Social Stability in Radically Pluralistic Fields

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Abstract

This paper examines how coordinated social life persists under conditions of deep and permanent disagreement. Classical and contemporary sociological theories of social stability often explain order through shared norms, collective agreement, institutional authority, ideology, or systemic equilibrium. These approaches work well when conflict can be resolved, suppressed, or compensated for. They struggle, however, to explain stability in radically pluralistic fields where incompatible moral, existential, or metaphysical commitments remain explicit, unresolved, and structurally unavoidable.

The paper develops a structural account of stability that does not rely on resolution. It argues that coordination can persist through two mechanisms called distributed coherence and quarantined precision. Distributed coherence enables action without agreement by distributing intelligibility across roles, practices, and temporal rhythms. Individuals do not need to share ultimate interpretations in order to act competently together. Quarantined precision limits the scope and intensity of high-stakes existential demands such as questions of death, justice, or ultimate meaning by confining them to bounded contexts rather than allowing them to govern all domains of action.

The argument is developed using the city of Kashi as a generative social field in which contradiction is continuous and publicly visible, yet coordinated life persists over centuries. To clarify why this persistence is theoretically puzzling, the paper also examines two narrative environments as structural reference points. In Geetanjali, individuals live with constant awareness of imminent death. Existential seriousness remains active across all contexts, requiring continuous cognitive and emotional effort to sustain engagement. In The Goat Life, social structure collapses entirely. Reflective agency erodes, and endurance persists only at the level of bodily routine.

These contrasts reveal the cognitive and affective costs imposed on individuals when social mechanisms fail to regulate existential demand. The paper shows how social normalization and good-faith participation execute distributed coherence and quarantined precision in practice. Finally, it draws on predictive processing to explain why such social arrangements remain cognitively viable by reducing the continuous effort required to sustain meaning under contradiction.

Author

• Balaraju Battu, New York University Abu Dhabi