The Four Fundamentalisms and The Threat to Sustainable
Democracy
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The most important words anyone
said to me in the weeks immediately after September 11,
2001, came from my friend James Koplin. While acknowledging
the significance of that day, he said, simply: "I
was in a profound state of grief about the world before
9/11, and nothing that happened on that day has significantly
changed what the world looks like to me." Because Jim is a bit older and
considerably smarter than I, it took me some time to catch
up to him, but eventually I recognized his insight. He
was warning me that even we lefties -- trained to keep
an eye on systems and structures of power rather than
obsessing about individual politicians and single events
- were missing the point if we accepted the conventional
wisdom that 9/11 "changed everything," as the
saying went then. He was right, and today I want to talk
about four fundamentalisms loose in the world and the
long-term crisis to which they point. Before we head there, a note on
the short-term crisis: I have been involved in U.S. organizing
against the so-called "war on terror," which
has provided cover for the attempts to expand and deepen
U.S. control over the strategically crucial resources
of Central Asia and the Middle East, part of a global
strategy that the Bush administration openly acknowledges
is aimed at unchallengeable U.S domination of the world.
For U.S. planners, that "world" includes not
only the land and seas - and, of course, the resources
beneath them - but space above as well. It is our world
to arrange and dispose of as they see fit, in support
of our "blessed lifestyle." Other nations can
have a place in that world as long as they are willing
to assume the role that the United States determines appropriate.
The vision of U.S. policymakers is of a world very ordered,
by them. This description of U.S. policy
is no caricature. Anyone who doubts my summary can simply
read the National Security Strategy document released
in 2002 http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2002/
and the 2006 update http://www.whitehouse.gov/nsc/nss/2006/,
and review post-World War II U.S. history http://www.zmag.org/CrisesCurEvts/interventions.htm.
Read and review, but only if you don't mind waking up
in the middle of the night in a cold sweat of fear. But
as scary as these paranoid, power-mad policymakers' delusions
may be, Jim was talking about a feeling beyond that fear
-- a grief that is much broader and goes much deeper. Opposing the war-of-the-moment
-- and going beyond that to challenge the whole imperial
project -- is important. But also important is the work
of thinking through the nature of the larger forces that
leave us in this grief-stricken position. We need to go
beyond Bush. We should recognize the seriousness of the
threat that this particular gang of thieves and thugs
poses and resist their policies, but not mistake them
for the core of the problem. One way to come to terms with
these forces is to understand the United States as a society
in the grip of four fundamentalisms. In ascending order
of threat, I identify these fundamentalisms as religious,
national, economic, and technological. All share some
similar characteristics, while each poses a particular
threat to sustainable democracy and sustainable life on
the planet. Each needs separate analysis and strategies
for resistance. Let's start by defining fundamentalism.
The term has a specific meaning in Protestant history
(an early 20th century movement to promote "The Fundamentals"),
but I want to use it in a more general fashion to describe
any intellectual/political/theological position that asserts
an absolute certainty in the truth and/or righteousness
of a belief system. Such fundamentalism leads to an inclination
to want to marginalize, or in some cases eliminate, alternative
ways to understand and organize the world. After all,
what's the point of engaging in honest dialogue with those
who believe in heretical systems that are so clearly wrong
or even evil? In this sense, fundamentalism is an extreme
form of hubris, a delusional overconfidence not only in
one's beliefs but in the ability of humans to know much
of anything definitively. In the way I use the term, fundamentalism
isn't unique to religious people but is instead a feature
of a certain approach to the world, rooted in the mistaking
of very limited knowledge for wisdom. The antidote to fundamentalism
is humility, that recognition of just how contingent our
knowledge about the world is. We need to adopt what sustainable
agriculture researcher Wes Jackson calls "an ignorance-based
worldview," http://www.landinstitute.org/vnews/display.v/ART/2004/10/03/42c0db19e37f4 Fundamentalists, no matter what
the specific belief system, believe in their ability to
know a lot. That is why it can be so easy for fundamentalists
to move from one totalizing belief system to another.
For example, I have a faculty colleague who shifted from
being a dogmatic communist to a dogmatic right-wing evangelical
Christian. When people hear of his conversion they often
express amazement, though to me it always seemed easy
to understand -- he went from one fundamentalism to another.
What matters is not so much the content but the shape
of the belief system. Such systems should worry us.
That said, not all fundamentalisms
pose the same danger to democracy and sustainability.
So, let's go through the four I have identified: religious,
national, economic, and technological. The fundamentalism that attracts
the most attention is religious. In the United States,
the predominant form is Christian. Elsewhere in the world,
Islamic, Jewish, and Hindu fundamentalisms are attractive
to some significant portion of populations, either spread
across a diaspora or concentrated in one region, or both.
Given all the attention focused on religious fundamentalism,
I'll assume everyone has at least a passing acquaintance
with the phenomenon and is aware of its threats.
But religious fundamentalism is
not necessarily the most serious fundamentalist threat
loose in the world today. Certainly much evil has been
done in the world in the name of religion, especially
the fundamentalist varieties, and we can expect more in
the future. But, moving up the list, we also can see clearly
the problems posed by national fundamentalism.
Nationalism poses a threat everywhere
but should especially concern us in the United States,
where the capacity for destruction in the hands of the
most powerful state in the history of the world is exacerbated
by a pathological hyper-patriotism that tends to suppress
internal criticism and leave many unable to hear critique
from outside. In other writing (Chapter 3 of Citizens
of the Empire That critique applies across the
board, but because of our power and peculiar history,
a rejection of national fundamentalism is most crucial
in the United States. The dominant conception of that
history is captured in the phrase "the city upon
a hill," the notion that the United States came into
the world as the first democracy, a beacon to the world.
In addition to setting the example, as soon as it had
the capacity to project its power around the world, the
United States claimed to be the vehicle for bringing democracy
to that world. These are particularly odd claims for a
nation that owes its very existence to one of the most
successful genocides in recorded history, the near-complete
extermination of indigenous peoples to secure the land
and resource base for the United States. Odder still when
one looks at the U.S. practice of African slavery that
propelled the United States into the industrial world,
and considers the enduring apartheid system - once formal
and now informal - that arose from it. And odd-to-the-point-of-bizarre
in the context of imperial America's behavior in the world
since it emerged as the lone superpower and made central
to its foreign policy in the post-WWII era attacks on
any challenge in the Third World to U.S. dominance. While all the empires that have
committed great crimes - the British, French, Belgians,
Japanese, Russians and then the Soviets - have justified
their exploitation of others by the alleged benefits it
brought to the people being exploited, there is no power
so convinced of its own benevolence as the United States.
The culture is delusional in its commitment to this mythology,
which is why today one can find on the other side of the
world peasant farmers with no formal education who understand
better the nature of U.S. power than many faculty members
at elite U.S. universities. This national fundamentalism
rooted in the assumption of the benevolence of U.S. foreign
and military policy works to trump critical inquiry. As
long as a significant component of the U.S. public - and
virtually the entire elite - accept this national fundamentalism,
the world is at risk. Economic fundamentalism, synonymous
these days with market fundamentalism, presents another
grave threat. After fall of the Soviet system, the naturalness
of capitalism is now taken to be beyond question. The
dominant assumption about corporate capitalism in the
United States is not simply that it is the best among
competing economic systems, but that it is the only sane
and rational way to organize an economy in the contemporary
world. In capitalism, (1) property, including
capital assets, is owned and controlled by private persons;
(2) people sell their labor for money wages, and (3) goods
and services are allocated by markets. In contemporary
market fundamentalism, also referred to as neoliberalism,
it's assumed that most extensive use of markets possible
will unleash maximal competition, resulting in the greatest
good - and all this is inherently just, no matter what
the results. The reigning ideology of so-called "free
trade" seeks to impose this neoliberalism everywhere
on the globe. In this fundamentalism, it is an article
of faith that the "invisible hand" of the market
always provides the preferred result, no matter how awful
the consequences may be for real people. A corresponding tenet of the market
fundamentalist view is that the government should not
interfere in any of this; the appropriate role of government,
we are told, is to stay out of the economy. This is probably
the most ridiculous aspect of the ideology, for the obvious
reason that it is the government that establishes the
rules for the system (currency, contract law, etc.) and
decides whether the wealth accumulated under previous
sets of rules should be allowed to remain in the hands
of those who accumulated it (typically in ways immoral,
illegal, or both; we should recall the quip that behind
every great fortune is a great crime) or be redistributed.
To argue that government should stay out of the economy
merely obscures the obvious fact that without the government
- that is, without rules established through some kind
of collective action - there would be no economy. The
government can't stay out because it's in from the ground
floor, and assertions that government intervention into
markets is inherently illegitimate are just silly. Adding to the absurdity of all
this is the hypocrisy of the market fundamentalists, who
are quick to call on government to bail them out when
things go sour (in recent U.S history, the savings-and-loan
and auto industries are the most outrageous examples).
And then there's the reality of how some government programs
- most notably the military and space departments -- act
as conduits for the transfer of public money to private
corporations under the guise of "national defense"
and the "exploration of space." And then there's
the problem of market failure - the inability of private
markets to provide some goods or provide other goods at
the most desirable levels - of which economists are well
aware. In other words, economic fundamentalism
- the worship of markets combined with steadfast denial
about how the system actually operates - leads to a world
in which not only are facts irrelevant to the debate,
but people learn to ignore their own experience. On the facts: There is a widening
gap between rich and poor, both worldwide and within most
nations. According to U.N. statistics, about a quarter
of the world's population lives on less than $1 a day
and nearly half live on less than $2. The 2005 U.N. Report
on the World Social Situation, aptly titled "The
Inequality Predicament," stresses: "Ignoring inequality in the
pursuit of development is perilous. Focusing exclusively
on economic growth and income generation as a development
strategy is ineffective, as it leads to the accumulation
of wealth by a few and deepens the poverty of many; such
an approach does not acknowledge the intergenerational
transmission of poverty." http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/rwss/media%2005/ That's where the data lead. But
I want to highlight the power of this fundamentalism by
reminding us of a common acronym: TGIF. Everyone in the
United States knows what that means: "Thank God it's
Friday." The majority of Americans don't just know
what TGIF stands for, they feel it in their bones. That's
a way of saying that a majority of Americans do work they
generally do not like and do not believe is really worth
doing. That's a way of saying that we have an economy
in which most people spend at least a third of their lives
doing things they don't want to do and don't believe are
valuable. We are told this is a way of organizing an economy
that is natural. Religious, national, and economic
fundamentalisms are dangerous. They are systems of thought
-- or, more accurately, systems of non-thought; as Wes
Jackson puts it, "fundamentalism takes over where
thought leaves off" http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oo/sidebars/America/Jackson.html
-- that are at the core of much
of the organized violence in the world today. They are
systems that are deployed to constrain real freedom and
justify illegitimate authority. But it may turn out that
those fundamentalisms are child's play compared with U.S.
society's technological fundamentalism. Most concisely defined, technological fundamentalism is the assumption that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy, advanced technology is always a good thing and that any problems caused by the unintended consequences of such technology eventually can be remedied by more technology. Those who question such declarations
are often said to be "anti-technology," which
is a meaningless insult. All human beings use technology
of some kind, whether it's stone tools or computers. An
anti-fundamentalist position is not that all technology
is bad, but that the introduction of new technology should
be evaluated on the basis of its effects -- predictable
and unpredictable - on human communities and the non-human
world, with an understanding of the limits of our knowledge. Our experience with unintended
consequences is fairly clear. For example, there's the
case of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion
engines, which gave us the interstate highway system and
contributes to global warming. We haven't quite figured
out how to cope with these problems, and in retrospect
it might have been wise to go slower in the development
of a transportation system based on the car and think
through the consequences. Or how about CFCs and the ozone
hole? Chlorofluorocarbons have a variety of industrial,
commercial, and household applications, including in air
conditioning. They were thought to be a miracle chemical
when introduced in the 1930s - non-toxic, non-flammable,
and non-reactive with other chemical compounds. But in
the 1980s, researchers began to understand that while
CFCs are stable in the troposphere, when they move to
the stratosphere and are broken down by strong ultraviolet
light they release chlorine atoms that deplete the ozone
layer. This unintended effect deflated the exuberance
a bit. Depletion of the ozone layer means that more UV
radiation reaches the Earth's surface, and overexposure
to UV radiation is a cause of skin cancer, cataracts,
and immune suppression. But, the technological fundamentalists
might argue, we got a handle on that one and banned CFCs,
and now the ozone hole is closing. True enough, but what
lessons have been learned? Society didn't react to the
news about CFCs by thinking about ways to step back from
a world that has become dependent on air conditioning,
but instead looked for replacements to keep the air conditioning
running. So, the reasonable question is: When will the
unintended effects of the CFC replacements become visible?
If not the ozone hole, what's next? There's no way to
predict, but it seems reasonable to ask the question and
sensible to assume the worst. This technological fundamentalism
makes it clear why Jackson's call for an ignorance-based
worldview is so important. If we were to step back and
confront honestly the technologies we have unleashed -
out of that hubris, believing our knowledge is adequate
to control the consequences of our science and technology
- I doubt any of us would ever get a good night's sleep.
We humans have been overdriving our intellectual headlights
for some time, most dramatically in the second half of
the 20th century. Most obviously, there are two places
we have gone, with reckless abandon, where we had no business
going - into the atom and into the cell. On the former: The deeper we break
into the energy package, the greater the risks we take.
Building fires with sticks gathered from around the camp
is relatively easy to manage, but breaking into increasingly
earlier material of the universe -- such as fossil fuels
and, eventually, heavy metal uranium - is quite a different
project, more complex and far beyond our capacity to control.
Likewise, manipulating plants through selective breeding
is local and manageable, whereas breaking into the workings
of the gene -- the foundational material of life - takes
us to places we have no way to understand. We live now in the uncomfortable
position of realizing we have moved too far and too fast,
outstripping our capacity to manage safely the world we
have created. The answer is not some naïve return
to a romanticized past, but a recognition of what we have
created and a systematic evaluation of how to step back
from our most dangerous missteps. Central to that project is realizing
that we have to learn to live with less, which we can
accomplish only when we recognize that living with less
is crucial not only to ecological survival but long-term
human fulfillment. People in the United States live with
an abundance of most everything -- except meaning. The
people who have the most in material terms seem to spend
the most time in therapy, searching for answers to their
own alienation. This "blessed lifestyle" --
a term Bush's spokesman used in 2000 to describe the president's
view of U.S. affluence -- perhaps is more accurately also
seen as a curse. Let's return to CFCs and air-conditioning.
To someone who lives in Texas, with its miserable heat
half the year, it's reasonable to ask: If not air-conditioning,
then what? One possible reasonable response is, of course,
to vacate Texas, a strategy I ponder often. More realistic:
The "cracker house," a term from Florida and
Georgia to describe houses built before air-conditioning
that utilize shade, cross-ventilation, and various building
techniques to create a livable space even in the summer
in the deep South. Of course, even with all that, there
are times when it's hot in a cracker house -- so hot that
one doesn't want to do much of anything but drink iced
tea and sit on the porch. That raises a question: What's
so bad about sitting on the porch drinking iced tea instead
of sitting inside in an air-conditioned house? A world that steps back from high-energy/high-technology
answers to all questions will no doubt be a harder world
in some ways. But the way people cope without such "solutions"
can help create and solidify human bonds. In this sense,
the high-energy/high-technology world often contributes
to impoverished relationships and the destruction of longstanding
cultural practices and the information those practices
carry. So, stepping back from this fundamentalism is not
simply sacrifice but an exchange of a certain kind of
comfort and easy amusement for a different set of rewards. Articulating this is important
in a world in which people have come to believe the good
life is synonymous with consumption and the ability to
acquire increasingly sophisticated technology. To miss
the way in which turning from the high-energy/high-technology
can improve our lives, then, supports the techno-fundamentalists,
such as this writer in the Wired magazine: "Green-minded activists failed
to move the broader public not because they were wrong
about the problems, but because the solutions they offered
were unappealing to most people. They called for tightening
belts and curbing appetites, turning down the thermostat
and living lower on the food chain. They rejected technology,
business, and prosperity in favor of returning to a simpler
way of life. No wonder the movement got so little traction.
Asking people in the world's wealthiest, most advanced
societies to turn their backs on the very forces that
drove such abundance is naïve at best." Naïve, perhaps, but not as
naïve as the belief that unsustainable systems can
be sustained indefinitely. With that writer's limited
vision -- which is what passes for vision in this culture
-- it's not surprising that he advocates economic and
technological fundamentalist solutions: "With climate change hard
upon us, a new green movement is taking shape, one that
embraces environmentalism's concerns but rejects its worn-out
answers. Technology can be a font of endlessly creative
solutions. Business can be a vehicle for change. Prosperity
can help us build the kind of world we want. Scientific
exploration, innovative design, and cultural evolution
are the most powerful tools we have. Entrepreneurial zeal
and market forces, guided by sustainable policies, can
propel the world into a bright green future." http://wirednews.com/wired/archive/14.05/green.html In other words: Let's ignore our
experience and throw the dice. Let's take naiveté
to new heights. Let's forget all we should have learned. So far, it appears my criticism
has been of the fundamentalist versions of religion, nation,
capitalism, and high-technology. But the problem goes
deeper than the most exaggerated versions of these systems.
If there is to be a livable future, religion as we know
it, the nation-state, capitalism, and what we think of
as advanced technology will have to give way to new ways
of understanding the world and organizing ourselves. We
still have to find ways to struggle with the mystery of
the world through ritual and art; organize ourselves politically;
produce and distribute goods and services; and create
the tools we need to do all these things. But the existing
systems have proven inadequate to the task. On each front,
we need major conceptual revolutions. I don't pretend to have answers,
nor should anyone else. We are at the beginning of a long
process of redefining what it means to be human in relation
to others and to the non-human world. We are still formulating
questions. Some find this a depressing situation, but
we could just as well see it as a time that opens incredible
opportunities for creativity. To live in unsettled times
- especially times in which it's not difficult to imagine
life as we know it becoming increasingly untenable - is
both frightening and exhilarating. In that sense, my friend's
acknowledgement of profound grief need not scare us but
instead can be a place from which we see clearly and gather
the strength to move forward. What is that path? Tracking the
four fundamentalisms, we can see some turns we need to
make. Technologically: We need to stop
talking about progress in terms that reflexively glorify
faster and more powerful devices, and instead adopt a
standard for judging progress based on the real effects
on humans and the wider world of which we are a part. Economically: We need to stop
talking about growth in terms of more production and adopt
a standard for economic growth and development based on
meeting human needs. Nationally: We need to stop talking
about national security and the national interest -- code
words for serving the goals of the powerful -- and focus
on people's interests in being secure in the basics: food,
shelter, education, and communal solidarity. Religiously: We need to stop trying
to pin down God. We can understand God as simply the name
we give to that which is beyond our ability to understand,
and recognize that the attempt to create rules for how
to know God is always a failed project. I want to end by reinforcing the
ultimate importance of that recognition: Most of the world
is complex beyond our ability to comprehend. It's not
that there's nothing we can know through our rational
faculties, but that it's essential we recognize the limits
of those faculties. We need to reject the fundamentalist
streak in all of us, religious or secular, whatever our
political affiliation. We need to stop mistaking cleverness
for wisdom. We need to embrace our limits -- our ignorance
-- in the hopes that we can stop being so stupid.
When we do that we are coming
to terms with the kind of animals we are, in all our glory
and all our limitations. That embrace of our limitations
is an embrace of a larger world of which we are a part,
more glorious than most of us ever experience. When we do that -- if we can find
our way clear to do that -- I think we make possible love
in this world. Not an idealized love, but a real love
that recognizes the joy that is possible and the grief
that is inevitable. It is my dream to live in that
world, to live in that love. There is much work to be done
if we want that world. There is enormous struggle that
can't be avoided. When we allow ourselves to face it,
we will realize that ahead of us there is suffering beyond
description, as well as potential for transcending that
suffering. There is grief and joy. And there is nothing to do but
face it. --------------------------------------------------------------- He is the author of The Heart of Whiteness: Race, Racism, and White Privilege and Citizens of the Empire: The Struggle to Claim Our Humanity (both from City Lights Books). He can be reached at rjensen@uts.cc.utexas.edu. --------------------------------------------------------------- |
