Putting the Fun in Fundie

(not really, but let's try to have fun anyway)

 This is my attempt to lay some thinking around fundamentalism to complement what I wrote about materialism.  A friend and member of the wonderful little study group I’ve described before commented that my materialism essay was good, yet spent a lot of time describing what I don’t ascribe to, and perhaps not enough about what I do.

 I think this is a fair point and a great segue to fundamentalism.  I’ve been rather overwhelmed in the last ten years or so at the varieties of fundamentalisms I find in every place I look.  In religious circles, of course; but also in all kinds of other circles, too: modern medicine, education, leisure, politics, economics, warfare, entertainment, you name it.

 In my last essay I wrote:

 “ . . . we impose this thinking on the universe, forgetting that we got those very patterns from observing the universe in the first place (and then placed a flag there and declared, ‘this is how it really is, stop looking any further and interpret everything you see now based only on this reality.’)"  

I find this to be a pretty good description of what I’m talking about when I speak of fundamentalism.  So, in education for example, we are fixated on the fundamentalist notion that young humans need schooling and are incomplete, deviant, or dangerous without it.  In religion, we are fixated on the “right and true path to God,” and the need to spread the message of this path to as many poor uninitiated humans as possible.  Atheism is a special case of this religious fundamentalism, but no less a fundamentalism for all that.  After so many years of seeing this so clearly from my vantage point, I started to see that there was, in fact, much more agreement among apparently disparate points of view.  The agreement was: fundamentalism (this is how it is, period).

 Once, I got so full of vitriol I wrote a little diatribe that was meant to be scathing and tongue-in-cheek at the same time.  Here is a excerpt:

“The atheists are really the second most devout fundamentalists, the first being the hedonists.  Mickey Mouse and Apple lead the most successful jihad the world has ever seen, more destructive and exploitative than any previous Inquisition.

Some of the Christians are humanists, while others are tribal neophytes, self-organizing in homogeneous “villages” of “we all agree with each other”, complete with shopping mall atmosphere and consumer-friendly Jesus.  For the latter, the world is 4000 years old, the Bible is to be taken literally, but only if by literal one means its English paraphrasing.  And Jesus said from his perch on the crucifix, “Your personal salvation depends on shutting down your thinking mind.”  As for the humanists, the Pope and Bono lead them onward to an imagined day when the poor will no longer be with us and everyone will be Nice.

 I have a lifelong and unavoidable relationship to Christian fundamentalism due to being (partially) raised in it.  Actually, I went to a cute little ELCA (Evangelical Lutheran Church of America) church growing up, but this was a compromise between my Dad (a Christian fundamentalist) and my Mom (much more of a spiritualist).  So, this was the first fundamentalism I swam in.  To this day, Christian fundamentalism earns an extra dose of ire from me, because it’s so close to my upbringing.  It’s why I currently don't identify as Christian (if anyone asks, although no one does), but I’m married to a Presbyterian minister and attend her cute little church most Sundays. And I usually enjoy it!  I know, tortuous, and confusing.  As an adolescent, I turned to science partially because it offered a way to sidestep outside of Christianity and take a look at it from a different lens.  By the time I was studying Physics and Math at university, however, I was becoming aware that my fellow Physics students and my professors were, for the most part, just as much in thrall to their form of fundamentalism (materialism) as the close-minded Christians I grew up with.  So then, I went to a seminary and studied (mostly progressive) Christianity for a couple years.  It was the same there.   With that done, it was off to Rudolf Steiner and anthroposophy, and I found plenty of “fundies” there too.  Now I’m so full of philosophies, my cup truly runneth over.  That said, I don’t claim to be a real “student of philosophy”. I’ve never been academic enough about my approach for that.  Academia was a life path I considered, until I realized that was another fundamentalism!  Sheesh, it’s everywhere!

 Charles Eisenstein has written quite clearly about the motivations that drive so many of us to try to “pin it down,” and place our flag in our chosen fundamentalist construct.  It has to do with wanting to belong to a group of others who approve of us and our actions, a group that can help us make sense of the world and ourselves.  But sense-making is so hard these days, removed as we are from true experience, from deeply held stories and traditions, from authentic connection.   I also think of fundamentalism as a kind of anesthetic, a kind of drugged sleep.  Not the good kind of sleep that I write about in my post on the alternative Lord’s Prayer.  But a depressed sleep that comes on when the world is too uncertain, too scary, too triggering, too something.  It’s a defense mechanism when life proves too hard to handle.  There are so many people sleeping through their lives in this way (including me!), and this provokes real compassion in me.  We all need to feel some amount of safe, connected, affirmed, held (we also need to feel an appropriate amount of unsure, scared, uncomfortable and puzzled).   The world as constructed by modern humans so often does not provide that for us.  It’s a vicious spiral that leads to more and more fundamentalism, which is why I also think of fundamentalism as an addiction.   A reliable sign of fundamentalist addiction is saviour complex.  One becomes so sure that one has the Key to Truth that one wants to seek out the poor souls doomed to sin/ignorance and bring them to the side of the light/enlightenment.  This last sentence encompasses every religious revival, the efforts of Bill Nye and Bill Gates and Pat Robertson, U.S. foreign policy, left-wing and right-wing think tanks, Nike and Disney, the military-industrial complex, the industrial-medical complex, the medical-educational-prison complex. . .  It seems everyone is trying to get each of us to “join the movement”.  But “the movement” is fundamentalism, no matter its outward trappings.  A close associate of saviour complex is rampant do-gooder-ism.  I suffer from this one quite a lot, still in recovery. 

 What, then, can a person do who is trying to walk a path of anti-fundamentalism?  Well, you can’t get fundamentalist about opposing fundamentalism, that’s for sure!  And, it’s a little lonely, too, I admit, because you can’t join stuff and feel like the good guy, or the sacrificing hero, or the suffering saint!   Perhaps this is why I spend so much time defining what I don’t believe and don’t ascribe to.  I’m trying to carve out some space where no flags are planted, and where I don’t intend to plant a flag, either.

“Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,
There is a field.  I'll meet you there."
-Rumi

I also appreciate a saying of Charles Eisenstein’s that “I hold opinions about things, but I try to hold them lightly.”  This humility is a hallmark of an anti-fundamentalist way of working, I think.  It also has aspects of certain Buddhist ideas of the “middle way”:

Not holding onto reality,
not getting stuck in the void,
you are neither holy nor wise, just
an ordinary fellow who has completed his work.

Layman P’ang, quoted in The Enlightened Heart, Edited by Stephen Mitchell

Trying to be anti-fundamentalist is very helpfully informed by my relatively recent reading of anti-racism literature.  Racism is, of course, an entrenched kind of fundamentalism.  Michelle Alexander’s book The New Jim Crow and Ibram Kendi’s book Stamped from the Beginning were amazing reads for me.  Not to mention Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy.  They helped me with my own personal racism and understanding of institutional racism.  And they also expanded my understanding of social constructs beyond just racism per se, including and especially fundamentalism.  The core of anti-racism is, as the name implies, negation.  At first, this really turned me off.  Then as I read these books, I began to really see the power this approach contains and the clarity it brings.  It is the same approach that I think was embodied in the non-violent action of the Rev Dr Martin Luther King Jr.  It is, I think (with a lightly-held opinion), what makes democracy, when it works, so powerful.  One allows the tension of “no” to remain and resonate in spaces where everyone is so darn sure of themselves.

 When one practices anti-racism one is opposing policies, actions, words and patterns of behavior that are founded on false certainties that people hold, for instance about the inherent abilities, propensities, origins, likes or dislikes, etc of white and black and brown people; When one practices anti-fundamentalism one is opposing policies, words, actions or patterns of behavior that are founded on false certainties about the origins of the universe, the nature of matter and spirit, etc.   This means that one can find racism (and fundamentalism) anywhere: in a group of white people as much as in a group of black people; in scientists as much as in church folks;  in rich communities and poor communities; in liberal circles and conservative circles; in public schools and private schools (including Waldorf schools).  Crucially, as I read Kendi, anti-racism means you can’t label a person as a racist. People are not racist, because people are all just people.  That is the core of anti-racism.  Racism is to be found in policies, actions, words;  racism is not an inherent quality of certain persons, just as inferiority or superiority is not an inherent quality of certain persons.  That’s the beauty of the anti-approach.

So, what can a person affirm if one is determined to be anti-fundamentalist?  Well, life and experience, first and foremost.  And speaking about what one actually knows from experience, rather than what one has read or what Great Thinker or Wise Sage or Holy Book one has become an expert on, or devoted one’s life to.

All of the above I hope explains why I adore the poem by Wendell Berry, “The Contrariness of the Mad Farmer”.  I even made a little video about my love for this poem on Instagram not that long ago.  It’s a refusal to plant a flag, to pin oneself down or to pin anyone else down.  In this refusal, in this negation, I hope I’m laying a path of affirmation.  The affirmation is life and mystery, the affirmation is diversity of experience and opinion, the affirmation is humility and never-complete becoming.  And it is, I hope, a way to stay awake in the world, the real happening world, where “this is how it is,” never really is, in my experience.

Photo by Jason Leung on Unsplash