Via Digby I discovered a fascinating article by Davidson Loehr, which takes as its starting point the work of The Fundamentalism Project, a massive interdisciplinary study conducted by the AAAS. The crux of the article is the essential similarity of all the world's various forms of fundamentalism (and fascism):
The scholars ... noted that all their papers were sounding alike, reporting on “species” when studying the “genus” was called for, that there were strong family resemblances between all fundamentalisms, even when the religions had had no contact, no way to influence each other.The only way all fundamentalisms can have the same agenda is if the agenda preceded all the religions. And it did. Fundamentalist behaviors are familiar because we've all seen them so many times. These men are acting the role of “alpha males” who define the boundaries of their group's territory and the norms and behaviors that define members of their in-group. These are the behaviors of territorial species in which males are stronger than females. In biological terms, these are the characteristic behaviors of sexually dimorphous territorial animals. Males set and enforce the rules, females obey the males and raise the children. ...
It is easier to account for this set of behavioral biases as part of the common evolutionary heritage of our species than to argue that it is simply a monumental coincidence that the social and behavioral agendas of all fundamentalisms and fascisms are essentially identical.
The article goes on in some detail, and ends by contrasting fundamentalism's exclusivity with liberalism's expansiveness:
The essential job of liberals in human societies is to enlarge our understanding of who belongs in our in-group. This is the plot of virtually all liberal advances. ... While society is a kind of slow dance between the conservative and liberal impulses, the liberal role is the more important one. It makes our societies humane rather than just stable and mean.But for the liberal impulse to lead, liberals must remain in contact with the center of our territorial instinct and our need for a structure of responsibilities. Fundamentalist uprisings are a sign that the liberals have failed to provide an adequate and balanced vision, that they have not found a vision that attracts enough people to become stable.
Now, I worry that taking the sociobiological approach to explaining fundamentalism will reinstate various patriarchal myths about the inferior status of women. True, human males are biologically stronger than females, but that is heavily dosed with cultural conditioning: men get encouragement in sport, etc., while women do not. Even given those reservations, the evolutionary model does have some value; I'm just not willing to subscribe to a "sole cause" model here.
I'm reminded of Kate Millet's Sexual Politics, in which she argues that the subjugation of women to men is the model and archetype for all subsequent oppressions. It's the first mover in a series of in-group/out-group determinations that produce the outsider as a threatening and/or sinful presence. Religion takes the patriarchal impulse as its motivator, and then reverses the equation: in religious terms, god is superior to all, and that produces the model for men to be considered as superior to women. Hiding its roots in this original domination, (fundamentalist) religion nurtures the most ancient behaviors in the name of truth. Loehr again:
What conservatives are conserving is the biological default setting of our species, which has strong family resemblances to the default setting of thousands of other species. This means that when fundamentalists say they are obeying the word of God, they have severely understated the authority for their position. The real authority behind this behavioral scheme is millions of years older than all the religions and all the gods there have ever been.Posted by Chris at December 7, 2004 09:54 AM
The driving force behind the Fundamentalism Project (which has published a series of books, here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Complete/Series/FP.html ) is U. of Chicago religious studies scholar Martin Marty. When I was in grad school, Marty was not regarded very highly by most of the religious studies profs. I never knew how much of this was simply motivated by garden variety academic envy (since the man raised millions of dollars in research money, and tended to act like a rock star) and how much was in reaction to his theories. But it does seem clear that big cross-cultural comparative projects like this should be treated cautiously. There is a big impulse to lump everything together under a single, all-encompassing umbrella ("fundamentalism") and ignore the sometimes very significant differences between, say, southern Baptists, orthodox Jews, and strict Koranic Muslims. In some ways the F. Project was a late 20th century version of big cross-cultural comparative religion treatises like Frazier's "Golden Bough" or Joseph Campbell's Hero With a Thousand Faces type stuff.
I'm not saying there aren't important similarities -- because there are -- just that you need to be careful when making comparisons. I think a safer thesis might look like this: Modern technology and capitalism has such an overwhelming, dominating effect in many countries that reactions to it are very common, and often take the form of a nostalgia or longing for allegedly better times past (along with the morals, values, and practices of those times). I think you're right to see a similar anti-liberalism happening here, and you're also right to be suspicious of an evolutionary or biological explanation as sole cause.
BTW, it's also important to distinguish between fundamentalists and extremists. Islamist suicide bombers aren't comparable to Baptists, even the most conservative of them; they're more comparable to the KKK.
Posted by: Dylan at December 7, 2004 12:45 PMGood comments, bro -- I think any time you make an abstracting generalization you run the risk of doing violence to some of the specifics. It's the old scandal of the particular: how can a unique event or person or thing fit perfectly into a general structure? Or put another way, the map is not the territory. Still, abstractions are useful, and even if fundamentalisms vary in their specifics and so on, the similarities are also evident.
Also-- it's true that fundamentalists and extremists don't overlap completely. But the fundamentalist worldview provides fertile soil for the growth of extremist views. David Neiwert (dneiwert.blogspot.com) has done very interesting work on this in the context of American right-wing politics: how very extreme views get funneled into mainstream media via channels like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, et al.
Posted by: Chris at December 8, 2004 12:11 PM