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SIT-Fundamentalism: March 4, 1998

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Special Report: Angst, Fundamentalism and Revivalisms; Reformations and Great Awakenings

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* ãFundamentalismä has been given a political coloration, particularly by Likud in smearing its enemies. This coloration began with the Irani-hostage crisis of 1979-81 and spread to the Intifada of 1987- in the West Bank and Gaza. But Islamic Fundamentalism is not the danger, nor is the fundamentalism rippling through the houses of Islam --Sunni, Shiite and other lesser denominations-- the only revival underway. We are in the Fourth Great Awakening and it is tied to the Fourth Industrial Revolution --the Computer-Electronics-Information Age, which began in the early 1970s and is just reaching its peak in this decade.

* The Reformation was the enlightened theological response to the burgeoning of knowledge and commerce of the Renaisssance and Age of Discovery. The key to the Reformation was that as education expanded, the Catholic Church policy of maintaining the people in a blissful state of ignorance no longer worked. Its universalist ambitions were obsolete in the expanding world of seaborne commerce and settlement where kingdoms were competing in the expansion. The most dour reformers, the Calvinists, could not make hell any more terrible than Danteâs, they could only make it more certain to those who were motivated by faith more than the balanced faith and reason embedded by the Platonists and neo-Platonists in Judaism and Christianity.

* People buffeted by change in their daily lives look for solutions in their faith and if their ancient faith has no answers they seek a new, kindred faith that does offer answers. As the Agricultural Revolution of the 17th-18th Century unfolded and as the 1st Industrial Revolution began to rev up, peopleâs lives began being disrupted. In response to this and to the enlightenment unleashed by Newton and others, the 1st Great Awakening --the Evangelicals v. the neo-Calvinists-- began, and the love-inspiring Evangelicals, led by the Wesleys, and the Baptists beat out the fear-inspiring post-Puritans epitomized by Jonathan Edwards. The Awakening, though, spawned a counter-Enlightenment which gave rise to the Unitarians and Universalists.

* That spawned a second Great Awakening as Trinitarians sought to combat ignorance and the spread of unitarian theology on the frontier. Bible Societies were established in Boston, New York, and elsewhere to publish scriptures and tracts and proliferate them. Other odd sects began the same thing. Johnny Appleseed spread Swedenborgian tracts with his seeds and seedlings. New Churches with American and apocolyptic twists were born: Mormans and Millerites --who spawned the Adventists and Jehovahâs Witnesses. At the same time, steam and coal had begun to propel the 2nd Industrial Revolution. But as late as the mid-1850s, in Britain, more were employed as household servants than in the factories of the Industrial Revolution.

* The 3rd Industrial Revolution saw the change from giant coal-fired machines and mega-plants, to gasoline and smaller, personal machines. Industries other than big steel and textile mills --which pour out masses of commodities-- were born to make little machines for purchase and use by the individual; cars, appliances. Agriculture had begun mechanization in the 2nd Industrial age and by 1900 the frontier was settled. About 1890, as anarchism and socialism were spreading across Europe and into our immigrant port cities, a new revivalism was spreading in the heartlands --pentacostalism in the South and temperance in the midwest and west. In New England, Christian Science spread rapidly as medicine was still emerging from quackery.

* The Fourth Great Awakening began, also in part to Nuclear War angst, etc., with the Hippies and their Age of Aquarius nonsense, which led the Beetles to Hindu fakirs and others to Buddha and was also being expressed by odd California cults. It has mutated into self-improvement cults such as Scientolgy and EST. All this is also an expression of the disruption of the continuum of our lives by other technological and commercial changes.

* As the electronic age has spawned increasingly rapid, and increasingly broadly cast change, more people in more faiths have been effected and have responded to faith in the same natural human way. Islam now has its revival going on, as does Hinduism. In America, Presbyterian Churches are bulging in some places --even New York -- where the ministers stick to matters of faith and Christian living. In the South and through the Media, all manner of old-time religious practitioners --including the Elmer Gantrys; Swaggart, Jim Bakker, Oral Roberts-- have reached tens of millions; though some may quibble, millions of lives have been turned around for the better. Among the Houses of Judaism, Lubbavitcher Orthodoxy and other Hassidic sects have exploded from the New York city boroughs in their expression of this ineluctable force of faith. Judaism places scant faith in the afterlife of the Egyptians, Chaldeans, Greeks, Christ and Mohammed, but there are hints of salvation and hope in some things now being preached.

* Religious revivals are spawned by magnitudal agricultural and industrial changes, which also spawn great political changes. Just as the Elmer Gantrys have learned to fleece the faithful from the Popes of old (Peterâs pence and the sale of indulgences), Politicians learned to harness revivalism into political power in Roman times --Constantine established the Christian Church after it had spread like wildfire in the collapsing economy of the third Century. Even before that, the established church had been the fourth co-equal branch of government since the first kingdoms of Mesopotamia in the 4th millenium BC (where the military caste had been the fifth branch). That Christianity's spread had been spawned by a long-term shift in climate from about AD 200, reversing the amiable conditions that had persisted since 900 BC, the dawn of the Iron Age. The shift Constantineâs empire was caught in and ruined by and which spawned the Arab breakout and the barbarian invasions from Eurasia, persisted into the age of the Crusades.

* Just as Constantine co-opted the power of Christian faith to revive his flagging empire and then involved himself in negotiating important matters of doctrine in order to try to heal already-widening schisms, secular leaders have continued to involve themselves in matters of the established faith. So too, since theology is a form of faith and reason, of ideology and politics, many ambitious demagogues have found the clergymanâs robes to be a fine place from which to advance their more secular agendas. There have been many false prophets and practitioners of liberation theology, one of the most infamous of whom is former-father Aristide of Haiti. But while Catholic orders were practicing their liberation agenda in Latin America, the Adventists, Jehovahâs Witnesses, Mormans and others were expanding more rapidly than the liberationists were advancing their socialist agendas. They lost the round but are still among us, and in the Protestant denominations, too, always at the headquarters and always driving parishes away. Bad preachers and bad doctrine drive the faithful into the way of good preachers or worse exploiters.

* I have already written of how good preachers and church leaders target their objectives and how bad ones do and wonât go over that again. But just as revivalism gives the TV-broadcasting Elmer Gantrys their opportunities and secular ideologues theirs, so too, revivalism --fundamentalism, creates political power which is easily turned into political actions --crusading. The popes used the crusades to win lands back from Islam and to win back from the rival Eastern Church. Today, Hindu revivalism expressed by the BJP, has Indiaâs Muslims, Sikhs and others quite nervous. In the US, the pro-life movement has spawned a few disturbed zealots whoâve bombed abortion clinics. These revivals donât solve everyoneâs problems though they attract all the sick in spirit and the economically troubled.

* Hamas has exploited the directionless life young Palestinians and other Arabs have been forced into by the failure of their parentâs secular-socialist politics and leaders such as Arafat, Nasser, Qaddafi, Assad and Saddam. This explains the vicious massacres in Algeria as well.

* Even without Israeli occupation, the expanding youth --and birth rates are all too high-- are growing up in countries where there is no more land, not enough industry or commerce and too much bureaucratic government soaking up too much of the revenues. With no opportunity in this life, they are predisposed to contemplate the rewards promised the faithful in the next life. So, too, with clinic bombers and Kamikaze pilots. Though a fundamentalist cleric of Hamas has no brief for Saddam as a Muslim, his persecution is similar enough to the Palestinian captivity and as an expedient, is more than enough to justify taking up Saddamâs name in advancing their own cause, if only for the provocative reminder to Likud. And as I have said, Israel has revivalist-fundamentalists among its many factions, including the young assassin of Rabin and the Hebron settler who massacred Muslims in the Tomb of the Patriarchs sanctuary four years ago this week.

* In China, where 300 millions are displacing to the cities and 100 million are classed as ãdriftersä not having caught on to urban ways, Christian churches are burgeoning, though officially many are ãsuppressed,ä including the Catholic Church. But China lost 30-50 million lives in the Tai-ping Rebellion of the 1850s. That was a quasi-Christian fundamentalist reaction to the Opium Wars and internal turbulence. It is understandable that authoritarian Beijing would want to control the shape of religious evangelism to prevent fragmentation of its empire back into warlordism.

2. Moves & Counter-Moves: Looking for Strategy, Understanding popular movements;

* (From ICU 2-26-1 of Feb. 26th) Clarification of whatâs going on in this ongoing strategic analysis is in order. I am analyzing political hot air, PR and propaganda strategies, political-diplomatic-litigational misconduct, etc, not writing emotional screed and attacks on any people or peoples in general. I do not demonize; that is the trick of tyrants: I analyze the scoundrels who do demonize other peoples in order to make trouble, so as to gain and exploit political advantage, which is the way to legally steal the source of wealth and power --government. We are looking here for keys to solutions to conflicts. We are looking for strategies at play in order to indicate strategies that might work towards reconciliation of emotionally-charged issues. We are doing this in real-time, not in an academic lab, long after the fact, when hindsight is plentiful.

* We all know that games are being played here, we just donât necessarily know which ones, or how theyâre played. But we do understand games. Once we understand these high-stake games of power confrontations, they cease being confusing. With understanding, fears recede rapidly. Now able to rise above the playing field and see the whole game and sub games being played (as with understanding the roles and moves blockers and defensive backs in football), we can even find aspects entertaining, even amusing in an ironic way. ãThe world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel,ä as Horace Walpole wrote in 1776. Our best solutions, seeking reconciliation, will be built when, understanding the true motives and underlying needs of the disputants, we can better define and demonstrate common ground beyond the loud, emotional screaming of the demagogues and stirrer-uppers of disputes. But understanding will never eliminate the need to be armed with both the carrot and the big stick,and the will to use both to the necessary extent. (To be continued.)

* (Continuation from ICU-26-1) People ordinarily do not engage in conflict beyond the childish brawl or the occasional spat with a neighbor; we go about the ordinary process of survival and getting along as a useful and widely known academic model, Abraham Maslowâs ãHierarchyä economically demonstrates; but now and then, we look for some excitement as a change from our humdrum; and there is ãthe latest craze.ä Politics consists of the arts of motivating people to abandon those ordinary activities of life to support and sustain some greater ambition or aspiration of the state: building monuments, creating arable lands, launching wars; creating, dispensing and taking othersâ wealth as means of advancing the politically proposed common cause. When leaders sink to the politics of demagoguery and tyranny, to demonize targeted others, they are inviting their followers to descend from their ordinary activities to obtain a goal with a base incentive of taking something away from someone else --an appeal to the target followerâs greed, an appeal to the man --an original sense of the ad hominem:

ãIn reading the history of nations, we find that, like individuals, they have their whims and their peculiarities; their seasons of excitement and recklessness, when they care not what they do. We find that wole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object, and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously imressed with one delusion, and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first. We see one nation suddenly seized, from its highest to its lowest members, with a fierce desire of military glory; another as sudenly becoming crazed on a religious scruple; and neither of them recovering its senses until it has shed rivers of blood and sowed a harvest of groans and tears, to be reaped by its posterity.ä

-- Charles Makay, LLD; Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds,Preface to the 1852 Ed., p. xviii

* When leaders call people to a higher purpose, rather than attacking others for a taking and redistribution of wealth, they are calling the people to create, defend, develop, as did giants like Washington, Lincoln, TR, Churchill, the Mandela-De Klerk-Tutu combine and FDR --JFK knew the talk points but never followed through to deliver the victory. Similarly with religions and ideologies, some call people as individuals and communities to rise above the sins of indulgence --as with Yankee revivalists saving souls from alcohol, prostitution, etc. A potentially interesting and highly useful book about religion, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt has been published by Professor Christine Leigh Heyrman of Delaware, who contributed an economical distillation in her Op-Ed ãReviving a Revival,ä on the flagging fortunes of ãPromise Keepersä in the NY Times on Feb. 24th She it is, who has defined how good revivalists --the Yankee evangelists I just cited-- go about their business; so too with great Statesmen. * Bad religious leaders --usually of established state religions or esoteric cults-- launch crusades against other religions and minority sects in order to conquer souls or destroy them for their differences. Here, the game is absolute control of a homogenous mass that will swell the coffers with additional tithings or the crusadersâ spoils of war.

* So too with ideological leaders appealing to a religiously defined people and the same holds true of ideologically motivated crusading. Good leaders seek to unite people in purpose, while respecting individual preferences. Bad leaders seek to divide the body politicinto factions based on perceived differences and relative advantage-privilege. Since human motivation is relative, wealth and comfort are naturally relatively distributed. In the politics of divisiveness, human envy, usually under control, is encouraged and the public purse and its tax revenues is always the source and purpose of the game playing between classes, factions or communities. Internal and foreign mischief is always the result of the political process, not the economic or social and it is never spontaneous.

* Russell Baker has written:

"Crusades typically start by being admirable, proceed to being foolish and end by being dangerous... The missionary impulse of people blessed by higher wisdom can be a terrifying force."

--R. Baker, New York Times, Op-Ed, "The Danger Stage," May 31, 1994.

* But once an emotional mischief is set afoot by a demagogue or tyrant, it takes time to contain. A democratic crowd is a mob with a ballot, it is only disciplined as long as it is restrained by leadership and civic pride; hence our foundersâ republican checks and balances on the democratic herd. Participatory democracy as practiced in Athens, Rome and in New England town meetings, has the additional limit in that you can only participate in the range of a half-dayâs journey if youâre to be assured of a bed for the night. If the leader chooses to have a mob, he may have it for the speechifying, and Mackay additionally warns:

ãMen, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, and one by one.ä

-- Charles Makay, LLD; Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, Preface to the 1852 Ed., p. xx

* As analytically minded news consumers, broadcasters and citizens we are reclaiming our senses from the demagogues ãslowly, and one by one.ä

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