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Authors: Lawrence Kaplan

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BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
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Page 16
This approach begins with a kind of naive nominalism. Given: that every day in the newspapers one reads or on radio and television one hears about movements that in English language transmission are called ''fundamentalism.'' Of course, it cannot mean exactly the same thing everywhere. Yet the term enters the vocabulary to designate a class of things that have some common features. In a certain period, "Left" and "Right" come into use. No one pretends that the Left and the Right in French politics means the same thing as in American religion, yet the terms point to phenomena which demand and deserve some common inquiry. Alexis de Tocqueville invents "individualism;" someone else invents "technology;" a third comes up with "bureaucracy." Of course, each has long historical antecedents and many varieties. Yet the terms have uses, and it would be futile to try to suppress them in each case. So it is with the invention of "fundamentalism" and its analogies elsewhere. The nominalist says: Here I come across a term, a usage; to what does it point?
For the record, the word began to be used in the United States in July 1920, during a dispute within conservative Protestantism. A party of contenders chose that name for itself, and the heirs still wear the badge proudly.
Why bother with it? Why not study each phenomenon in utter isolation, complete singularity? Answer: because historical, sociological, and philosophical inquiries are often informed by comparative approaches. Philosopher Morris Cohen liked to remind that the absolutely unique, that which has no element in common with anything else, is indescribable, since all description and all analysis are in terms of predicates, class concepts, or repeatable relations. And the great French historian Marc Bloch wrote that comparativism comes up whenever one is involved with efforts at explanation. One needs some question, some hypothesis, and then the comparative approach necessarily comes up. So it is with movements around the world today.
The comparative approach can serve not only intellectual but also "public policy" needs. Thus, epidemiologists study the AIDS outbreak in Africa and America in order to determine distinctive features that may call forth differing diagnoses and treatments. In the comparative approach one sees common features but then can note
 
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differences in the two locales in respect to heterosexual versus homosexual cohort outbreaks, and the like. Or actuaries might study long-lived people in Azerbaijan and in Utah to see whether folk life in the two places can explain why people tend to live longer there than in many other places. Utah's residents are Mormon, and their way of life has something to do with longevity. The Azerbaijanis are not. Can a comparative approach help determine what the two populations might have in common?
Whoever compares has to keep singularity in mind. One is reminded of William James's empathy for the crab who does not want simply to be classified and dismissed as a crustacean. No, I am a crab; I am "me." So it is for people who come to be called (in this case in English and increasingly in translations) fundamentalist. Scholars who are well versed in the separate cultures often speak up for these singularities and try to establish and patent alternative words. I have read of some who say that the subculture they study might more accurately be called, say, "belligerent neoradical protorevolutionary extremist conservatism," or whatever. They have already lost their battle to establish such a term, and ordinarily when they describe the phenomenon in question, it shares many features with movements called, elsewhere, fundamentalism. It is possible to keep "me, the crab'' in mind while also studying crustaceans. Every comparativist knows to do that.
Let me make two other preliminary qualifying statements. For the first, one is tempted to use capital letters to emphasize a point.
SUBSTANTIVELY, FUNDAMENTALISMS HAVE LITTLE OR NOTHING IN COMMON WITH EACH OTHER
. The whole point of, say, Shi'ite Islamic fundamentalism is to locate, insist on, and apply fundamental elements of
shari'a,
law codeswhich Islam shares with none of the other faiths or world views from which it would distance itself. Again, when Protestants reach for fundamentals, they reach precisely for unsharable teachings, for features that are distinctive to Christian faith claims, e.g., about a literal second coming of Jesus.
Next to that let us bracket the effort to determine what role individual psychology plays in fundamentalisms. Such a study has much to tell, but it is not the present point. I simply am resisting psychological reductionisms here, efforts to say that this or that
 
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individual turns fundamentalist because, say, she was toilet trained too early, or he is oedipal, or they suffered teen traumas. Such efforts do not easily explain why a whole population on one side of a mountain, a river, a map line, is fundamentalist and another cohort or population on another side remains simply conservative.
Now, to some "fundamentals of fundamentalism."
1. Fundamentalisms occur on the soil of
traditional
cultures, or cultures in which people perceive and claim that they simply and conservatively inherit a world view and way of life. From Al-Ghazzali to the present, one comes to know that most people who live in traditional cultures do not know they are traditionalist. They do not see the "other," and are untested. Thus newly established intense religious groups (sometimes still called "cults," especially pejoratively) are not fundamentalist, even if socially they bear some marks of fundamentalist movements. There has to be a previously unassaulted, relatively protected traditionalist culture, within which a body of people has some sense that there was a true or pure ancestral past.
Now, if a movement is only conservative, traditional, orthodox, or classical, I like to observe that "we"scholars, mass communicators, politicians, publicswould pay little or no attention to them, certainly not as a class. A lonely anthropologist may tape-record a tribe in its singularities, or a sociologist might drive past a Baptist church in some hollow or other. Fundamentalisms occur or get named in different circumstances. I have heard Clifford Geertz cited as having observed and claimed that "from now on no one will leave anyone else alone." I presume he refers to advertising, mass media, travel, mass higher education, attempts at persuasion, propaganda, and proselytism. When traditional cultures no longer feel "left alone" or when they want to intrude on "the other" of whom they become aware, something happens to traditionthat which was conserved, the beliefs or practices that come to be regarded as classical and orthodox.
2. The second element is a widespread if vague sense of threat. Usually the threat is focused. Peter Laslett speaks of "the world we have lost." People tend toward fundamentalism when they fear losing a world. Such threats may come from outside the group, and are
 
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given code words like "Westernization" or "modernity" or "invasion," coupled with "pluralism" or ''secularism'' or whatever. Or threats may come from within, as when someone in a group turns innovator, experimenter, adapter. What Walter Lippmann called "the acids of modernity" do not always penetrate from without.
Thus when in traditional cultures someone chooses to adapt to modernity, however defined, by becoming "modernist," he or she becomes a challenger. The revisionist who reworks the sacred history of the group assaults it. Radical reformulators are threats. Reinterpretation to meet the challenge of a new day demands counteraction. If there is "symbolization" or "spiritualization" of a heritage, guardians of the tradition smell change; they get their backs up and plan resistance.
3. Most briefly, and already hinted at, in the population there must be some generalized uneasiness, discontent, fear of identity diffusion, or loss of focus. And leaders must emerge who give names to the discontented and who can name the challengers, the enemies; these may be apostates or heretics, or they may be subtle phenomena like "secular humanism."
4. Now comes reaction. So far as those who pursue these hypotheses are concerned, the term "fundamentalism" is first applied when leaders and followers take steps consciously to react, to innovate, to defend, and to find new ways to counter what they perceive as threats to the tradition they would conserve. You might say they become "busy." Reaction, counteraction, revanchist action: these are characteristic. If they are not present, observers continue to call movements or cultures simply "traditional" or "conservative."
5. The counteraction takes the form of discriminating reclamations. There may be some separation, by leaders, between "fundamentals" and "nonfundamentals." That division must be at least hypothetically present; why else point to "fundamentals"? Of course, most fundamentalists might think of the heritage as a "package deal," and may argue that they cannot yield on even a small point lest a larger one be compromised. Yet they are selective about what from the past must be seen and insisted upon as fundamental.
Catholicism is an elaborate and intricate system of belief and behavior patterns and elements. The Catholic fundamentalist may
 
Page 20
overlook the grand fundamentals such as the Trinity, or this or that Christological view. She will instead select items that will "stand out," such as mass in Latin, opposition to women priests, optional clerical celibacy, or support for papal dismissals of "artificial birth control." These selective retrievals issue in the application of the term ''fundamentalist."
So it is also with American Protestants, on whose soil the self-chosen term first prospered. When challenged by "modernity" outside Protestantism and "modernism" (e.g., biblical criticism, evolutionary thought in the seminaries) the party that called itself "fundamentalist" did not reach back toor, of course, denycentral teachings such as the doctrine of the Trinity of the Chalcedonian formula of Christology. It rarely mentioned the sacraments, over which the movement was itself divided and where it had to allow diversity. It chose a different set of teachings and assigned them "fundamental'' status. This move includes at least two characteristic features, our next two fundamental points.
6. Fundamentalists seek authority. This may reside in exaggerated views of hierarchical authority, such as papal infallibility. It may refer to a law book, or a story, or a classic event. Almost always there will be an insistence on an authoritative set of texts, a canon that is an inerrant utterance of the final truth about reality. Without such an assured, specifiable authority as that provided by shari'a or "the inerrant Bible," it would be difficult to hold a movement together, to ward off outsiders, or to have a good argument. While the text is usually regarded as sacred, secular philosophies such as Marxism are able to produce movements of selective retrieval which appeal to authoritative texts as a way to start and sometimes finish arguments.
7. The other common feature of the fundamental insistences, be they doctrinal, practical, behavioral, or cultural, is that they offend, they "cause scandal." The Greek word for offense is
skandalon,
which evokes the idea of tripping or trapping. Fundamentalist teachings or insistences are chosen and designed to "trap" those who would evade them, to "trip" those who would transgress them. They are not chosen in order to commend the movement to the outside world.
Thus, when television cameras close in on Iranians who stone an
 
Page 21
adulterous couple or sever the hand of the guilty pickpocket after trial, "outsiders" feel revulsion and alienation. They are supposed to. When Protestant fundamentalist denominations fight on camera over the "literal" saga of the prophet Jonah being eaten by a great fish, which spews him up days later, the outsider laughs and scorns, and one would expect public relations' experts within the movement to minimize the scandal of the teaching. Instead, these experts want the larger public exposed to such a teaching.
One might use the image of the castle. One needs thick walls, fastnesses, a "keep" for the people within. One needs towers and battlements from which to try to keep others out, or drawbridges over which the party within can make forays to clear space and keep enemies at a distance. And there must be a moat, into which those who would transgress from either direction would sink.
8. Let us talk about the moat. Fundamentalisms resist ambiguity and ambivalence. You have to be "this" or "that." To borrow from sectarian philosophy or theology, there is a temptation even in cultures that do not know the name to be ''Manichaean." This means that the universe is clearly divided under the hegemonies of Good versus Evil. This may sometimes translate to Christ versus Anti-christ, in a Christian culture, or God versus Satan. There is a war on, perhaps based on a "war in heaven," as in Milton's
Paradise Lost,
Book VI, based on a biblical clue, with its reflection of war on earth. The enemy is compromise or the compromiser. The potential apostate or heretic is threatened with drowning in the figurative moat.
9. On the basis of this sharp metaphysical-type division, there is then a practical division through the formation of a people. Fundamentalisms often rely on cultural "thickness," on tribalism, on people's blood relations and physical propinquity. Yet they also can rely on what has been called "convergent selectivity," as when people are summoned across distances by mass media of communication. They may wear insignia, or learn shibboleths and code words or behavior patterns which lead them to recognize each other.
In either case, something like "the party of God" or "the people of God" or "the chosen people" or "the elect" emergesa Moral Majority, if you will, that has found each other and will oppose outsiders, infidels, waverers, adapters.
BOOK: Fundamentalism in Comparative Perspective
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