Fundamentalism is a modern phenomenon
Submitted by Curtis on 2002-06-9 10:53:20, Sunday
In reply to What is the opposite of fundamentalist? submitted by Forgiven on 2002-06-9 09:22:00, Sunday
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Hi, Forgiven. I apologize for barging in here when I wasn't asked, but the question you raised is one I've been thinking about a lot in recent months. Two reasons, I guess -- someone very close to me has recently become a Christian (like me, she was raised in a resolutely secular household) and then like so many others I have wondered what could possibly motivate the fundamentalist fanatics who destroyed the WTC. Karen Armstrong, whom I have a lot of time for, in her book on fundamentalism (she considers the Jewish, Islamic and Christian variants) makes a point I hadn't considered: that fundamentalism, like "secular humanism" to use the term I believe you use, is a quintessentially modern phenomenon. Specifically, that both are a product of the Newtonian Revolution and what Nietzsche called the "Death of God". Nietzche's pronouncement is widely mis-interpreted as a mocking celebration of a triumph over religion, akin to Rousseau's comment that there "would be no peace until the last king is hung by the entrails of the last priests". Far from it. Nietzsche regarded the collapse of belief as an unparalleled cultural disaster that would bring in its wake nihilism and the destruction of all that gave civilization value. What had happend was the end of an ability to see the world through any other than rationalist eyes. Nietzsche traces the "rot" (if you agree with him) all the way back to Socrates. But however far it went back, the univerisal triumph of science -- everything from its predictive power to the trial of Galileo to the Darwinian revolution -- has made it impossible (or at least very difficult) to do something our ancestors managed quite easily -- look at the world through anything other than rationalist, literal eyes. Two thousand years ago, at least the more educated of our ancestors did not literally believe that God created the world in 6 days or the sun stopped during the seige of Jericho. Our ancestors saw these -- I hesitate to use the term myth because the meaning of that word too has been destroyed -- but as a different approach to grasping reality, a poetical one if you will. Few educated people in the ancient world for example, literally believed in the stories of the gods on Olympus in the way they believed that if they jumped from a window they would fall to the ground. The scientific revolution has largely destroyed this way of looking at the world -- to our loss, I would say. We can scarcely comprehend today what the prophets and religious philosophers of the past were talking about. Alas, this is true of the fundamentalists as well. The fundamentalists cannot isolate themselves from the flat, rational literalism of our times. Instead they do something our forefathers would have regarded as silly -- attempt to read the Bible (or the Torah or the Koran -- or for that matter the Upanishads) in the same way they do a cookbook. Which of course is impossible. The Bible is filled with contradictions and preposterous stories -- preposterous when taken literally. How could it be otherwise, being a record, as it is, of the spiritual journey over the course of several thousand years of one slice of humanity? Insisting on reading the Bible like one would a cookbook creates psychological tension in anyone who tries it. The fundamentalists know perfectly well that such things as the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection, and the Flood (or for that matter Muhammed's direct ascension into heaven from the Temple Mount in Jerusalem) did not literally happen in the way the John F. Kennedy's assassination happened. So the fundamentalists are forced into denial that creates a huge psychic cost and leads to the outbursts of hatred and fanaticism that have been associated with fundamentalism. At the same time, however, I no longer believe that those who are stridently deaf to any of the claims of religion can bask in some unearned sense of moral and intellectual superiority. I have come to accept that there are great truths at the heart of religion -- perhaps none greater than in Christianity -- that we have largely lost sight of. And that is a great tragedy; a tragedy for humankind. I have great respect for those who are trying, however hopelessly to recapture some of those truths. And I try to be open to what they can teach us. Curtis |
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