to be drawn into the lives of others

....

Days after his son was killed in action on the Balkan front of WWI, Durkheim wrote to his nephew Mauss, “life triumphs over death.” He told Mauss that his grandmother, after her son had died, spent a week mourning, but on the eighth day couldn’t stop herself from asking about neighborhood gossip. She had not forgotten her grief—but to be alive is ever to be pulled away from reckoning one’s own pains and pleasures and to be drawn into the lives of others. What seem like the hardest things religion can demand—the overcoming of self-interestedness and of the terror of death—are in fact sublimely ordinary.

Every feature of human nature that might inspire hope, Durkheim knew, can be put to evil use. Our desire to stand together in a comprehensible world, our longing for community, and our readiness to project idealized visions over unsatisfactory realities may lead us to commit horrible deeds. But it is these enduring emotional structures that also lead us to connection with other people and offer the only possible foundation for a decent political order.

(Blake Smith, The Religion of Liberal Democracy)