Steve,
The presumption running through western philosophy is that there is one ideal state to which we move/are drawn, yet reality is at its most fundamental level a tension and balance. Even matter is more positive and negative charge, than it is some singular substance.
I see the most elemental dichotomy as being between energy and form. Galaxies are energy radiating toward infinity, while the structures and forms coalesce toward equilibrium. Both entropic.
As these organic creatures, we have the gut and heart processing and circulating the energy driving us on, while the central nervous system sorts through the forms precipitating out. We are driven by our desires and directed by our judgements and if we chose not to judge, nature does it for us.
So we exist between the anarchy of desire and the tyranny of judgement.
The heart seeks transcendence, while the head seeks order. Neither of which exists without the other. Without the order of culture, experience and age, there would be nothing to transcend. Yet without the energy in the first place, there would be nothing to order. Just the zero of perfect equilibrium.
Since we have this paradigm of monist idealism, both sides of this dynamic see themselves as on the one true path and those going the other way as misbegotten fools. Liberals seeking the emancipation of all desire, while conservatives try finding some container to fit it all in.
We could go to any society on earth, or in history and there will be those pushing the cultural norms and those enforcing them and while they might be opposed, the society doesn't exist without both.
That is the lesson we still have to learn. More yin and yang, than God Almighty.
The spiritual absolute would be the essence of sentience, from which we rise, not an ideal of wisdom and judgement, from which we fell. That we are aware, than the details of which we are aware.
Conflating the ideal, which is aspirational, with the absolute, which is elemental(infinity versus equilibrium), means there can be no live and let live world, as everyone sees the Other as a rebuke of their own One True God.
