``...How many of us, for example, have openly and honestly stood up for secular politics and have condemned the use of religion in the Islamic world as roundly and as earnestly as we have denounced the manipulation of Judaism and Christianity in Israel and the West? ....A new secular Arab politics must now make itself known, without for a moment condoning or supporting the militancy (it is madness) of people willing to kill indiscriminately. There can be no more ambiguity on that score...'' [Edward Said, The Necessity of Skepticism: Backlash and Backtrack, CounterPunch, 9/28/01]
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While Said is addressing an Arab audience in this particular paragraph, much of the same can be addressed to the entire US and the Christian rightwing that has dominated whole swaths of US domestic and foreign policies for at least two decades.
I mentioned the Enlightenment as the ultimate source of these disasters because it was that historical movement that signified the transformation of the West from a religious ordered society into a provisionally secular one. Its historical expression as the French Revolution was profoundly anti-clerical, and virtually all its intellectual and philosophical tenets were aimed at dismantling the religious foundations of feudal society. These historical events amounted to stripping away the spiritual trappings of the human world from the intimacies of the mind to the social ordering of society. In this sense then Hegel can be seen as a kind of spiritual reaction to the absolutist materialism of some of the french revolutionaries---certainly those aligned under the new human sciences.
While the origin of secular thought is often associated with the rise of the physical sciences (Galileo, et al) those movements did not directly threaten the structure of society---although the Church could see it coming. Once you accept a material basis for the universe, a material examination of human society will soon follow---and of course it did.
It is this stripping away of spirituality from all the dimensions of human existence that has been under attack from all the resuscitated religious fundamentalisms in Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. It is not a mere coincidence that most of the terrorism can be associated with some form of overwrought religious nonsense. It is as likely found in the car bombers of London, as in Oklahoma City or Waco, in abortion clinic bombings, as in the Palestinian refugee camp slaughters, as in the suicide bombers of Jerusalem, and now the WTC and Pentagon.
So, in my mind that is the common thread, the basis of this cultural war that in its ultimate frustration has been reduced to terrorism---terrorism on all fronts.
Chuck Grimes