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.