loquacious

Fundamentalism Dot [The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism]

Karen Armstrong
2000
370 pp.

I haven't been blogging the books I've been reading lately (wow, for a year and a half!), but this one, The Battle for God, intersects with so many other books I've read, I had to put some notes down on paper screen.

The Battle for God, briefly, is the story of fundamentalist movements of the major monotheisms -- Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Her thesis, which I will not do justice to here, is that fundamentalism arose as a reaction to the Enlightenment. She traces the history since then (as well as events leading up to the Enlightenment) with a special concentration on the emergence of fundamentalism as a political force in the 20th century. Basically, she argues that for the first 1000 years of all these religions, no one would have dreamed to try and take the holy books literally. That ancient people's knew the difference between mythos (metaphor) and logos (reason/science), and that they were comfortable using them side by side. Only as reason came to dominate life in Europe did some religious believers start to confuse mythos and logos. She follows how that has played out over the centuries, eventually getting us to where we are in terms of Christian fundamentalists in the US, religious Zionists in Israel, and the Muslim jihadists seen in some Arab countries.

One of my long-term projects, and a major reason for this blog, is to try and connect the dots out there. There are a lot of complex, interacting forces at play in the world, which makes it very difficult to understand the reasons why things are as they are, and why things play out the way they do. I keep thinking there must be a way to isolate and define a few key drivers. Hence, the dots. I think that fundamentalism, as explained by Armstrong, probably ranks as one of the dots. [Other dots covered so far are Globalization and Framing/Linguistics. A dot that I still need to work on is Masculinity, mainly based on Susan Faludi's brilliant book Stiffed.]

The rise of fundamentalism pretty neatly fits into these other cultural happenings. Fundamentalism and Globalization are deeply intertwined, and by globalization in this case I mean exploration/colonization that started hundreds of years ago. Presumably, fundamentalism wouldn't be the force it is if Europeans hadn't both come to the Americas as well as done the Crusades, as well as economically controlled/colonized the Middle East in the 20th Century. The kind of literalist backlash that is fundamentalism is of course exactly what Lakoff is describing in Don't Think of an Elephant . . . a kind of thinking that some find basically impossible to understand. Armstrong's book goes a long way to explaining the (religiously) conservative mind set: it's a fundamental focus on the past as the best possible time, which therefore needs to be recreated. Liberal thinkers (or Enlightenment-thinkers/believers in science/technology) focus on the best times being ahead in the future. If you are focused on recreating the past, of course more change is bad... especially unknown change.

As Armstrong explains it, fundamentalism is basically a by-product of the speedy progress that started happening with the Enlightenment. It might have been inevitable, but it was definitely hastened (and deepened?) by people feeling very threatened by the new world that was envisioned by the elite few at the time that could see the power of science. Basically, science did a really bad job of bringing people along, and we're still feeling the backlash. [Also explained much more eloquently than I have here.]

Armstrong doesn't write about this, but of course it's pretty much all men both pushing the enlightenment side, as well as leading the reactionary fundamentalist side. I haven't really thought through the why of this -- there could be many causal or non-causal relationships in there -- I'm just saying. There's some kind of drive for power/control that's very male... or maybe as Faludi would put it, there's some male reaction to loss of power/control that's very dangerous for our society.

Anyway, I think the book goes a long ways to explaining why things are as screwed up today as they are. Why there are fundamental splits within societies (ie. 50/50 split elections) as well as between societies (US hegemony vs. Muslim self-rule, for eg). Why people 'vote against their own interests' (they aren't!). How it is that the balance of power can be held by a small, radical few in the world we've built.

Book 15: On Globalization

On Globalization
George Soros (2002)
186 pp
Rating: 3 of 5

Not terribly different that a lot of the basic books on globalization, Soros’ book is interesting in that it was written by a business tycoon who made a lot of money off of globalization, but definitely sees the drawback and the unbalanced playing field that global capitalism has produced. He also has some of the few concrete suggestions I’ve seen about how the international finance and trade organizations could be fixed to make them work better, and to level the playing field.  He also issues a strong call for the US to live up to its foreign aid responsibilities.

Book 13: The Prize

The Prize
Daniel Yergin (1991)
788 pp.
Rating: 5 out of 5

This is a brilliant history of oil and the oil industry (and really, much more interesting than that might make it sound!). Where it leads to, of course, is globalization. Where it starts from is American capitalistic imperialism. Oil seems like it might well have been one of the first truly multi-national businesses. It’s certainly at the core of several world and regional wars, and one might justifiably place a lot of current global tensions at its doorstep.

The book is extremely thorough. Perhaps a bit too much at the beginning for my taste, but it does all build up to a centry and a half overview. It certainly starts to get good around 1910 and the build up to WWI. In fact, Yegin does an amazing job detailing how oil figured prominently in WWi, WWII, then the cold war and the geopolitical struggle, especially in the Mideast, that occured after that. I certainly have a much much clearer idea of why the US (and other countries) have gone to war, made the 'friends' they have, snuggled up to dictators, and much much else. One of the major turning points was when both the US and Brittain made the choice to convert their Navies from coal to oil, knowing full well that their domestic production of oil was insufficient to meet their military needs. This set the stage for a prolonged military, diplomatic and/or economic relationship (aka as a stranglehold) on the Middle East.

Growing up in the late 70's, i never did understand what was behind the Iranian hostage 'crisis'. Now I do. In the 90's and more recently, I never could figure out why the US had/has such a close relationship with the Saudi Arabians. Now I do. Buying gas, I never did know who was behind all those different gas stations. No I do.

I think most remarkable, and perhaps most pertinent is the work this book does uncovering US private interests (private industry) and their role in collaborating with the US government, to accomplish geopolical aims. The US government and the oil industry have been in bed together a long long time. I know realize that G.W. Bush is just the logical extension of 150 years of history.

Globalization Dot: Reading List

Two years ago i was part of a great book group that read only books on Globalization for a year. Since Globalization is definitely one of the dots I'm trying to connect, I might was well start with the list of books we read on the topic (and a few I read before).

• World on Fire. Amy Chua
• Globalization and Its Discontents. Joseph Stiglitz
• The Future of Freedom. Fareed Zakaria
• Empire. Niall Ferguson
• The Poisonwood Bible. Barbara Kingsolver [or you could read King Leopold's Ghost if you prefer non-fiction. Things Fall Apart would be another great fiction book to add to this list.]
• The Lexus and the Olive Tree. Thomas Friedman (dull, I'd skip it)
• Life and Debt (film)
• Tropical Gangsters. Robert Klitgaard.
• Guns, Germs and Steel. Jared Diamond
• Jihad vs. McWorld. Benjamin Barber

See also Memoirs of an Economic Hitman, which I read much more recently.

Of these, I think that Guns, Germs and Steel and Chua's World on Fire might be the books that impacted me the most.  I'll blog later about GG&S, but let it suffice to say that it provides an excellent overview about how we got to where we are today -- namely, a globe where certain peoples have managed to suck up all the resources and are thus disproportionately able to control the circulation of global capital. I really can't recommend it highly enough as a sort of baseline reading to coming to understand the current state of globalization (the other thing you should be sure to get in is a strong book on colonialism).

But for today's globalization environment, World On Fire is hands down the single best book at fairly quickly describing the current state of globalization on a number of different fronts: economic, political, and cultural. Almost all the other books we read covered one of these areas (or one sub-portion, or period, of these areas). What Chua does so effectively is to call attention to the intersection of the simultaneous rapid democratization and rapid expansion of capitalism/free markets that is the hallmark of current globalization. She looks closely at a number of countries where this is occuring, and tries to draw attention to where gloablization seems to be working, and where it does not. Her compelling thesis is that in countries where a minority sub-population group holds a decisive economic position over the majority ethnic population, mixing together rapid democratization and free markets is a recipe for social unrest (and economic failure). Her list of examples is convincing: Rwanda, Indonesia, West Africa. I'm not doing the book justice here, but I have to say that I still haven't seen someone bring together these threads in as compelling a way as Chua does.

If you find the economics part of all this intimidating, try watching the film Life and Debt. It lays out the way that western countries (through the IMF and World Bank) effectively and unfairly control the economies of smaller developing countires in ways that seek to create a permanent economic servitude (at the expense of educational, health and other social services).

Africa Reading List:
Some time previously, I set out to read up on Africa, a place I came to realize I knew little about, had never been taught about, and seldom read of in the news.  Reading up on Africa is pretty useful for understanding globalization.

• Things Fall Apart. Achebe.
• King Leopold's Ghost. Adam Hochschild. 1999.
• The Shadow of the Sun. Ryszard Kapusscinski. 2001.
• Tropical Gangsters. Robert Klitgaard. 1990.

I have never been to Africa (well, except for a day in Morocco, which I don't think counts). However, the above 4 books, when combined with a basic political history of the continent (pick any) and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel I think start to give a pretty interesting overview of the pre-colonial to post-colonial (globalization) period. Africa is not a culturally monolithical place at all, so these books definitely can't even start to describe such a diverse set of peoples, but they do add up to a meaningful start at understanding the West's, ahem, acquisition and subsequent deacquisition and continuing exploitation of the continent, and the mess that has been made of things.

Book 6: Confessions of an Economic Hitman

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
John Perkins (2004)
Non-Fiction
Rating: 4 out of 5

A couple of years ago, I participated in a small book group that had a globalization theme. We could have saved ourselves a lot of trouble and just read Perkins' Confessions.  Of course, the problem with that is that we probably would have thought that Perkins was a crank, or at least an accomplished liar.

The story he tells - his own experience as a consultant for private corporation, where he was explicitly instructed to inflate economic forecasts for large international development projects, thus insuring that the countries about to receive loans could never pay them back and would be in perpetual debt to the US - is like a paranoid fantasy. Really, if you just picked this book up and knew almost nothing about globalization, I don't think you'd believe a word of it (Perkins' odd writing style doesn't help his credibility).

But, after having read some dozen other books on globalization, Perkins' account of his 10 years of ripping off other countries, sinking them into permanent debt, and his detailed knowledge of clandestine US actions attempting to overthrow (or eliminate) foreign leaders, seems all too realistic.

I don't think of myself as some kind of Pollyanna, but I did find myself shocked at how mafia-like our country has been to countries in the developing world (particularly ones with oil). The facts around US action in Iran to install the Shah are well known. Perkins builds from there to explain how the US built on success there at overthrowing that government and installing their own lackey in later years. Later years where he played an integral role in creating the servitude of Ecuador, Panama, Venezuela, Columbia, and Indonesia, plus the mutually agreed upon bilking of Saudi Arabia.

Is it all true, though? Parts of it seem to have been verified. Perkins' old boss originally verified it, then later recanted his verification (but not completely). He worked at the company he said he did, and he was well respected in that industry. The projects he said he worked on happened. The companies (the Bechtels, Halliburtons, etc of the world) got huge construction projects that make the rich even richer and made the poor even poorer - none of that is in doubt. Former World Bank officials, such as Nobel winning economist Joseph Stiglitz (in his Globalization and Its Discontents) seem to have corroborated the basic view that the World Bank intentionally structures projects to increase indebtedness so that later leverage can be applied to enforce radical free markets in the developing world. But are US corporations intentionally collaborating with the US government to destabilize and indebt the developing world? It seems crazy, but it just might be true.

Read the New York Times recent article, and one in Boston Magazine if you want more background and more dissenting (and corroborating) views.

However, as I lead with, I'm inclined to believe the basic premises of this book. Again, this is only after reading over a dozen books on globalization, like those by Stiglitz, that seem to leave no doubt that the financiers of international development are more concerned with lining their own pockets (and perhaps trying to keep the US ascendant) than helping the citizens of those developing countries.

This book left me feeling very sad. Sad that greed seems to rule so many people's lives. Sad that those charged with leading our nations and our institutions seem to take the view that for the US to succeed, everyone else must be suppressed and kept in servitude. And I have to say I was startled by how all of this happened in my lifetime. OK, I was a teenager in the 1970s, but how could I have know almost none of this? Although to some extent I can blame the media for under- or non-reporting, but the responsibility is also mine.