Fundamentalism American Style

ON FUNDAMENTALISM AMERICAN
STYLE
The term was coined by the religious right in the nine-twenties in the USA to define themselves. To understand the background of fundamentalism, a brief survey of Socio-Religious evolution would be essential.
Religion is a highly resilient institution. One may speak of it as a spent force at ones own peril. It has been written off many times only to come back up with renewed vigor.
One may justifiably say that religion is as old as human kind. Humans evolved into the current form for as Homo sapiens about 1.7 million years ago. The first of the species must have reacted to natural phenomenon instinctively running away from fires, seeking shelter from flood and hurricanes. They may have developed the faculty of analysis but did not yet have any vehicle to develop a body of knowledge. They did not have a spoken language.
Once spoken language evolved, organized thought was possible. Analysis observation, conclusion, interpretation and philosophy would be no use unless one could share the thoughts with others or learn and teach.
Written language was to come much later. Organized thought pre-dated it by unknown millennia.
At some point a group of people must have tried to make sense of hot and cold weather, high and low tide, rain and drought, storms and floods etc. Some were beneficial, others harmful.. It may have dawned on some bright person that there was a purpose, a design or an agency behind it.
The primal instinct was self-preservation. Good was what promoted it, evil led to its retardation? A natural disaster may have coincidentally followed an evil deed for example theft. It might have led to the belief that a super human agency had sent the calamity as collective punishment. Some incidental act may have been followed by abatement of a forest fire.
Lo and behold, something had propitiated the mover of fires.
Other animals were physically stronger. A tiger could easily kill a person but several persons, better still, armed with sticks and stones could chase it away. Most animals could run faster. In order to kill them for food, preventing their escape by posting persons at exit routes would be effective. Stealth would be effective too. Take an animal unawares; they did not have the human faculty of planning and forethought. If you tempted the animal with food, trained and beat them into submission, you could use them for transport and heavy work like tilling. Females of some species would provide milk, a nourishing and safe diet.
So we now have, analytical thought, organization and collective action, albiet at a very primitive level. We have a hunter-gatherer society. There is no stable abode. Groups travel, after resources of one area have been exhausted. Diet is meat, berries, and fruits. Fire as protection against elements and predators is known, cooking is probably not. Meat is eaten raw (much like today’s rare beef steak in the USA). A fire probably burnt down a forest roasting animals. Finding no other meat, people may have been forced to eat “cooked” meat. They probably didn’t like it, but may have discovered, that it kept longer with out going bad.
We don’t have a concept of property in terms of owning dwelling or land yet. There is no specialization except perhaps; that men went out to hunt and women managed the family. Polyandry was practiced; men were away for days or even weeks, leaving a few for guard duty. It was the matriachal stage of development. The same women had to look after returning providers.
Population increased. Hunting grounds became insufficient, climatic change may have intervened. It became increasingly difficult to draw sustenance from known areas. Mass starvation must have been a recurring event. Thievery and later robbery must have been invented. The disruptive causes must have had deleterious effect; preventive measures must have been taken.
Primitive law and order came into being.
Naturally occurring grain bushes must have been noticed, how seeds when water was available water and exposed to sunshine grew into plants, as did fruit and berries. Some group of people may have decided to stay put in a place with plenty of grain. They were eaten raw till an accidental fire produced cooked rice, as meat had been “cooked” previously. Cooked rice went down the throat more easily. Lentils and vegetables were soon tenderized by cooking.
Once settled on land, elements couldn’t be escaped from, as easily. One had to build shelter. Someone noticed the beneficial effect of certain plants/leaves/root and he/she became a part time medicine person. Some could build better. Some one may have cried aloud that an impending storm would go away. It may have passed them by, and we have a spirit man.
But all work was communal, though specialization was developing.
With increasing complexity of society tribes arose, which congregated with other tribes for exchange of goods and mutual protection, thus organized life is taking shape now. Tribal heads must have been chosen by election or consensus and over time must have assumed hereditary rights. Town/city government must have been formed with hierarchical structure.
We have a definite concept of property necessitating legitimate children who would inherit and law and order agencies, which would protect it. Rulers who could lead wars of plunder or defense became a necessity.
It is final goodbye to equality of man and woman and to matriarchal society.
We have seen that the concept of super natural was necessitated to ward off natural calamities, flood, lightening and pestilence, but it was hitherto mostly an individual, a spirit man to propitiate the “movers of disasters” which may have been named gods, but they were attributed properties akin to human ones. They had body, sex, families, hierarchy, moods, and sentiments; only they were far more potent and rather short tempered. One had to watch ones step with them. A pantheon of gods for lightening, fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake, evolved.
But it was not organized religion.
The need for organized religion came with the concept of property. In order to establish legitimacy of birth, some kind of formality sanctioned by the spirit man must be gone through. Retribution for infidelity must have been threatened to keep hitherto free spirits in line. You could post guards, but they would be more effective if thieves were made to fear perdition. The rulers had their soldiers but to keep the undesirables and rebels under control Assistance of the spirit man was needed to provide legitimacy to the ruler. The spirit man had to be fed, clothed, housed and a place for his incantations provided. He returned the compliment. Divine right of king is in its incipient stage.
Not very secure in their jobs, spirit men must have organized, much like in later artisan guilds. Organized religion is raising its head.
With time, better grasp of natural phenomenon, body of accumulated human experience called knowledge is preserved. Population explodes and society develops into kingdoms, later into empires.
With enhanced knowledge of natural phenomenon, empirical religion gives way to inspirational, which is better able to protect the status quo.
Pharaohs preceded Judaic prophets but did not have “divine” religions. Chinese and Indians had earth-based religions too.
Now temporal and spiritual offices are combined in a prophet who wages wars to subdue non-believers, unless they capitulate without aggression (much as Libya did after assault on Iraq). Property was acquired, as a reward for converting the heathen (oil in recompense for ‘liberating’ Iraq).
Christianity was a revolt against the inequities, the injustices and avarice of the priestly order. The priests conspired with their foreign over lords to quash the teachings of one of its own, as he was bucking the trend. Status quo and privelege had to be ensured even at the cast of crucifying a member of the brotherhood of priests. The new religion went under ground. Bible was compiled some sixty years after crucifixation.
Church eventually becomes predominant after a Roman emperor converts to the religion. From a band of fugitives it metamorphoses to a pillar of establishment, stifling knowledge, assigning stations in life, forcibly keeping vassals, lords and kings in their respective places.
Dark age prevailed. There was dire poverty, ignorance, frequent pestilence and slavery, one law for the ruler, another for the ruled, palaces for nobles and bishops and hovels for their followers, wasteful abundance for the rich and maybe one meal a day for the poor. Religion protected privelege.
I am talking of medieval Europe. Please keep in mind; this inspirational religion had rebelled against established order, preaching quality and justice.
While Europe was shackled by a subverted religious order, another religion arose in the unlikeliest of places- Mecca. This religion also rebelled against established order, preaching equality, justice and peace but its egalitarian aspect was overcome rather quickly (fifty three years) by establishment and it was used as an tool for empire building much as Judaism and Christianity had done before it.
The prophet of Islam had much greater early success than Judaic prophets or Jesus, perhaps because he attained prophethood at the age of forty, escaped assassination, perhaps because communications and travel were much faster and he came from an important though impoverished tribe. Arabs though illiterate were independent and Mecca was the crossroad of trade routes.
Between Hijra AD622 (migration) to Medina when effective state building started and AD632- just ten years- he had the whole Arabian Peninsula under his control.
Jesus Christ, on the other hand lived in a country ruled by foreigners and unlike Muhammad had to challenge the entrenched priestly order, whose worldly privileges were at stake and which did not hesitate in getting their Roman overlords to prosecute him. He was crucified when he was thirty-three.

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State and religion went hand in hand in Europe and in Asia too after the advent of Islam.
Many pagan rites had crept in Christianity, time was ripe for a reformist movement, Puritanism and Protestantism supplanted Catholicism in large parts of Europe. Among the most interesting reasons for discarding Catholicism, was king Henry XIII’s desire to keep on marrying and popes refusal to keep on sanctioning them. Church had come to rival state; banishing Catholicism brought huge church properties under the king’s control in England. Separation of church and state was implicit in reformation, though religion continued to be used by European government to aid and abet colonization.
The decline and fall of Muslim empires led Muslims to attribute their sorry state to non-performance of religious rites. They were no longer good Muslims, so God did not favor them anymore.
A small minority, however, attributed the sorry state to lack of education, innovation, initiative, and drive. As a corollary they put Europeans on a pedestal, idealizing them, aping their mores, customs and traditions. They had to learn European languages of necessity. But this put them at a great disadvantage in education, spending years learning a foreign language before getting a grip on other subjects such as science, mathematics etc.
The small minority of Muslims who believed that their redemption lay in adopting European ways, naturally, adopted liberal thought as well, and were the ones who led the war of liberation in India and Africa (In Turkey, Egypt, and Iraq it was the struggle against national decay and subservience to the west). Clerics did not take active part in the struggle, in fact many opposed it on the grounds that God will take of everything, if one followed his commandments and other equally spurious reasons abhorrent to the word and spirit of religion.
When leaders failed to deliver and spurred by further humiliations, establishment of Israel, defeats of 1967, 1973 at the hands of Israel, 1971 civil war in East Pakistan, Russian invasion of Afghanistan, Muslims aided and abetted by the West in general and USA in particular, financed by Saudis (to save their own skin from indigenous fanatics) embraced fanaticism and resorted to terrorism.
Europeans have, by and large, remained free of fundamentalism, keeping state and religion separate and vigorously reinforcing the policy, as the recent French law-banning exhibition of religious symbols in state institutions.
Americans bucked the European trend. U.S. constitution does ordain separation of church and state, but attempts at subversion and neo-conservative interpretation of the constitution have been going on for a long time.
In order to understand why (Americans North and South) and Europe took divergent paths in the matter of religion in daily life and Government, one has to look at the inception of the country. Europeans migrated to Americas for a number of reasons, predominant being economic and religious persecution. A small percentage took to the boats with dreams of fortune, but vast majority were escaping starvation. Destitute masses have to seek solace in and hope for divine intervention. They become very religious. Victims of religious persecution give up hearth, home and even life for their beliefs. They would not be inclined to liberal thought.
The immigrants came upon a vast land, sparsely populated by unsophisticated people, who had been isolated from the rest of the world for a long time and who had been left behind, in the rest of the world’s march to scientific, industrial development. What was even more important, they had acquired powerful tools of war. They were overpowered easily, by a combination of trickery, germ warfare (they were rewarded for their hospitality to the starving immigrants, by a gift of blankets impregnated with small pox. Not having been exposed to the disease before and totally lacking immunity, untold numbers died. This was the first use of biological war -fare in human history.
The easy victory, further, potentiated the belief, that they were being rewarded for being good Christians.
The trend of economic and religious migration continued till 1960’s when immigrants from Asia started coming. In sharp contrast to earlier arrivals, they had passed through a process of screening which excluded all except the highly educated and whose skills were actually needed in the country. Instead of being a burden, they saved US economy billions of dollars which the country would have to spend on training physicians, educationists, engineers, scientists (roughly $200,000.00 per trainee equivalent to $one billion for 52,000 foreign trained physicians alone) that is, if they could find indigenous candidates, good enough for training in the country. The newcomers are gradually gaining influence specially the professional groups. But the unfortunate trend under the impact of international events among these immigrants too, is towards intolerance and bigotry.
Group character is passed on over generations. Australia, which was colonized by convicts, is known for the crude and rough (comparatively) language of its people. Americans have continued to cling to religion and take it rather seriously. I once went for an interview for a Medical practice in a small community in Minnesota. They were very hospitable. Their main concern was that they didn’t have a church for me.
Universal literacy, scientific advances, prosperous life style have not been able to over come its influence. They are easily moved by slogans of moral values, nature of family, definition of marriage, permissibly of abortion and morality of stem cell research. These matters, which have little impact on the life of the overwhelming majority of people, cause them to put vastly more important issues on the back burner.
Look at America today. The core of its economy was subjected to a dastardly attack on 9/11. The Government correctly went after the perceived perpetrators. It was a successful operation; Taliban and AL Qaida were demolished. Afghans were delivered from a lunatic tyranny and the people afforded a chance to develop representative and rational institutions. They have not been able to take advantage of the opportunity due to their own primitive stage of social development- they are still in tribal age.
Then, instead of confronting the source of fanaticism- Saudi Arabia- or tackling the genesis of terrorism, Israeli occupation of Palestine, ethnic cleansing perpetrated on them by the Government of the mini Hitler Sharon, the U.S. administration concocted fables of weapons of mass destruction, deluded themselves with hallucinatory visions of fawning crowds in Iraq, acclaiming U.S. forces as liberators. They dreamed of control over a large reservoir of oil and installing an effective client government. They ignored all pleas of better planning after victory. They did not pay any attention to the request of their own Generals for much larger number of troops. They belittled France, Germany and Russia and went charging into Iraq, declaring mission accomplished in a hurry, losing more lives after the declaration than before. The soldiers of the greatest power and the richest country in world history have to cannibalize broken down vehicles for armor. They did not even have adequate number of body armor.
They are still mired in the morass of popular resistance, unable to see the way out, begging the British to relieve them in Baghdad so they could spare troops for Faluga. They had to deal with the hated Shia clerics on equal terms. They are wasting billions of dollars a day with no massive oil supply in sight to pay for it They have burdened the economy with trillions of dollars in national debt, ignoring even rising unemployment figures. Instead of encouraging jobs creation, outsourcing them, overlooking 45 million Americans with no health Insurance and exhibiting shameless complacence over it all.
They had to submit to Ayatollah Sistani’s demand that general elections be held. A new Government of National unity has been installed as a result. But it is unable to deal with the insurgency because all the levers of power are in American hand. The Iraqi security forces cannot match insurgents in firepower or dedication. Many run away from confrontations. They do not want to give their lives to protect the interests of occupying forces. Many are sympathetic to insurgents.
Insurgents are undeterred by the firepower at the command of USA troops. They kill a few USA soldiers several every day and many Iraqi ones, whom they regard as collaborators.
Iraqis are worse off than ever before, worse than even under Saddam, whose regime was in the strangle hold of US/UK sanctions. I have dubbed sanctions as UK/USA, because the UN the supposedly sanctioning authority has no teeth.
All Iraqi infrastructure has been demolished. Children are dying of hunger, lack of medicines in greater numbers than ever before. There is little clean water or electric supply, industry or jobs.
One would have thought, that such an administration would be trounced in an electoral contest based on a literate, well-informed body of voters.
But no, they won because John Kerry was for women’s choice, for stem cell research and ambivalent on gay marriage.
One cannot blame corporate media. They were, if anything tilting towards Kerry. You cannot blame money. Both had it and spent it in abundance. You cannot blame the security issue; in the end people thought Kerry would be as good on the score. People knew that Kerry was far more intelligent, had far better advisers, would be as relentless in fight against terror, would be much more effective, as he could develop a true coalition and get European troops to fight in Iraq. He would be more solicitous of Israel, would abolish the irresponsible tax reduction, trim national debt, put a more humane and acceptable face on capitalism and not appoint members of the lunatic fringe to the cabinet.
It would have been a walk over but for the Christian fundamentalists who galvanized churches (Kerry is a practicing catholic- yet catholic bishops campaigned against him), exhorted voters, transported them to polling booths, launched smear campaigns on T.V., told blatant lies, besmirched the honor of a highly decorated was hero (against a draft evader) so that 50% of Hispanics, normally a democratic constituency, voted for the republican ticket. Ohio, a state with large unemployment was won by the President by 135,000 votes. This all in the name of morality in a country, which has come a long way in accepting varied sexual choices, where women after several thousand years have regained equality.
Though the difference between the rich and poor has widened (Remember Jesus Christ favored the poor) under Bush, they still voted republican.
People were taken in, as people usually are, perhaps consoling themselves with the thought that priests will intercede for them in the after world, perhaps priests reminding them of Christ pronouncement that the poor will inherit the kingdom of heaven, implying that they won’t if they disobeyed the priest.
One can go on conjecturing but there is no denying the fact that bigotry cost Kerry the election.
Fundamentalism in the U.S.A is a part of the trend all the world over. It cannot be curbed by combating it in this country alone. Injustice, poverty, hunger, disease, ignorance, superstition, religious fanaticism, racism, economic exploitation, and dominance of Capital will have to be dealt with on a global scale.