"religious based resusciations of their antique socio-political orders" (CG)
All contemporary scholarship on fundamentalism describes it as a MODERN response to change that calls for a return to a mythical non-existant past.
"Armstrong sees fundamentalist groups as complex, innovative, and modern -- rather than as throwbacks to the past -- but contends that they have failed in religious terms. Maintaining that fundamentalism often exists in symbiotic relationship with an aggressive modernity, each impelling the other on to greater excess, she suggests compassion as a way to defuse what is now an intensifying conflict."
-Chip "get a library card" Berlet
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Hmm. Get a library card, huh? I take that to mean buy my books and read the same people I read. Well, you'll have to wait your turn.
Resuscitation in this context is suppose to mean bring back to life, revitalize in the here and now. I am not sure I quite understand the distinction between fundamentalism as a modern response, and fundamentalism as a revitalization of some antique order. After all the timing of the response remains modern, or contemporary in either case.
In my lexicon a resuscitation is essentially a creative act as a re-production, re-creation, re-reading, and inevitably a re-interpretation. So, the implication in my mind is not a return or a throw back per se---I think of resuscitation as a re-enactment or recital.
In any case, I am not sure why it is so important to eliminate the idea of a throw back as one of many possible motivations or characterizations. For example the dress of people in some areas of the Middle East and Central Asia still looks like the dress worn in some of Rembrandt's drawings and etchings, and resembles those found in Byzantine mosaics, frescos, and Persian painting of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
In other words, there might not be any reason to go back, since there might have never been much movement away from those traditions in the first place. If this is the case, then revitalization is a more appropriate concept than either a dialectic with modernity, or some form of innovation.
And it still remains to be seen (since, I haven't done the reading yet), whether or not fundamentalist groups (Jewish and Muslim) are all that socio-politically innovative or not. That is the point to looking through some survey of their historical or traditional legal and social codes of conduct.
The US Protestant fundamentalists might be more easily configured as modernistic and innovative since they don't have the vast histories that Jews and the Muslims have to draw upon. Since the fundamentalist protestant crowd seem quite anti-catholic, they have cut themselves off from about a thousand years worth of cannon law and dogma---that was their protest, wasn't it?. A specifically Catholic clerical fascism would seem quite at odds with any of the Protestant groups---although it might be fun to watch.
On the other hand, I obviously agree, taken all together there is a distinct rejection of Modernity in all the fundamentalisms. However, it seems quite likely the rejection does not issue from the same perspectives and has quite different meanings to each group. For example an aggressive, nasty, and heavy handed capitalism seems to fit quite well with the US evangelical crowd, right on through to an embrace of mass media and mass culture. They want to censor and morph those mass productions into something resembling Disney on Prozac, the bland leading the bland. Even their theoretical rejection of sex and violence, seems more of matter of whose sex and whose violence---considering that as far as I can tell, so far there is little else in the Old Testament, except sex and violence (begetting and retribution).
And as long as I am picking away, the problem I have with the term fascism is its easy confusion with the nazis and other European based ideologies that were indeed, blatantly modernistic, and blatantly fabricated mythologies about the past. I am not sure that either the Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists are fabricating a mythology out of whole cloth. They don't need to. The history is there in sufficiently rich and suggestive form, and in sufficient detail as text, as well as in extant culture to not require intentional fabrication and blatant manufacture.
The English, French, and German ideologues of the late Nineteenth Century didn't have quite the historical record they needed, so they just made it up. In this sense then the US fundamentalists are in the same dilemma---a lack of historical precedent, and lack of any living traditional culture to draw on. So they are in the process of fabricating whole sections of thought and custom out of nothing. In this particular case they do seem to be fascist in the manufacturing (or innovative) sense of the term.
In addition, the US and EU in the Nineteenth Century, were in the process of creating their particular conceptual framework for national states, attempting to mold their histories, arts, languages, and customs into a magical identification with their national state institutions. Both Italy and Germany stand out in this process because national identity was strongly problematic. The US of course has the Civil War to point to.
I spent a fair amount of reading time on the background to WWI centered on the interestingly different responses that Bertrand Russell, Andre Gide, and Thomas Mann recorded in their writing about WWI. They were all haute bourgeoisie, well established, national figures at the time, and theoretically liberal-progressives. But Mann's response was unique in contrast to the other two. Russell and Gide were intellectually horrified at the war propaganda and its strong nationalism. Their response to all that brought them into a new awareness of the darker social and cultural aspects of nationalism. Mann on the other hand, in fact celebrated these same components (Reflections of a Non-Political Man). He later changed his mind, without re-canting, and ended up much closer to Russell and Gide over about a year period after the German surrender, although he arrived in not quite in the same way.
Mann, Gide and Russell were all atheists, although Gide and Mann reserved a certain literary sympathy toward religious beliefs. Russell with his scientific bend considered all that mere superstition. And needless to say, they all saw the rise of nazism as something much darker than they had ever contemplated before.
The point here is that what I want to do is wonder through some of the Jewish, Muslim, and Christian worlds of text and perhaps re-visit an experience I had while reading these early 20th c. writers. It is not that their writings directly apply to the here and now of fundamentalisms, but they give an insight into some of the ways that individual and national identities are created.
This effort applies to the Armstrong quote above which claims that fundamentalisms are a failure or re-definition of religious belief. I think this is a critical point to understand, but I am far from certain these are either redefinitions or failures---primarily because I don't think of any thought or belief in terms of success or failure. As thoughts and beliefs, they are expressions of something and can, therefore no more succeed or fail than a vocabulary list can succeed or fail. In the arena of expressive form such criterion don't particularly illuminate any thing beyond the evaluative means of some external aesthetic judgment.
In the end of course I am not interested in settling on a scholarly view of fundamentalism, although at some point I will read some of them. Rather I am interested in discovering their human dimensions---I am not sure what else to call it.
For example consider this from the Rubaiyat:
Into this Universe, and why not knowing, Nor whence, like Water willy-nilly flowing:
And out of it, as Wind along the Waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing.
These fundamentalisms might also be seen as the silent interlocutor to this fragment of Omar Khayyam. Consider that Omar was a lover of the grape in as great a measure, as his time and place were devout. So, instead of juxtaposing modernity to faith, it might also be possible to make fundamentalism one voice in a dialogue between the epicurean and the aesthete.
You know, my Friends, with what a brave Carouse I made a Second Marriage in my house;
Divorced old barren Reason for my Bed, And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse.
For `Is' and `Is-not' though with Rule and Line And `Up-and-down' by Logic I define,
Of all that one should care to fathom, I Was never deep in anything but---Wine.
It is hard to imagine anything that would join the devout Christian to the devout Muslim and Jew faster than their full throated chorus of excoriation for Omar in his finest turns.
Chuck Grimes