The Secular Fundamentalist

The Disappearing Western Existential Hinterland

The great European voyages of geographical discovery starting in the late fifteenth century didn’t so much disprove that the world had a fixed edge that an unsuspecting sailor might fall off; rather that this edge would keep moving as they explored ever farther afield.  This happened just as much in every facet of thought and action as the modern world unfolded.  The focus of the entire culture started to shift to the edges.  The available human energy gradually started to drain from the hinterland, so that as the edges moved outwards, its lush landscapes started to dry out and fade into a scrubby savannah.

Thus the problem with living on the edge too long is that the hinterland, for which the edge forms a border, starts to disappear.  Much of it had already been mined out during the often violent historical journey to the edge; first by bitter religious warfare and later by the co-option of its security and calming value for the maintenance of an emerging industrial social order so bent on its own agendas it could give little back for its use of the territory.  As to what is now left, because it is so diminished and neglected, even the recognition software has become too dilapidated and corrupted for us to see much of  what is still there.  And the desperadoes who still fossick in the ideological rubbish dumps of our age still cling to broken down, but still treasured toys from another time.

Traditional organized religion is not just about the delivery of cosmological, magical and afterlife beliefs, but a process for regulating and capitalizing the existential and social commons, to produce a substantial sector of its net wealth.  The fact that it is not a monetized part of the human economy does not mean it does not form part of the critical infrastructure of the built software that constructs and securitizes individuals and their communities.  When the traditionally religious speak of ‘salvation’, at least in part, this is what they are talking about.

The evolution of religious thought and organization through the modern period, as exemplified by Protestantism, gives us an insight into how the emergence of capitalism reformulated, colonized and finally all but destroyed this infrastructure, leaving mass populations totally at the mercy of markets and in a state of near chaos beyond the narrow parameters of production drivers and market responders.  And it is a sobering reminder of the power of our own organizational and technological genius, that it can so overwhelm everything it touches.

Protestantism is uniquely identified with the emergence of early industrializing societies.  It reformulated the Christian spiritual package for the emerging needs of these increasingly secular entities.  ‘God helps those that help themselves’.  ‘Wealth and success are an outward and visible sign of the Grace of God and election to the company of the spiritually saved’.  It was not that these societies were ceasing to be religious, but rather, that religion was being reconfigured to fit in with dominant secular concerns rather than the other way round.
 
However, such processes are never static. As the secular demands of increasingly powerful industrial and state administrative sectors made themselves felt, there were forces afoot to reduce the religious call on social time.  The plethora of Holy Days was restricted to just Sundays, except for the really important ones, like Easter and Christmas.  The power of religious courts was progressively reduced in favor of secular ones.

And it wasn’t just courts.  With industrialization came a larger tax base and much more powerful state institutions that progressively took over and intensified their secular social administration. The emergence of science, and its philosophical instrumentalism in combination with the new technology it made possible, started to edge out the centrality of religious ideas about the cosmos and the nature of causality.

Gradually, this process of religious residualization started to affect the better educated who were being exposed to the increasing inflow of secular thinking.  They increasingly started to see the church pulpit as a utilitarian social control device that held sway over the minds of the ignorant mass of people, to keep them ‘in their place’.

More subtly, this instrumentalist objectification of social relationships increasingly disconnected skeptically secularizing ruling class elements from their subjects, and made way for converting them into abstract units of production, to be maneuvered around in the same way as livestock or raw materials.  The emotional and existential hinterland that unified and connected communities started to move towards an ‘edge’ of more specialized consciousness and function, that would later intensify productivity and push the boundaries of  knowledge, organization and behavior.

As secular knowledge and specialization intensified, a new industrial system emerged.  It rapidly quickened its pace, and immediately required increasingly substantial rearrangements of the old order, such as displacing peasants en mass off the land and into the emerging cities that would increasingly come to dominate economic life.
 
Religious institutions, which had once been the custodians of settled and eternal values of human conduct, found themselves being used to legitimize, smooth and opiate that often traumatic, dislocative and sometimes violent transition.  After all, ecclesiastical ‘livings’ were paid for by landlords ‘modernizing’ their rural land holdings and labor practices, or investing in the emerging manufacturing and urban infrastructure.
 
Priests even found themselves being used as magistrates to help administer the dirty and ruthless business of penal colonies, that had to be set up to get rid of the semi-criminalized urban poor created by the social disruptions caused by industrialization.  Many of the convicts despised them.  By submitting to use as part of a secular administration driving towards the edges of human behavior, their capacity to evoke a rich spiritual ‘dreaming’ was gradually slipping away from their grasp.

In the twentieth century, the rise of unprecedentedly violent warfare that increasingly engulfed civil populations, unprecedented industrial growth, economic crisis, and the emergence of overwhelmingly  totalitarian secular governance, all pushed traditional religious sensibility to the margins of the industrialized world.
 
In the later twentieth century, there could be no greater pathos than large and fervent crowds of the existentially impoverished at a religious revival meeting, trying to convince themselves that Jesus really loved them.
 
The hopes held for the alternative lifestyle during the sixties and early seventies were mostly dashed on the rocks of self interested and self indulgent egoism, and a lack of working models of disciplined collective action; all painful reminders of how unfamiliar and substantial the challenge was, and how meager the resources to meet it.
 
Radical socialism quickly degenerated into dictatorship and a heart starved notion of ‘comradeship’.  Marxism was an intellectually and politically astute analysis of capitalism and the power of mass movements, but came nowhere near joining the notion of class into the individual inner self.  Nor did it sufficiently challenge the legitimacy of capitalism’s contribution to the historical process and so adopted many of its worst features in its own development modeling; then executed them with a cruelty, crudity and bureaucratic inefficiency that was eventually ruinous and disgraceful  into the bargain.

Or, as in China, it transmogrified itself into a capitalist behemoth, sporting a socialist cap with numerous feathers in it, for all the brutal productivity, production and pollution records it routinely breaks.

Bureaucratic welfare statism, the kinder face of socialism, as pioneered by the British, quickly degenerated into a variously feckless redistribution of the benefits of economic decline, a disintegrating work ethic, bureaucratic regulatory domination, loss of entrepreneurial talent, the rise of a culture of entitlement, the emergence of  whole new classes of lumpen proletarians and trashy business ‘unscrupularchs’, a plunge into a voracious borrowing regime off a diminishing stock of wealth collateral to meet its relentless demands, for the next generation to try and pay off, and all this served on a platter of existential angst, nihilism, alienation, escapism, quick pleasures and moral inconsequentialism that affected the whole society from top to bottom.

Gurus and cults have risen and fallen like ideological mushrooms, leaving their devotees stranded from California to India.  Crying need plainly isn’t enough to sustain existentially aspirational movements.

Whether one describes the existential hinterland as the inner shining, the brimming life-force, the ineffable oneness, the breath of the cosmos, the great acceptance, the love that forgives all, these are just empty and gutted meanings if one is locked out on the edge of a hinterland that has been systematically looted, and software degraded.

The Global Financial Crash was the apotheosis of this decline in the integrity of the existential foundations, social governance and its reproduction.  The sixty year old total war templated production/consumer binge that began with the post-World War 2 reconstruction, found itself being led by men of such arrogance, greed, and lack of scruple, they were incapable of doing even the most basic things to maintain the integrity of the system on which they relied, or their own legitimacy as leaders.
 
What can summarize this disgusting corruption more abjectly than the supposedly reputable merchant bankers who offered their richer clients absurdly inflated returns on investment products that they knew to be defective, and then shorted against them on the futures market to clean them up afterwards, when the market turned, as they knew it would?  And the best that could be said is that a lot of the clients probably got the financial services agents they deserved.

At the other end of the social spectrum were the lumpen-proletarians who trashed parts of London and other regional centers in 2011, in a vandalism and looting spree that was redolent of the characters in the prescient 1970s social horror movie, ‘A Clockwork Orange’, which was a representation of what happens when the social commons and collective psychological hinterland completely crumbles.

Some religious people think that the rise of fundamentalist religion in the later twentieth century has been a both unexpected and hopeful sign that the traditional hinterlands may yet be rescued from what has seemed until recently to be a relentless institutional and numbers decline and loss of relevance.

Certainly this movement has done nothing to stem the decline of traditional middle-of-the-road religious institutions in the more industrialized parts of the world that still seem to be torn between sticking to traditional beliefs that are plainly losing their grip, or trying to rework the tradition to seem more ‘relevant’, but in so doing, weakening their ideological roots.

I do not think emerging religious fundamentalism necessarily signifies a return to the psychological hinterlands of our forebears.  It gains traction because it partially abandons reason and the ordinary instrumental connections of cause and effect.  The NASA physicist who was the public relations spokesman for the Creationist Museum in Kentucky, while being interviewed on an ABC current affairs program, suggested that the laws of physics and science in general, and the evidence used to substantiate them, only applied as long as they did not conflict with the word of God.  If they did, the laws could not prevail and the evidence for them was by definition, mistaken.

The problem religious fundamentalists have is that unless theology rules the natural sciences, as it did in the pre and early modern periods, when cosmology, geography and history all confirmed a deistically authored and managed understanding of reality, they still end up clinging onto the side of an existential cliff.  They just can’t ever look down upon the ground of their being, for they would fall like a stone if they did.  The anchor of faith and its connection to reason is so problematic it just cannot provide.  That makes them very vulnerable, and dangerously prone to blindly irrational behavior.

In third world societies, where modernism never got the kind of hold it did in the first, it has been easier to maintain a traditional picture of the universe.  It wasn’t until the 1960s in Mecca that the final ecclesiastical voice declaring Copernicanism a heresy, finally died.  And in many places in the rural villages, life has changed very little since the days of The Prophet, so going back to his nostrums wholesale and in every detail, really isn’t a problem.
 
A combination of repulsion at the dysfunctionality and decadence of consumer societies and economic backwardness, makes taking life to just the way The Prophet would have liked it seem much more doable and plausible.  It is just that having a population that knows more about the Qur’an than industrial management, means it can’t compete in a global market, unless it has a secular population like the Chinese in Malaysia, or an imported workforce, as in Saudi Arabia, who do most of the specialized secular thinking for them, and they import all their technology.

To recover our existential place in the centre of our psychological hinterlands in ways that can act as a counterpoint and anchor to the now super-dominant edges of consciousness, will require massive shifts in the breadth of our understanding of wealth, the balances of its elements in their various account lines, and the density and velocity of their resource flows, much of which are now off balance sheet and unaccounted for in any sort of profit and loss accounts.

Such a reconstruction would be as large and demanding a project as anything our species has ever attempted, which is why it won’t happen quickly, or very likely until the modern project itself actually starts to crumble, under the unsustainable pressures of its rapidly accumulating demands on nature, and its human protagonists.

It is a measure of the present extent of the ideological disarray within populations in an affluent society like the US that so many believe in irrational thoughts like creationism.  A Gallup survey put out in July 2011 reported that three in ten Americans interpret the Bible literally, saying it is the actual word of God.  A June 2012 Gallup survey reported  that forty-six percent of Americans believe in the creationist view that God created humans in their present form at one time within the last ten thousand years.
 
Nor should it be surprising how easily legitimate scientific knowledge about say anthropogenic climate change can be counter-marketed by small but well funded private lobby groups, in ways that can distort public opinion and paralyze necessary government action.  Even as late as April 2013, an American Gallup poll showed that nearly 40% of Americans believed that global warming was from natural causes and 34% imagined that most scientists were either unsure about it or disagreed with it.  A Public Policy Polling (PPP) poll taken over the same period found 37% of Americans and 58% of Republicans thought global warming was a hoax!

In 1933, the government of an equally fragile German society was hijacked by a party with only 30% of the vote, that believed that all the country’s problems were caused by a bizarre international joint conspiracy of Jewish bankers and communists, who had stabbed Germany in the back at the end of the Great War, made way for the ‘unjust’ Versailles diktat, speculated against its currency and caused The Depression.
 
An April 2013 American PPP poll showed that 28% of voters believed a secretive power elite with a globalist agenda was conspiring to eventually rule the world through an authoritarian world government, or New World Order....28%!!!!

And in case anyone thinks that the so called ‘conservative’ (whatever that means) side of American society is off with ideological fairies, the liberal Democrat side of politics isn’t necessarily doing much better in key matters of judgment.  As pointed out in chapter 8, the ability of humanist liberals to critically differentiate say empathy and critical rigor and/or their propensity to conflate ideas, say repression and discipline, indicates reasoning faculties that are just as blunted and vulnerable in their own way, as those of their opponents.

It augurs extremely badly for what might happen if anything ever went really wrong in the secular realm; one where beliefs routinely overwhelm judgment, because they are clinging to anything that  looks vaguely plausible, on a crumbling existential cliff that they do not know how, or haven’t the strength, to get off.  If captains of industry cannot come to terms with climate science because it contradicts their ideological precepts about the infallibility of markets, and because they have come to believe that the science is a socialist plot to de-industrialize, we are already in deep trouble.