~ by Samir Selmanovic
Certainty is out of vogue. Dogma is the devil. We are learning to communicate any convictions we have more tentatively; any statements we make, we feel obliged to qualify. And for a good reason. We have noticed something common to people who blow themselves up in buses or fly planes into tall buildings. Or economically colonize other countries or bomb them into submission. They are sure. The rest of us—the vast majority of people—cringe and protest.
We see violent people as having dangerous levels of certainty and conviction— fundamentalists and extremists—and ourselves as peacemakers, free to question anything and think for ourselves. But since experiencing the September 11 terrorist attacks while living in Manhattan, I am not so sure anymore. I am beginning to think neither is true: we are not free thinkers; they are not religious extremists.
First, we are all part of one of the most fundamentalist ideologies in history. Never has such a large group of people submitted themselves to a single ideology like we have. The ruling dogma of our time has become the economy. Albeit in different words, we hear this rumor of the oppressive dictatorship of the economy over all our lives. From workers in Chinese rice field to Wall Street moguls, we have become unquestioning followers. We have subjected our individual and communal lives to decisions that honor the market above any other force, the story of economic progress over any other story, corporations over any other institutions, and possessions over any other values that govern our lives. The present economic crisis now demonstrates how deep that fundamentalist devotion has been running.
During our "economic boom" virtue has morphed from something valuable in itself into a helpful strategy to overcome the cost of transactions. Relationships have become a natural network for spreading one’s influence and business. Our “free time” has become a paid-for activity. News about the world has become a form of entertainment, whose bottom line is to keep advertisers happy. Marketing strategies have molded us into consumers with a similar fantasy life. While insisting we are unique, we have been using words from commercials to describe our life dreams and celebrity personalities to describe the person we would like to marry. The millennia old concept of communal life has morphed from being a citizen to being a consumer.
Something else has happened. Across the planet, people have been discussing different scenarios of the end of the world: “Religious people will destroy us with their wars. Global warming is going to cook us all. Viruses will wipe us out. God is going to come and clean house.” But while we can imagine different scenarios of the end of the world, we are unable to imagine a more modest shift in the way we run this world. Since the fall of communism, discussion about what is going to come after modern liberal capitalism has ceased. We all agree: our view of human beings as Homo Economicus is here to stay. There is a vacuum of options in our collective psyche. We have become fundamentalists of a religion with its own dogma (“nothing is ever enough”), its own sense of belonging (industry brands), its own temples (shopping malls), its own centering meditational practices (life punctuated by commercials), its own priesthood (get-rich experts), its own sacred (accrual of personal satisfaction) and its own plan for spreading the faith (expansion of the market). Now, the economy is collapsing under the weight of our expectations, we are forced to take a break from this fundamentalism. Now we have an opportunity to see and question the dogma.
When a movement, a revolution, a religion, a country, matures and moves away from its first ideals and ability to adapt, from the ability to keep on dreaming and changing, and becomes “fundamentalist,” fear has taken a hold of the imagination. Capitalism with its initial insights into the human spirit, ingenuity, and perseverance has been steadily deteriorating into consumerist fundamentalism. We have learned to live by the fear of losing everything through some misfortune of world events, by the fear of the poor or lazy who might take everything from us, by the fear of finding ourselves among the “have nots,” by the fear of old age, by the fear of being ugly and by the fear of being alone.
So most of us watching “extremists” blow things up are not free thinkers at all. Most of us are fundamentalists of our own kind, unaware of the fact, participating in the madness of self-destruction. Moreover, our public ideology has found a way to criticize itself or laugh about itself while constantly strengthening its grip on our actual lives. We can talk as much as we want about the need to live sustainable lives, curb our desires, talk about the sacredness of the earth and learning to see that small is beautiful, as long as we—individually or corporately—don’t try to change the way we actually live. The only power that makes us change our lifestyle is—again—economic. Nothing else can move us. That’s not freedom.
But we also should consider that supposed extreme religious fundamentalists are not extremely religious at all. Their fundamentalism is much closer to consumerist fundamentalism than we think. To blow oneself up in order to wake up surrounded by sighing virgins or any other bliss expresses nothing but a desire for extreme products and services, with celestial goods instead of earthly ones. People who blow themselves up are actually people without conviction, commitment or certainty. Deep inside, they carry ambivalence about their faith. They do not trust.
And because they are not sure about their faith, they gravitate to acts of self-destruction. Because they cannot find peace with their creaturehood, they take upon themselves God’s prerogative to create or destroy life. Because they have not grasped the religious teaching of the inter-dependence of all life and the absurdity of reducing the other into an enemy, they are so detached from the image of God in themselves that they are ready to act on their self-hatred and self-destruct. They see their acts of violence as a way to push themselves over the threshold of unbelief.
At the same time, we give them a title of “religious extremists?” So what are then people like Gandhi, Martin Luther King and thousands of others who have given their lives protecting the interest of those with whom they disagree? Religious light-weights? No, people who are extreme enough, rooted and certain about something care enough to be capable of standing up to the officially promoted reality.
There is a scarcity of religious or humanist extremists willing to dissent, not so much with talking, writing or protesting, but dissenting deeply, from within. In a fundamental sort of way. It seems leaders like those who have helped humanity in the past cannot surface and lead today. Their ideas are swiftly subjugated to the unyielding master of our public ideology. First political campaigns and now the whole world runs under the banner, “It’s the economy, stupid.” If you think anything else can matter more, you are not sane enough to be trusted, we are told. United States, president elect Obama, keenly aware of these dynamics, repeatedly yet timidly warns the public, "the road before us will not be easy." Any direct appeal to values other than economic prosperity are still considered only inspirational at best and heresy at worst.
The resulting scarcity of public dreamers on all levels of civic life then creates a vacuum of imagination. In the past, the world was young and progressing. History was going on with the future wide open. Today, not only has the culture lost its critical distance from the social reality of unstoppable consumption, but most religion has lost this critical distance as well. For many of us, modern liberal capitalism has been adopted as not only one moment among many in history. It is the last one, inevitable. The current order of things has been regarded like something given to us, like a revelation, something that can’t be argued, something that we cannot change with our choices, something eternal, after which there is no future to be fathomed.
We have grown up with a classic myth of what it means to wage war. It always meant taking the weapons, conquering the other and preserving one’s own way of life at all cost. Yet, on our interdependent planet we have no more territory left to exploit and no more wars that can be won. In this world, empathy, cooperation, and forgiveness are becoming the most potent agents of transformation.
To take the risk of refusing to reduce anyone to “an enemy,” a risk to contribute instead of just take from the world, a risk to be inter-dependent instead of self-sufficient, the risk to forgive and absorb wrong instead of retaliate, takes people with courage and strong convictions. We have to learn to measure our lives differently--find different fundamentals of life. And may thousands of new fundamentalists across the globe please step forward.
(from Signs of the Times, adopted for this website by the author)
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