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 14: Untouchable

Untouchable
Mulk Raj Anand (1935)
157 pp.
Rating: 4 out of 5

Yes, it’s fiction! (after reading 788 pages of non-fiction, I needed it) Picked this book up at a friend’s garage sale. I have to say I was never quite sure who the “untouchables” of India were, though I had heard the phrase. This book pretty much lays it out: generations and generations of people condemned to servitude in the worst possible jobs (oriented around unclean situations) by Hinduism – and at the same time and for the same reasons, excluded by Hinduism (if I’ve got this wrong, someone please comment and I’ll amend).

The book is a coming of age story of a young untouchable – it’s one day in his life of his own aspirations and dreams meeting up against the hard reality of his place in the world.

This book really made me think about disparaged minority groups. The untouchables seem (at least per this author) to have internalized so completely their bottom-class status, that fighting it didn’t even enter their minds. I really had to reflect on how this might translate into my own community (LGBT). While it’s easy to accuse members of one’s own minority group as "self-hating” (especially when they seem completely disinterested in standing up for their own rights), this book was a great reminder about how easy it is to internalize one’s own place in the world – and if you forget, how quickly someone will remind you of it. And the psychological damage both of those actions have.

Book 10: A History of God

A History of God
Karen Armstrong (1993)

Non-Fiction

Rating: 5 out of 5

The downside to reading A History of God is that it really slowed down my goal of reading a book a week. I guess though that not every good book will be under 200 pages.  A History of God covers 4000 years of the evolution of the Judeo/Christian/Muslim god.

It's quite a good read, and I can't possibly write enough in this blog about the interesting parts. It should be pointed out that, as my partner says, I am a heathen, and so of course a lot of this was information to me.

God's early years were particularly interesting. God, as we tend to think of 'him' (I'd write 'it' but it doesn't flow well) is an amalgam of two different gods that were locally worshiped by the folks who became the Jews. One was a rather distant and remote sky god, the other was Yaweh, who was basically a god of war. This really explains a lot about the god of the old testament - all the vengeful stuff is because he was a war god!  It was also pretty interesting that one of God's first tasks was to take out all the other gods who were around and in the neighboring lands. This actually took hundreds of years - people really did worship God plus others, as convenient, for quite a while. Especially if you went traveling to other kingdoms, because it was generally accepted that all gods were localized. Even God, at least for a while. [If anyone is a biblical/god scholar, sorry for the hack job I'm doing on this]

Also pretty interesting was learning about how during the first millennium CE Muslims, Jews and the Eastern Christians all developed a more mystical (and less literal) sense of God. The Western Christians never quite got there, and this had lots of ramifications that we are still dealing with. While evolving ideas of science can fit in well with a more mystical (read - metaphorical) vision of God, a direct crisis of faith was set up in Western Christendom by the sort of absolutist reading of the religious texts. In other words, (western) Christianity really sowed the seeds of its own conflict by insisting that the words of the bible were literally true. Of course, this later came into conflict with scientific rationalism, which, due to W. Christianity's absolutist view of religious experience, slowly created a giant pool of agnostics/atheists, who had to reject Christianity in the face of the overwhelming evidence that the Bible could not be literally true.

Also quite interesting was to learn more about the Reformation period, when Christian fundamentalism seemed to, like our own time, rise in the public conscious. The Reformation of course gave us the Inquisition, witch hunts, and other panicky excesses.

It's increasingly interesting to me to think about the general new swing in fundamentalist thought that is leading the US down a path in terms of it's politics (see Carter, for example). It seems to increasingly impact our foreign policy (it seems to guide our approach to globalization to some extent, I'd argue), and certainly domestic policy is impacted. While religious fundamentalists I know think that liberals are leading the US to immorality and eventual destruction, it's ironic to think that their own inability to examine the historical context and motivations of their own movement might be the very thing that causes the collapse of US hegemony.

Book 5: Buddha

Buddha
Karen Armstrong (2001)
Non-Fiction
Rating: 4 out of 5

Okay, I have to admit that I was on the waiting list at the library for Armstrong's A History of God and I happened to notice that she'd also written a book on the Buddha. The hold list for Buddha was much shorter than the list for God, so the Buddha came first. And thank God, because this was a great book. (Nothing personal, God.)

So, I have to admit that I'm one of those agnostic/atheist westerners who finds Buddhism strangely appealing. Maybe it's the vegetarian bit, or maybe it's the total lack of any religious war involving Buddhism ever being fought, but in Buddhism it does seem that here is a faith-based system I can get behind.

Not that Buddhism isn't without its shortcomings, which Armstrong is not hesitant to point out. The most glaring, of course, is the treatment of women (still better than most other religions of its day, I think). But overall, Buddhism, of all the world religions I've (shallowly, admittedly) studied, seems to have the most to say to the modern world. It's just a strangely friendly and useful religion if what you are looking for is a way to try and come to grips with how one should act in the world of today (vs. Christianity, say, which seems hopelessly mired in helping folks to deal with the world of about 1000 years ago). But this post is supposed to be about the book, so I won't go on too much about religion, let's save that for a later post.

One of the most interesting things that Armstrong does is to draw some comparisons between the religions that were all being founded around this time (Buddhism, Confucianism, Judaism), and Socrates et al in Greece. They were all a part of a large movement during a time she calls the Axial age, when a large shift in human thinking was occurring. Before this time, apparently, humans were not so much pondering themselves and their purpose on this planet. Survival was more the name of the game. Things happened seemingly randomly, and the religions of their time fit into that... naturistic/animistic religions that called for sacrifice or other ritual to prevent random bad things from occurring. As humans gained more control over the environment and started be able to explain things, they also started to look inward. This kind of self-examination we are familiar with the Greeks, but Armstrong ties in the major religions of that time, with of course a major emphasis on the development of Buddhism. Anyway, this is a great example of a large shift in human thinking, that happens fairly infrequently -- where before a whole world view precluded certain kinds of thinking, and afterwards a whole new kind of human development was able to take place.

The book actually reads as a sort of biography of the Buddha, in as much as we know much if anything about the facts of that man's existence. Armstrong does a great scholarly job laying out what might be fact from what is obviously myth/fiction, with a light hand at explaining away why later writers about the Buddha (there are no actual texts from his actual lifetime) would have mythologized his life.