[lbo-talk] Capitalism and Religious Fundamentalism

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

On 6/23/07, Russell Grinker <grinker at mweb.co.za> wrote:
> Baiting the devout
>
> It is because secular intellectuals have lost their own belief in progress
> and liberation that they are turning venomously on those who retain a vision
> of the good society: the religious.
>
> by Michael Fitzpatrick
>
> When I first came across Christopher Hitchens' diatribe against Mother
> Teresa I enjoyed its knockabout exposure of this unctuous old fraud and her
> preposterous celebrity networking (1). But I increasingly found myself
> wondering why it was that such an able polemicist of the old left had been
> reduced to taking on such a trivial and demeaning target. The question 'Why
> bother?' returned with greater insistency when I discovered the recent
> flurry of popular anti-religious books by a range of atheists, agnostics and
> secular humanists (Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, who are now
> referred to collectively as 'The New Atheists'), to which Hitchens has now
> added his own contribution: God Is Not Great: The Case Against Religion (2).
>
> Readers of these books will learn little about religion; they are much more
> revealing about their authors' own insecurities. Lacking much knowledge of
> religious faith, its contemporary critics focus on its superficial aspects
> and extreme manifestations (notably, Christian and Islamic fundamentalism).
> Once-influential radicals, now condemned to the margins of society, tend to
> exaggerate the importance of religious authorities, who in reality have
> little more legitimacy than the politicians who patronise them, in the
> (often mistaken) belief that they provide links to the masses. Having lost
> their own belief in progress and liberation, secular intellectuals are irked
> by their encounters with people who, on whatever basis, retain a vision of
> the good society and a commitment to realising it. They clearly feel rebuked
> by the undaunted practice of those who have not given up. Indeed, in their
> own state of confusion and demoralisation, old radicals give too much credit
> to religion, in this respect, and furthermore, they often misinterpret as
> religious fervour popular affiliations that are largely pragmatic and
> instrumental.
<snip>
> Rest is at:
> http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php?/site/reviewofbooks_article/3513/

In contrast, Ernest Gellner, who characterized his own epistemic
standpoint as rationalist fundamentalism, i.e. fundamentalist only in
commitment to historical materialist methods to understand the world,
in epistemic disagreement with both post-modern relativists and
religious fundamentalists, but willing to compromise politically,
going along with "the contingencies of local development, the
accidents of local balance of power and taste" (Ernest Gellner,
Postmodernism, Reason and Religion, Routledge, 1992, p. 95),
understood religion, especially modern Islam, far better than the New
Atheists.

For instance, Gellner wrote, "Contrary to what outsiders generally
suppose, the typical Muslim woman in a Muslim city doesn't wear the
veil because her grandmothers did so, but because her grandmother did
_not_: her grandmother in her village was far too busy in the fields,
and she frequented the shrine without a veil, and left the veil to her
betters.  The granddaughter is celebrating the fact that she has
joined her grandmother's betters, rather than her loyalty to her
grandmother" (p. 16).  In other words, modern Islam in general,
especially varieties of modern Islam that are often misleadingly
characterized as "fundamentalism" (against the counsel of Ervand
Abrahamian [cf.
<http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20070618/011894.html>]
and others who think like him), is in effect anti-traditionalist if
not always in rhetoric -- popularization, democratization, and
modernization of what Gellner calls "High Islam," at the expense of
"Folk Islam" in his terminology, in part a result of urbanization and
mass education that capitalism brought about, in part a response to
colonialism and imperialism.

And Gellner did all that while rejecting the Revelation, be it by
religious fundamentalists or old-fashioned Marxists trapped in such
"Zombie categories [that] embody nineteenth-century horizons of
experience" (Ulrich Beck and Johannes Willms, Conversations with
Ulrich Beck, Trans. Michael Pollak, London: Polity Press, 2004, p.19)
as the ideology of Progress.

His was the spirit of the eighteenth century, comparative rather than
hierarchical, against the philistinism of the nineteenth century.
That is the spirit that allows us to enjoy Voltaire and Islam at the
same time.
-- 
Yoshie