Religious fundamentalism is now found world wide. Christian fundamentalism is rampant in the United States, as is Muslim fundamentalism from the Mideast to Indonesia and Western China and Hindu fundamentalism has reversed that society’s effort to be secular. In all of these places it has already produced very destructive conflicts. It is an enemy of reason and science and its dogmatic rigidity makes it extremely inflexible at a time that is, and increasingly will be, demanding societal multiculturalism and reliance on the freedom to think and speak that science demands of itself and of the society that would produce the needed scientists.
In economics we have a rampant fundamentalist “free market” capitalism in which the operating assumption is a rigid laissez faire with no room for the regulation and transfer of wealth to society as a whole rather than a few exceptionally wealthy people. This has resulted in gross inequities and the largest gap between the rich and the poor since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century. This is an economics that has forgotten its origins in political economy.
In popular culture there is mass participation in violent video games whose violence is justified in the context of good versus evil. Even the police have adopted the good guys/bad guys dichotomy of children. There is no room for the complexity of human beings. They must be classified one or the other. This leads to gross injustice and the largest prison population next to
As J. B. Bury points out in his book A History of Freedom of Thought, democracy is a very fragile form of government. The vast majority of civilized history has been autocratic. Fundamentalism, by its very nature, is autocratic. The modern surge of fundamentalism can, if successful, return us to a latter day form of the Dark Ages, in which curiosity, the passion for understanding, and the freedom of inquiry and expression they require will be lost. Samuel P. Huntington, who would have us believe in a clash of civilizations between East and West, is mistaken. Our basic problem is the clash of fundamentalism and freedom.
We must understand that fundamentalism, whether religious, economic, political or cultural, is an enemy of democracy and must be resisted wherever it occurs. If American’s understood this they would not be gulled so easily by religious fundamentalism seeking to dominate society under the guise of the freedom of religion. When one’s freedom of religion aims at the submission or demise of other religions, it is no longer operating under the freedom of religion provision of the Constitution.
A further point and one addressed by Sara Robinson in a two part essay titled Two Kinds of Americans: Us Versus Them to be found on the Internet at www.ourfuture.org, is the use of fundamentalism to divide and thereby rule a society. In the essay Robinson details how the Republican Party deliberately departed from a 25 year shared governance in 1968 and set out on a path to gain power by using racist fundamentalism to divide the country and thereby destroy the common good that had been the focus of
To my mind progressives have to make fighting fundamentalism in all its forms a focus of their effort. They should no more shy about bringing fundamentalist religion to task for its antidemocratic intentions and practices than they are about fighting fundamentalist economics.
Bob Newhard
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