Posted on Jul 26, 2011
By Chris Hedges
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings
in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic
world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who
propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those
defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as
diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as Sam Harris
and Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle
the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has
poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and
environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse
language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages
experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed
Attas.
The battle under way in America is not between religion and
science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe
in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The
blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our
vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast,
simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They
cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and
fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and clichés like
cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears
the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of
the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is
a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some
use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for
complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day
creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in
the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the
widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.
We live in a fundamentalist culture. Our utopian visions of
inevitable human progress, obsession with endless consumption, and fetish for
power and unlimited growth are fed by illusions that are as dangerous as
fantasies about the Second Coming. These beliefs are the newest expression of
the infatuation with the apocalypse, one first articulated to Western culture
by the early church. This apocalyptic vision was as central to the murderous
beliefs of the French Jacobins, the Russian Bolsheviks and the German fascists
as it was to the early Christians. The historian Arnold Toynbee argues that
racism in Anglo-American culture was given a special virulence after the
publication of the King James Bible. The concept of “the chosen people†was
quickly adopted, he wrote, by British and American imperialists. It fed the
disease of white supremacy. It gave them the moral sanction to dominate and
destroy other races, from the Native Americans to those on the subcontinent.
Our secular and religious fundamentalists come out of this
twisted yearning for the apocalypse and belief in the “chosen people.†They
advocate, in the language of religion and scientific rationalism, the divine
right of our domination, the clash of civilizations. They assure us that we are
headed into the broad, uplifting world of universal democracy and a global free
market once we sign on for the subjugation and extermination of those who
oppose us. They insist—as the fascists and the communists did—that this call
for a new world is based on reason, factual evidence and science or divine
will. But schemes for universal human advancement, no matter what language is
used to justify them, are always mythic. They are designed to satisfy a
yearning for meaning and purpose. They give the proponents of these myths the
status of soothsayers and prophets. And, when acted upon, they fill the Earth
with mass graves, bombed cities, widespread misery and penal colonies. The
extent of this fundamentalism is evident in the strident utterances of the
Christian right as well as those of the so-called New Atheists.
“What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows
dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-range nuclear
weaponry?†Sam Harris, in his book “The End of Faith,†asks in a passage that I
suspect Breivik would have enjoyed. “If history is any guide, we will not be
sure about where the offending warheads are or what their state of readiness
is, and so we will be unable to rely on targeted, conventional weapons to
destroy them. In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival
may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an
unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a
single day—but it may be the only course of action available to us, given what
Islamists believe.â€
“We are at war with Islam,†Harris goes on. “It may not
serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to
openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so. It is not merely that
we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by
extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed
to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of the
hadith, which recounts the sayings and teachings of the Prophet.â€
Harris assures us that “the Koran mandates such hatred,â€
that “the problem is with Islam itself.†He writes that “Islam, more than any
other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a
thoroughgoing cult of death.â€
A culture that exalts its own moral certitude and engages in
uncritical self-worship at the expense of conscience commits moral and finally
physical suicide. Our fundamentalists busy themselves with their pathetic
little monuments to Jesus, to reason, to science, to Western civilization and
to new imperial glory. They peddle a binary view of the world that divides reality
between black and white, good and evil, right and wrong. We are taught in a
fundamentalist culture to view other human beings, especially Muslims, not as
ends but as means. We abrogate the right to exterminate all who do not conform.
Fundamentalists have no interest in history, culture or
social or linguistic differences. They are a remarkably uncurious,
self-satisfied group. Anything outside their own narrow bourgeois life, petty
concerns and physical comforts bores them. They are provincials. They do not
investigate or seek to understand the endemic flaws in human nature. The only
thing that matters is the coming salvation of humanity, or at least that
segment of humanity they deem worthy of salvation. They peddle a route to
assured collective deliverance. And they sanction violence and the physical
extermination of other human beings to get there.
All fundamentalists worship the same gods—themselves. They
worship the future prospect of their own empowerment. They view this
empowerment as a necessity for the advancement and protection of civilization
or the Christian state. They sanctify the nation. They hold up the ability the
industrial state has handed to them as a group and as individuals to shape the
world according to their vision as evidence of their own superiority.
Fundamentalists express the frustrations of a myopic and morally stunted middle
class. They cling, under their religious or scientific veneer, to the worst
values of the petite bourgeois. They are suburban mutations, products of an American
landscape that has been perverted by a destruction of community and a long and
successful war against complex thought. The self-absorbed worldview of these
fundamentalists brings smiles of indulgence from the corporatists who profit,
at our expense, from the obliteration of moral and intellectual inquiry.
Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s “Ulysses†acidly condemned
all schemes to purify the world and serve human progress through violence. He
said that “history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.†Dedalus in
the same passage responded to the schoolmaster Deasy’s claim that “the ways of
the Creator are not our ways,†and that “all history moves towards one great
goal, the manifestation of God.†A soccer goal is jubilantly scored by boys in the
yard outside the school window as Deasy expounds on divine will. God, Dedalus
tells Deasy as the players yell in glee over the goal, is no more than the
screams from the schoolyard —“a shout in the street.†Joyce, like Samuel
Beckett, excoriated the Western belief in historical teleology—the notion that
history has a purpose or is moving toward a goal. The absurdity of this belief,
they wrote, always feeds fanatics and undermines the possibility of human
community. These writers warned us about all those—religious and secular—who
call for salvation through history.
There are tens of millions of Americans who in their
desperation and insecurity yearn for the assurance and empowerment offered by a
clearly defined war against an external evil. They are taught in our
fundamentalist culture that this evil is the root of their misery. They embrace
a war against this evil as a solution to the drift in their lives, their
economic deprivation and the moral and economic morass of the nation. They see
in this conflict with these dark forces a way to overcome their own alienation.
They find in it certitude, meaning and structure. They believe that once this
evil is vanquished, an evil that extends from Muslims to undocumented workers,
liberals, intellectuals, homosexuals and feminists, they can transform America
into a land of plenty and virtue. But this fundamentalism, which cloaks itself
in the jargon of scientific rationality, Christian piety and nativism, is a
recipe for fanaticism. All those who embrace other ways of being and believing
are viewed, as Breivik apparently viewed his victims, as contaminates that must
be eliminated.
This fundamentalist ideology, because it is contradictory
and filled with myth, is immune to critiques based on reason, fact and logic.
This is part of its appeal. It obliterates doubt, nuance, intellectual and
scientific rigor and moral conscience. All has been predicted or decided. Life
is reduced to following a simple black-and-white road map. The contradictions
in these belief systems—for example the championing of the “rights of the
unborn†while calling for wider use of the death penalty or the damning of
Muslim terrorists while promoting pre-emptive war, which delivers more death
and misery in the Middle East than any jihadist organization—inoculate
followers from rational discourse. Life becomes a crusade.
All fundamentalists, religious and secular, are ignoramuses.
They follow the lines of least resistance. They already know what is true and
what is untrue. They do not need to challenge their own beliefs or investigate
the beliefs of others. They do not need to bother with the hard and laborious
work of religious, linguistic, historical and cultural understanding. They do
not need to engage in self-criticism or self-reflection. It spoils the game. It
ruins the entertainment. They see all people, and especially themselves, as
clearly and starkly defined. The world is divided into those who embrace or
reject their belief systems. Those who support these belief systems are good
and forces for human progress. Those who oppose these belief systems are
stupid, at best, and usually evil. Fundamentalists have no interest in real
debate, real dialogue, real intellectual thought. Fundamentalism, at its core,
is about self-worship. It is about feeling holier, smarter and more powerful
than everyone else. And this comes directly out of the sickness of our
advertising age and its exaltation of the cult of the self. It is a product of
our deep and unreflective cultural narcissism.
Our faith in the inevitability of human progress constitutes
an inability to grasp the tragic nature of history. Human history is one of
constant conflict between the will to power and the will to nurture and protect
life. Our greatest achievements are always intertwined with our greatest
failures. Our most exalted accomplishments are always coupled with our most
egregious barbarities. Science and industry serve as instruments of progress as
well as instruments of destruction. The Industrial Age has provided feats of
engineering and technology, yet it has also destroyed community, spread the
plague of urbanization, uprooted us all, turned human beings into cogs and made
possible the total war and wholesale industrial killing that has marked the
last century. These technologies, even as we see them as our salvation, are
rapidly destroying the ecosystem on which we depend for life.
There is no linear movement in history. Morality and ethics
are static. Human nature does not change. Barbarism is part of the human
condition and we can all succumb to its basest dimensions. This is the tragedy
of history. Human will is morally ambiguous. The freedom to act as often
results in the construction of new prisons and systems of repression as it does
the safeguarding of universal human rights. The competing forces of love and of
power define us, what Sigmund Freud termed Eros and Thanatos. Societies have,
throughout history, ignored calls for altruism and mutuality in times of social
upheaval and turmoil. They have wasted their freedom in the self-destructive
urges that currently envelope us. These urges are very human and very
dangerous. They are fired by utopian visions of inevitable human progress. When
this progress stalls or is reversed, when the dreams of advancement and
financial stability are thwarted, when a people confronts its own inevitable
downward spiral, dark forces of vengeance and retribution are unleashed.
Fundamentalists serve an evil that is unseen and unexamined. And the longer
this evil is ignored the more dangerous and deadly it becomes. Those who seek
through violence the Garden of Eden usher in the apocalypse.
