Excursus: the war in Afghanistan, international politics, and fundamentalism

Tonight President Barrack Obama announced the United States' intention to increase troop levels by 30,000. At this point the U.S. and other Western nations have been embroiled in an arduous struggle with groups like Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and others. The clarion call for the majority of the western world was the attacks on the Twin Towers on September 11th, 2001. These are difficult and painful realities that all of us in one way or another are forced to presently deal with.

These current political realities, however, betray a cultural war that has been going on for at least five hundred years - perhaps even two millennia. This cultural war is a struggle of ideas and broad disagreement on how truth is discovered. It is a disagreement on what role reason plays in an individual's life and what place should things like religion and revelation play within society. Beginning with Greek rationalism in the sixth century BCE western civilization began to undergo a significant shift in its orientation to the natural world and to the intellect. Prior to this the Greeks conceptualized nature as the expression of various deities and as events in history as expressions of their various and capricious wills. This shifted, though, with the advent of philosophy in both the pre-Socratic and post-Socratic period. Democritus for example argued that all living things were composed of atoms (discreet instances of matter that could no longer be broken down) and that things like people, animals, and other organisms were merely the composite of these particles. Death was simply the dissolution of these particles and birth was their recombining in new forms. Socrates too, in his various dialogues, questioned the logic of divine worship, and of grounding morality in the will of a deity ('Eutrypho' is one example). He argued instead that these things could be discovered through reason; the careful and slow task of asking questions of one's self, and the physical world around us. Our knowledge would always be limited to some degree but we could at least know some things.

The chief antagonist to ancient philosophy was the nascent Christian church. Early Christians argued that God's revelation in Jesus had preeminence over human reason. Reason's role was important, but subservient to what God had made known to us through revelation. If reason posed serious questions to what had been revealed, than it must be misguided. An expression of mankind's desire to not submit to their creator. Anything that agreed with the Christian revelation was a pre-cursor to the Gospel. The early father's of the church like Irenaeus, Origen, Ambrose, Gregory of Nyssa and others argued for something known as 'appropriation.' Since Jesus was God's word, they argued, all that is found by human reason and agrees with the Gospel was actually an expression of God's revelation in pre-Christian cultures. In this sense, people like Socrates were viewed as 'Pre-Christian christians' and could thus be 'appropriated' by the Church. One example of this perspective is Michaelangelo's Sistine Chapel in which biblical Hebrew prophets are alternated with Greek Oracles who also foretold the coming of Jesus. This perspective in which revelation has preeminence and reason a subservient role was consolidated in the West when Emperor Justinian ordered Plato's Academy closed in 529 AD and the study of philosophy apart from revelation was outlawed.

This was not to last forever, however. Beginning in the thirteenth century western Europe underwent a Renaissance in which classical Greek and Roman literature was rediscovered. Emphasis slowly began to shift and society again began to view reason differently. People began to re-read the works of Plato, and other philosophic treatises that had survived. The result was the emergence of nascent Science: studies in anatomy, medicine, and more. Emphasis began to be placed on learning the original languages in order to read texts in their original context. An emerging sense of history as 'other' began to appear. This eventually led to the Enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth century. Religion increasingly had a more and more marginalized role within western Europe. By the time the nineteenth century was coming to a close the inroads had gone so far that religious institutions began to react. The early twentieth century saw the creation of religious groups that insisted upon the 'fundamentals' of their religion. These groups increasingly saw themselves as in reaction to the dominant culture who had largely undercut religion's importance in every day life.

Now at the beginning of the twenty-first century this same war of ideas continues. The battles of the past century in the West has become the battle of the current century among Islamic communities. Muslims like Abul Ala Muwadudi, a Pakistani journalist and politician in the 1950's feared that Islam itself was under threat and about to disappear. The result was a united attack and mobilization against secular modernism throughout the 60's and 70's. A man by the name of Sayyid Qutb took this even further. He argued that not only the west but also Islamic society itself had become permeated with secularism and had to be purged. It was men like this who inspired Ossama Bin Laden and others to form the Islamic fundamentalist coalition against western nations like the U.S. They feel as though their very religion and way of life are at stake.

In the end only history will tell us how this will end and where it will all lead. What is clear, however, is that the issues we are facing are not simply geo-political or militaristic. They are ideological. What is needed is a broad cultural education. We need to learn our current place in history and we need bright people in our universities to write and educate. Again, no one knows where this will all lead but personally I think there is a 'Brave new world' ahead and this current issue is another expression of fundamentalism's reaction to religion's increased marginalization. The religious traditions that have nurtured us for the past 2500 years cannot remain as they have; they will need to evolve as they always have. Refusal to adapt is simply to court further marginalization. Religion must meet our needs and fears: ones now shaped by stem cell research, cloning, and genetic engineering. Again, only time will tell.

If this topic interests you, read the following to get started out: The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism by Karen Armstrong