The Great Divide

There is a Great Divide within 'western' society today, and chances are slim that this Divide will be bridged in times to come, not least because there are so few people who are capable of or are interested in keeping up with what has been happening on either side of it. This is the Divide between what has come to be labelled as the 'public sphere' (PS) and what have been branded as the 'private dimensions' (PD), and this Divide has established itself as one of the foundational pillars of most 'western' democracies. According to the official version of the matter, at least, this Divide is quite clear-cut : PS refers to the legal machinery and the socio-economic policies of the nation-state where there shall be no discrimination on the basis of gender, religion, or political belief; PD effectively covers whatever has been left out, and includes, among other things, religious beliefs and other idiosyncratic notions that one is taught to keep to oneself.

It has become quite clear, however, over the last few decades that some of the most heated of contemporary debates are conducted precisely at the contested sites of this Divide. Debates over abortion, stem-cell research, and euthanasia, for example, cannot easily be placed either into PS or into PD. A woman who supports the legalisation of abortion with the argument, 'A woman has absolute rights over her own body' is not simply making a PD comment, for this argument has all sorts of wider ramifications of a PS nature about our understanding of what socio-political existence is like. On the other hand, somebody who opposes abortion with the claim, 'All life is sacred', is making a PS claim from a very specific PD standpoint, possibly, Islamic, Roman Catholic, or Jewish.