WHY FUNDAMENTALISM? WHY NOW?

In his new PBS mini-series, Faith & Reason, Bill Moyers, by interviewing in depth prominent intellectuals, both believers and skeptics, attempts to find some pragmatic common ground between rationality and religion. I didn't even know about the series until earlier this evening when I caught an episode on our local PBS affiliate. And, lemme tell ya, if the rest of the series is anything like what I saw today, it's a pretty kickass show.

Anyway, to the point. The interview that really grabbed me was with philosopher and skeptic Colin McGinn. The popular thinker raised insightful point after point until toward the end of the interview when he launched this ambiguous stinker:

BILL MOYERS: How do you account for this resurgence of fundamentalism?

COLIN MCGINN: I don't know what the reason is for it. Because especially as you say it's a worldwide phenomenon, so if we just considered say America and Europe, we might say, "Well, look, we've had the scientific viewpoint." And the scientific viewpoint is too narrow to encompass everything about human values. It doesn't encompass art. It doesn't encompass morality. It doesn't encompass emotion in many ways. And so there's a sort of backlash and I sympathize with that. I think having a view of the world which is solely dominated by science is a limited view of the world. I think everything in science is good, just not that science is the only way to think about things, as that's why I think philosophy is a valuable subject. It's not science.

But the trouble with that is it doesn't seem to apply very well to the Muslim world. It's hard to see it as a backlash against science, because science never gained a strong ideological hold there. So it's very difficult to see. It seems almost like a coincidence where this religious fervor is coming up in different parts of the world. I think some of it has to do with the ordinary as disappointing. The ordinary world is disappointing to people. It may have something to do with the kinds of lives they live in the ordinary world.

For example, they don't have the spiritual connection with nature anymore. That doesn't seem to exist in the way it did. An old pagan idea is fading away, and so people need religion to get them away from the boringness, the dullness of ordinary life. And it's true of course. And it's the same with myth. If you've been plowing the field all day in the rain and you come home at night and you're eating gruel and life is not very enjoyable and somebody starts telling you a story about these magnificent creatures doing all these wonderful things in myth or in religion, the human imagination can conjure up another world, and it gives you an escape from the ordinary world. So, part of it I think is a difficulty of living in the ordinary, humdrum world. The ordinary, humdrum world is often just that.

Click here for the rest of the transcript, or go to the show's mainpage, linked above, to watch streaming video of the interview.

I agree with McGinn's overall analysis of the question. That is, he's right in that science, as a philosophy, is incapable of providing all the answers that humans seek about their existence, and when relied on exclusively leaves Westerners morally and emotionally short-changed; he's also correct in his observation that Enlightenment values never flew well in the Muslim world. He then, however, suggests that the simultaneous rise of Christian and Islamic fundamentalism is something of a coincidence, and goes on to offer a generic explanation that seems to be answering another question--why do people believe in God? In other words, at the end of a really great discussion that makes me want to read a book or two by him, McGinn essentially throws up his hands and shrugs his shoulders.

That's such a drag because the answer seems obvious to me.

The one force that affects, and has been affecting for many years, both the East and the West is corporate globalism or "free trade" or neoliberalism or whatever else you want to call it. There is no way to underestimate what's going on here. The corporate fist now encircling and squeezing the world has caused countless severe and savage social disruptions from San Diego to Sri Lanka. In the United States, the middle class, as a broadly based social stratum, is very nearly a thing of the past. Americans, to a great extent, are unaware of the overall machinations and maneuverings of the wealthy elite which have been causing their extreme anxiety about job loss, health care, and a whole host of other economic and social ills--many can't shake the propagandistic notion that it's somehow their fault if they can't make ends meet, never even imagining that their lot in life was decided by guys in suits who neither know them nor care about their best interests. Same thing in the developing world, except that the social and economic situation is far worse. Did you know that as gigantic agri-business breaks into the East Indian market, family farmers who can no longer compete under these circumstances have been killing themselves in droves? In both the US and abroad millions of people, by economic necessity, have been forced to abandon their family homes of many years to seek work. Amid all these depressing and fear-inducing social trends, lonely desperate people no longer trust each other.

It is completely clear that corporate globalism has turned on its ear the way that people around the world have lived for a long time, in the West for decades, in the East for centuries. How can anyone at all be surprised that religious fundamentalism, which offers community, love, meaning, and the tradition of an idyllic past that never really existed, has stepped in to fill the void? I must personally admit that these qualities are what I most miss about being a Southern Baptist: if you don't know any better, fundamentalism is extraordinarily appealing.

Now what I'd like to know is why McGinn, an obviously intelligent and analytical man, totally missed the link between corporate globalism and the rise of fundamentalism. I suppose there really is something to the notion of the Ivory Tower.

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