Fundamentalism

In On Balance, Adam Phillips suggests that you can determine when a thing is fundamental if it turns up in dinner party conversation or after a few pints down the pub and the tolerant façade people present begins to slip. The debate becomes agitated and sometimes violent. To protect us from such ugly displays, some polite forms of society have created the convention that we are never to discuss politics or religion…or, in other words, never to discuss anything that really matters, that pertains to Truth.

But, outside the etiquette of polite society, this is very hard to do. There are few human beings who live lives of obscene indifference. Most human beings consider something or someone as fundamental. Without this fundamental idea, without recognizing something as definitive, our lives are trivialised. The fundamental may be your children or the State of Israel or the Bible or your socialism. Whatever it is, it is fundamental to how you understand yourself, your place in the world and, for some, your eschatological purpose. In this loose sense, we are all fundamentalists.

It follows that we will want to protect these fundamental things from views that seek to harm them. “There is no such thing as free speech,” Stanley Fish writes in No Such Thing as Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing Too, “because from the very start your sense of just how free speech should be is shadowed by your identification of, and obligation to, the good in whose name acts of speech are to be justified.” For example, the democrat will try and hold in some sort of harmonious tension the multiple views within society. However, if it is perceived that the fundamental idea of democracy is itself being threatened by a particular view then this dissenting view may considered inadmissible. Adam Phillips observes that “For the fundamentalist, as for the democrat, people can say what they like; but when they start saying things that aim to destroy the foundational preconditions of their given political culture there have to be penalties.”

But how do you manage fundamental beliefs in a pluralistic, liberal society? One possibility is that there can be what the political philosopher, Chantal Mouffe, calls "productive conflict", lively debate that invigorates democracy. Another possibility is that some consensual ground is mapped where we accept that there are fundamental things that we disagree on but other fundamental things (e.g., our common humanity, our desire for peace, our search for unity) that we can choose, at times, to recognise. Or society responds to these tensions by elevating the idea of tolerance with the result that vigorous “truths” are turned into flaccid “opinions” and bled of some of their power.

Increasingly these methods are being questioned. Productive conflict may be useful in a democracy, but who decides what is productive and for whom? Or what happens when discussions and negotiations keep breaking down and we are no longer able “to agree to differ”? I noted that in a recent article, an activist wrote, “it is not tolerance that we want, it is acceptance” signalling a philosophical shift to a position that is more sharply defined and, for the advocates of tolerance, threatening. Adam Phillips suggests the following modus vivendi:

We are talking about the moment in which people begin to believe, in despair or with relief, that co-existence rather than consensus is our best option; or alternatively believe that the unbelievers – those who are not of the same mind – must be eradicated. Coexistence, in other words, is the modern liberal’s last hope; the only remaining political ideal left, and one that will survive only if that is itself agreed upon.

Today the word “fundamentalism” is most often associated with religion. Islamic fundamentalism. Christian fundamentalism. Religious fundamentalism is a complex phenomenon (too complex for a blog post) but it appears to arise, in part, as a reactive response to a contemporary world view, for example, to secularism or Western materialism. In this reaction, the balance between faith and reason tips towards more aggressive expressions. "The quest for certainty and simplicity becomes dangerous," writes Pope Benedict in Salt of the Earth, "when it leads to fanaticism and narrow mindedness. When reason as such becomes suspect, then faith becomes falsified." The fundamentalist becomes less concerned with honouring the fundamental and more concerned with strategies of conflict. When what is considered fundamental is defined as in-opposition-to rather than as a truth to be valued in itself, then the distorting effects of this process proliferate with grave consequences. When fundamental beliefs are imposed rather than proposed, human freedom and dignity is treated contemptuously.

“There is no goodness without belief,” wrote John Updike, “There is nothing but busy-ness. And if you have not believed, at the end of your life you shall know you have buried your talent in the ground of this world and have nothing saved to take into the next.” Most people accept that believing in something fundamental is essential if our lives are to have some moral coherence and purpose. Yet this can only be achieved if these fundamental beliefs are protected from the corrosive effects of fundamentalist designs. Adam Phillips advises that for the religious believer to achieve this involves keeping the vital relationship between faith and reason in play at all times. Without this relationship those things that believers consider fundamental risk spinning dangerously out of control. This is not a new idea, but it is one that Adam Phillips expresses eloquently in On Balance. For those, who believe in something they consider fundamental, this is a salutary warning.

On balance, excess and religious fanaticism

I am temperamentally suspicious of extreme positions in religion, politics, culture and people. These are commonly described in terms of binary sectarianism: liberal/conservative, progressive/reactionary, utopian/revolutionary. I find these tags intellectually lazy and adolescent. My psychological anxieties about such divisions are that (a) they are too crude to be useful in thinking deeply about ideas. By generalizing, they inevitably degrade the vital nucleus of an idea and (b) nuance, paradox, intellectual humility and the slipperiness of human thought become vices rather than virtues of intelligence. By making an aristocracy of the final word, the possibility that there may be something more to say about a matter or fresh ways of speaking about it are closed off.

It follows that the idea of mature, respectful “dialogue” with contrary perspectives becomes a sign of weakness. The possibility that other views may shed light on a given view is held as anathema. Such sectarianism must turn the person who holds a contrary view into an enemy. They are to be defeated either by battering them into submission with an argument or by battering them physically, verbally or emotionally until they no longer exist. The umbrella term for these attitudes and strategies is fundamentalism.

I am looking for something more balanced, especially in a world where there exist competing and opposing views. A balanced economy. A balanced body politic. A balanced Church. A balanced person. More balance in my life, my ideas and in myself. I believe that because balance is attractive and difficult to achieve that it has an inherent value. But, has it? For example, what makes me think that the “balanced argument” or the “balanced presentation” of a particular argument is of more value than the polemic or the rant? Could, in fact, the polemic or the rant be nearer to the truth of the matter than the meticulous weighing of ideas and expressions on some finely tuned scales? And, how does one determine what is the balance, what is the extreme? I clearly have some idea in my mind of what are excessive positions, but based on what? Maybe I should be more suspicious of balance?

I’ve been thinking about these mental balancing acts because I’ve been reading Adam Phillip’s infuriating and fascinating (you see, I’m trying to strike a balance and ending up with a critical imbalance!) meditation, On Balance. He writes:

When the dramatist Mark Ravenhill writes that “Art that isn’t driven by this basic impulse to create an unbalanced view of the world is probably bad or weak,” we are not shocked by this, partly because after Romanticism we take it for granted that this is the province of art; elsewhere it is balance that is required. Art, ideally, is where the unbalanced views should be kept, as far away from religion and politics as possible. If we want art to be an isolation ward it is because we know just how contagious these so-called unbalanced views of the world can be (fascism, racism and sexism in modern liberal societies are unbalanced views, but liberal democratic values are not).

I’m not sure this view bears close examination. I’m not aware that, for example, in the contemporary art world “unbalanced views” are proliferating and that dangerous germ cultures like fascism, racism or sexism are being grown. The really “unbalanced” views (and they are, at present, minority views) in this environment are that beauty, harmony and truth are more than bourgeois, cultural constructs. Yet, there may exist some art forms, such as in the theatre, and entertainment forms, such as comedy, where playwrights or comedians dare to tip the balance or knock it over.

The reason that Adam Phillips is convinced that “unbalanced views should be kept, as far away from religion and politics as possible” is because the memory of 9/11 casts a dark shadow over his thinking. On Balance is as much a book about this event as it is about balance or psychoanalysis. For Adam Phillips, 9/11 is the example of modern excess that colours all his views of other, lesser examples of excess:

The anorexic and the suicide bomber, the attention-seeking child and the compulsive gambler, the person who has more money than he needs and the person committed to celibacy are all involved, in their different ways, in extravagant violations of law, decency or morality; even though, of course, they may not see it this way. And this, too, is important when we are thinking about excess: what is excessive to one person may be to another person just an ordinary way of life. The devoutly religious are not, in their own view, overdoing it; terrorists are not, in their own view, overreacting to the injustices they feel they have suffered. Indeed, one of the many ways of describing many of our personal and political and religious conflicts is that someone is trying to persuade someone else that they are being excessive: excessively cruel, excessively disrespectful, excessively unjust.

Perhaps, we need to take a more balanced approach to our discussion of excess. Instead of lumping together all forms of excessive behaviour – “the person who has more money than he needs and the person committed to celibacy” – as if they were identical, we need to recognise that different excesses belong to different categories of behaviour. For example, is the excessive behaviour of grief the same as the excessive behaviour of sexual promiscuity? Can you ever have too much grief? If so, what is the right amount of grief? Can you ever have too many sexual partners? If so, what is it about having multiple sexual partners that could be damaging? Different excesses. Different categories.

Adam Phillips concludes his discussion of excess by considering religious excess or fanaticism. This, of course, interested me because I, according to Phillips, am supposedly living an excessive life as a religious celibate and for somebody who prizes balance that is unsettling. But, more importantly, this discussion (post 9/11) has widespread cultural implications. Phillips suggests that there are three ways to account for religious fanaticism:

i. …Excessive belief is called up to stifle excessive doubt, as if the fanatic is saying to himself: “If I don’t continually prove my belief in this extreme way, what will be revealed is extreme faithlessness, or despair, or confusion, or even emptiness.”

ii. ….Excessive acts of belief are required to persuade other people, as if the fanatic is saying to himself: “What matters most in the world to me will not be listened to, or considered, or thought about or even noticed unless a dramatic statement is made.”

I think there is something in these descriptions of extreme religious behaviour, but it is Adam Phillips third description that I found really thought provoking. I will conclude this post with it.

iii. …the religious fanatic is someone for whom something about themselves and their lives is too much; and because not knowing what that is is so disturbing they need to locate it as soon as possible…Because the state of frustration cannot be borne – because, perhaps, it is literally unbearable, as long-term personal and political injustices always are – it requires an extreme solution, which is usually a fast one…Fanatics are people who have had to wait too long for something that may not exist. Wherever there is excessive frustration there is a false solution; this would be an excessive way of putting it. Our excesses are the best clues we have to our own poverty; and our best way of concealing it from ourselves.

On Balance, Adam Phillips, Hamish Hamilton, 2010