A Green View of Fundamentalism vs. Modernism

by Kelpie Wilson

Sentient Times, Dec '01 - Jan '02
www.sentienttimes.com

A lot of ink will need to be spilled before America figures out the true import of September 11. Better ink than blood: to me that is the American Way. In that tradition of free speech, here’s a green perspective on the conflict between traditional cultures like Islam and modern consumer society and what it means for our survival.

This conflict now threatens to become the New World Order: the conflict that will replace the Cold War as an excuse to continue military buildup. From a green perspective, conflict and military buildup are a lousy approach to priming the economic pump. But then so is consumerism. Neither living to kill nor living to eat are the proper way for a supposedly evolved species like us to live. We need a higher purpose. One is easily provided in the environmental crisis. We need to become responsible stewards of the planet. It's our mission, and if we don't choose to accept it, then it will be because deep down we are an immature and dissipated species on a suicidal path.

Fundamentalism inhibits us from doing our job as humanity by not allowing us to grow up. It mires us in an ancient world where father knows best, and if you don't agree you may pay with your life. The fathers will do almost anything to keep their authority, and the weak are happy to let them. Patriarchs come in all stripes. We have many versions still surviving in this country: from fundamentalist Christians and Jews to bikers and organized crime families. One of the good things about consumer corporate capitalism is that it lifts us out of extreme patriarchy. Glass ceiling not withstanding, women in modern developed nations have more freedom and power than at any time in recorded history.

Women's freedom is essential if we are to grow into our ordained role as earth stewards. Women are essential because we control the means of reproduction. Being Earth Stewards is all about balance, and the most important balance we need to work on is the balance between production (of goods from earth's resources) and reproduction (of ourselves). In case you haven't noticed, overpopulation and overconsumption are choking the life out of this planet.

In the modern consumer corporate capitalist world, women have, for the most part, the freedom to determine for themselves when to stop having children. In the fundamentalist and patriarchal worlds, women usually don't have this freedom and often live under abysmal conditions of repression along with the multitudes of unfortunate children they are forced to bear in poverty.

In the modern world, women may be freer, but the earth is more bound. When the reason for living is to consume, everything becomes fodder. The net of capitalism lets very little escape. Nothing is allowed to exist for itself ever again. Not love, not beauty, not community nor health nor happiness. Everything has to be connected to a buck or it's not real. It has no value. And because we haven't efficiently found the best way to attach the value of natural beauty to a buck, it is being destroyed in order to make doodads and trinkets and "convenience products" so someone can make a buck. As the poet Wordsworth said:

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!

One reason more of the world may be turning back to fundamentalism is that it appears to have more staying power. After all, the "father knows best" system got us all the way through recorded history. Everyone knows deep down that there's not much future in a system that relies on consuming the earth to generate prosperity. We're all just waiting for the crash. Remember Y2k? To some, fundamentalism offers more security.

Science is the third way, and it constitutes the other good thing about corporate consumer capitalism, which embraces science. The spread of the scientific world-view means that more people than ever before have the knowledge and tools to become good earth stewards. Science applied to the economy can rationalize it and create a new economic system that incorporates the triple bottom line of nature, culture and finance in order to preserve the healthy functioning of all three.

But science, as good as it is, may be the cause of the current conflict between the Islamic and modern worlds. Technological change and the growth of scientific knowledge has proven disruptive to all cultures, but to the traditional cultures most of all. The dizzying pace of technological change has been a constant source of comment for decades in the West, and yet we have had the three centuries since the Enlightenment to get used to it. Imagine how extremely different it must have been for the Arab world, most of which was isolated from the modern world until the last half of the 20th century.

Although Arabs were responsible for some of the best science in the middle ages, Arab culture never went through a rationalist revolution. The September 20 edition of the science journal Nature, examines the point of view of Iranian political commentators: they "saw the collapse of the Soviet system not as a triumph of the West but as a prelude to the total collapse of a system based on humanist beliefs fostered in the Western Enlightenment, which, in their eyes, committed the fatal error of divorcing a scientific understanding of nature from an appreciation of its divine aspects."

And here we come to an interesting issue for greens. Although we celebrate science and rationalism and base all our conclusions on Western Enlightenment values, something about the thought of appreciating the divine in nature resonates. Science must not be divorced from the divine, if the divine means the value of life. Science as we know it has, like everything else, been forced into the service of the almighty dollar. Too often corporate consumerism controls and directs science when it should be the other way around. Why else would we see so much money directed to genetic engineering projects designed to benefit agribusiness and pharmaceuticals and so little toward research and development of cheap, renewable solar energy? The former promises exorbitant profit for a few while the latter would merely create the underpinnings of sustainable societies while (incidentally) disenfranchising the oil companies. Additionally, only a fraction of modern science research budgets are concerned with preserving biodiversity, known to fundamentalists as the Creation.

If the current extreme conflict between fundamentalism and modernism is the result of the rapid pace of technological change, one way out is to slow down. It was shocking to me a few years ago when I realized that I completely agreed with the Catholic Pope's statement condemning genetic engineering. How can we just drift into redesigning the planetary ecosystems when we have no idea how the originals work? It's like asking a three-year-old to redesign the space shuttle engines. We need to pay attention to what kind of science our public dollars are funding.

Perhaps September 11 will remind us all to simply slow down. Get off that jet plane and reflect. Every one of us can take the time to reaffirm the fundamental values common to all human beings: connections with family, friends and community; freedom to pursue happiness; symphonies; the smile of a baby; the beauty of nature; love.

These common values are secular humanism, the template of shared morality that all religions are based upon. They are the true fundamentalism. Patriarchal fundamentalism is about control and so it adds a whole host of other things—hatred of homosexuals, fear of women's power, and contempt for nature— to the list of shared values it promotes. But the secret is, these agendas are not shared by all and all we have to do is say NO.

The scariest thing in the world today is the crossroads where patriarchal fundamentalism and corporate capitalism meet. Like a pair of evil twins, these two can feed off each other to create stunning evil. The Bush organized crime family's Gulf War precipitated the current terrorist attack as surely as the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo touched off the First World War. Six thousand buried in New York are payback for millions of starving Iraqis. The Bush family will benefit from the conflict they generated in innumerable ways, as they draw power from the patriotic fervor of our home grown Taliban lead by Robertson and Falwell. The Bush family and their Republican cohorts have effectively manipulated the support of fundamentalist Christians, mainly because, as an organized crime family, they share the same patriarchal values. Darkly mirroring this business, the terrorists adroitly commandeered all the trappings of the consumer society they supposedly abhor: flight training, credit cards, cell phones, the internet.

Long ago, in another age, before the Supreme Court stole the presidential election of 2000 and appointed a crown puppet to rule us, there was a candidate who once spoke the truth. Al Gore wrote in his book Earth in the Balance, that environmental stewardship should become the new organizing principle of society. During the campaign of 2000, he never found the courage to make that statement again. It might have saved him, and us. But, nonetheless, he, a major party candidate for the Leader of Free World did make that statement at one time. Some of us have not forgotten, and we will be looking for leaders who will make that statement again and again, and turn it into action.

As citizens, we can nurture the shoots of wisdom that still appear in our hyperactive yet atrophied culture. Shoots of this wisdom surely also exist in the Islamic world. I don't know what they are because it is not my culture, but I can pray that they will be nurtured by those within Islam who understand. There is no doubt that the roots of understanding run deep. The great poet Jalaluddin Rumi, who was born in Afghanistan in the thirteenth century wrote:

Mankind has an unfulfillment, a desire, and he struggles to fulfill it through all kinds of enterprises and ambitions.
But it is only in love that he can find fulfillment.