted into a brand — evacuated of its authentic empathy-based content in the very act of being politically imposed. This is heteronomy replacing homonomy at national scale, confirming the DIT prediction: The hard-& destroys the sacred it claims to save.

American Christian Nationalism follows the same pattern with a distinctive empirical signature. The most comprehensive research — Whitehead and Perry’s Oxford University Press study — finds nearly two-thirds of white evangelical Protestants qualify as Christian nationalism sympathizers or adherents. More striking: The more devout Christians are — the more they attend church, pray, and read Scripture — the less support they have for Christian nationalist policies. Genuine homonomy consistently resists the heteronomous imposition. The tradition’s own most serious practitioners recognize the corruption of the sacred in its political weaponization.

VI. The Structural Unity: One Pathology, Three Sacred Contents

The DIT analysis reveals something that conventional geopolitical analysis systematically misses: The Islamic, Jewish, and Christian hard-& factions driving the conflict have more in common with each other than any of them has with the soft-& mainstream of their own tradition. Each shares the rejection of the Westphalian soft-& framework; the claim that a particular sacred tradition has divine mandate to command the political and economic order; the conversion of democratic negotiation into theological dictate; the narrowing of the other-interest to an in-group at the expense of the broader shared other-interest; and the production of outcomes that systematically work against the integrated flourishing of the human beings living under their authority.

All hard-& factions in all three of the Abrahamic sourced religions favor a kind of dark empathy. It takes the economy and society back toward pre-Enlightenment. back to moral and ethical philosophy before the new thinking that saw the need for liberty and freedom, dignity and opportunity for ordinary people. It takes the economy and society back toward a time when the best balance in the Profane & Sacred was determined by the vertical power system, with little freedom for ordinary people to choose.

The current Israel-US-Iran war is not between people who want the Profane and people who want the Sacred. It is between three factions each wanting their own version of the hard-& Profane &  Sacred fusion.  Each faction wants to impose their particular sacred on the same geography — and none are seemingly willing to acknowledge that the other parties’ sacred claims have any legitimate standing at all.

The bombs being dropped cannot solve this. Military force can suppress organizational capacity; it cannot repair profane & sacred frontiers or address the legitimate grievances — dispossession, profane colonization, sacred humiliation — that generate mass receptivity to hard-& ideologies. Every military action that confirms the narrative of sacred community under profane assault strengthens the very recruitment dynamic it purports to weaken.

The DIT map is now fully drawn. What emerges is not three separate religious nationalisms running parallel tracks — it is one coherent global movement with three religious branches, each making the same hard-& structural move with different sacred content, united by shared opposition to the soft-& Enlightenment institutional order:

Jewish Religious Nationalism (Hazony, Religious Zionism): Hebrew Biblical covenant → particular people → particular land → nation-state as sacred political unit → hard-& of divine promise commanding territorial policy

Catholic Integralism / Christian Nationalism (Deneen, Vermeule, Orbán): Thomistic natural law → Christian social order → particular nation as vehicle of Christian civilization → hard-& of Church teaching commanding political economy

Islamic Nationalism (Qutb, Khomeini, Hamas, Hezbollah): Quranic sovereignty → Muslim umma → Islamic state as divine political unit → hard-& of sharia commanding all domains of life

All three share: Rejection of universal human rights as imperialism, rejection of international law as illegitimate constraint, rejection of the Enlightenment profane soft-& sacred as the source of civilizational decay, and the proposal to restore the sacred's command over the profane through the nation-state as the organizing political unit.

VII. What the DIT Framework Points Toward

The DIT framework does not offer simple policy prescriptions. But it identifies with precision the conditions under which the soft-& can be restored. The Westphalian settlement was produced by thirty years of catastrophic warfare that convinced even the most committed hard-& factions that the cost of continued fighting exceeded the benefit of sacred victory. It led to the Enlightenment, and moral philosophy, the shared ethic that gave liberty and freedom, dignity and opportunity to all.  The current factions seem to  want to go back to pre-1648, seemingly not yet having reached that exhaustion point — and the nuclear dimension means the natural exhaustion mechanism of pre-modern warfare is foreclosed. The negotiated alternative must be found before the catastrophic one arrives.

The empirical evidence is not entirely pessimistic. The most devout practitioners of every tradition consistently resist the hard-& weaponization of their faith. Mainstream Islamic scholars have repeatedly condemned the hard-& factions’ theological claims. The most authentically Christian voices resist Christian nationalism’s corruption of the Gospel’s empathy-based ethic. Serious Jewish scholars recognize that Religious Zionism’s territorial maximalism violates rather than fulfills the Torah’s ethical obligations. These soft-& voices are not making headlines — but they are, in every tradition, the majority.  The majority favors soft-&, and is suffering under the tyranny of the minority wanting to impose hard-&.

And, ironically, they share, across three Abrahamic traditions, the one ethical commitment that makes a durable settlement possible: The empathy-based golden rule’s universal radius — the expansion of the empathy-based other-interest to genuinely include the other --- All the Other, We the People ---  the recognition that the neighbor’s sacred claims have enough legitimacy that coexistence is preferable to mutual annihilation. This is not a novel discovery. It is the oldest ethical teaching in all three traditions. It awaits, at the civilizational scale the current crisis requires, institutional expression adequate to its scope.

VIII. Conclusion: The Spaceship and the “&”

The Israel-US-Iran war — and the wider civilizational conflict it represents — is, at its deepest structural level, a collision among multiple hard-& factions, each of which represents a tradition that either rejected, was excluded from, or was victimized by the Westphalian soft-& settlement. Unfortunately, is now operating with modern weapons and state power in a world whose institutional architecture was designed to manage exactly this kind of conflict but lacks the enforcement mechanisms, the mutual exhaustion, and the shared other-interest that made the original Westphalian solution work.

The DIT insight that cuts through the noise is simple, empirically grounded, and — in the end — hopeful: The hard-& destroys the sacred it claims to protect. Every tradition’s most serious practitioners know it. The question is whether they can produce, through the talk, talk, talk of genuine Other Forum engagement across traditions, a soft-& settlement adequate to the scale of the current crisis — before the hard-& factions produce, through their combined actions, a catastrophe adequate to produce the mutual exhaustion that would make such a settlement unavoidable.

On this Spaceship Earth, the Profane & Sacred are joint, nonseparable, and absolutely interdependent. The profane pushpins and the sacred poetry are both essential. The Market Forum and the Other Forums are both necessary. No faction’s sacred, however ancient and however genuinely held, can long survive the obliteration of the profane it needs to sustain it. And no profane order, however technically sophisticated and materially productive, can long sustain itself without the empathy-based sacred that gives it its ethical foundations and its human meaning.

The “&” is not a compromise. It is the truth of our evolved nature, confirmed in every neural circuit and every civilizational experiment in human history. The task of our moment — perhaps the defining task of this century — is to build, across the three great Abrahamic traditions and their many internal factions, the Other Forum infrastructure sufficient to produce that recognition before it is too late.

Selected Scholarly Sources

On Dual Interest Theory and Metaeconomics

Lynne, Gary D. Metaeconomics: Tempering Excessive Greed. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

Lynne, Gary D.  “Cargo-Cult Economics to Metaeconomics:  Toward a Humanomics with a Theory.”  Review of Behavioral Economics 12, 3 (May 2025):  257-289 

Angyal, Andras. Foundations for a Science of Personality. Commonwealth Fund, 1941.

Wilson, Edward O. Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. Knopf, 1998.

de Waal, Frans. The Age of Empathy. Harmony Books, 2009.

Putnam, Robert D. Bowling Alone. Simon & Schuster, 2000.

On Qutb and Islamic Political Theology

Qutb, Sayyid. Social Justice in Islam. Trans. Hamid Algar. Islamic Publications International, 2000.

Toth, James. Sayyid Qutb: The Life and Legacy of a Radical Islamic Intellectual. Oxford University Press, 2013.

Calvert, John. Sayyid Qutb and the Origins of Radical Islamism. Columbia University Press, 2010.

Kuran, Timur. Islam and Mammon. Princeton University Press, 2004.

On Religious Nationalism Across Traditions

Whitehead, Andrew L. and Samuel L. Perry. Taking America Back for God. Oxford University Press, 2020.

Gorski, Philip and Samuel Perry. The Flag and the Cross. Oxford University Press, 2022.

Du Mez, Kristin Kobes. Jesus and John Wayne. Liveright/Norton, 2020.

Hazony, Yoram. The Virtue of Nationalism. Basic Books, 2018.

Deneen, Patrick J. Why Liberalism Failed. Yale University Press, 2018.

On Westphalia and International Order

Croxton, Derek. Westphalia: The Last Christian Peace. Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.

Philpott, Daniel. Revolutions in Sovereignty. Princeton University Press, 2001.

Wedgwood, C.V. The Thirty Years War. New York Review Books, 2005 [1938].