searching for the greatest enemy of modernity

Today, a popular narrative on the Western political right holds that the parts of the world which adopt the ideas of the Enlightenment, such as the importance of science and technology, political debate and democracy, and religious pluralism through secularism, is being challenged by Islamic groups on a mission to undo virtually everything the West has introduced. The now unfortunately late Christopher Hitchens pounded the podium in his justification for casting Islam as the enemy of modernity, siding with those on the hysterical right whose days are devoted to looking for signs of this vast Muslim conspiracy to take over the world, and whose rage at those who object to their blanket cast of all Muslims as complicit in this plot fills countless comment sections of innumerable news and current events blogs. But by focusing strictly on Muslim fundamentalists’ disturbing and violent tendencies, they’re loosing track of the underlying driver for their actions. The fundamentalism. It’s that unwavering, blind devotion to proselytizing by any means necessary that we should find threatening since it may come in different flavors popular at different times, but it always fosters very dangerous tensions.

Granted, there are plenty of Islamic extremists whose attitudes often descend into utter barbarity, and their insecurities about normal human behavior and sexuality fostered by theological hardliners lead to absolutely absurd police actions in archconservative Muslim societies. But just because its was the Islamic version of religious fundamentalism figuring so prominently in global conflicts for the last decade and a half, we can’t go around declaring that over a billion Muslims must be in on some grand plan to dismantle the Western world’s positive contributions to humanity. How does one coordinate a billion people to walk lock-step with each other over decades, especially when these people won’t shy from participating in the very behaviors they’re told to abhor when the mullahs aren’t looking? (NSFW) And right wing conspiracy theorists scared of invaders in their midst aren’t a new phenomenon either. If today’s leading anti-Muslim activists been born a century prior, they’d be looking for the signs of the Jewish conspiracy to rule the world through banks by which they fund the near-imminent New World Order. Indeed all too many still do, with some going as far as declaring a biology class teaching evolution to be an actor in a Zionist plot. They’d cite The Protocols and snidely respond to all critics with Yiddish pejoratives, just like they throw around archaic Arabic pejoratives today.

Caught up by stranger danger, these conspiracy theorists are missing that what they’re rightfully terrified of is religious fundamentalism itself. Because it comes in an exotic cloak from foreign lands doesn’t make it totally different from any other type of fundamentalism. In fact, fundamentalist Christians and Jews also oppose the consumption of alcohol, prefer to see their women away from sight and out of school, believe that criticism of their devotion is grounds for violent reprisals, and that healthy human sexuality should be treated like an awful disease to be cured. Across the board, they agree on so many things, if it weren’t for the minutia of their books and theologies dictating that they hate each other with a passion, one could imagine them joining forces for a devastating blow to the modern world. The big reason why today it’s the Muslim fundamentalists who play out their violent fantasies of punishing the unbelievers is because they live in nations where this is condoned by a radical social construct, or where there’s no force of law to stop them. Over the centuries, the West has gotten more liberal and its fundamentalists have to contend with powerful law enforcement and courts that don’t look kindly on the idea of violently punishing someone for having a different opinion or worshipping the same gods in a different way. We tried that in the Dark Ages and during the Inquisition. This is why we outlaw it now.

Obviously, we should not be making excuses for violent lunatics who believe that a deity wants them to go out and kill people solely for the crime of not believing what they do they, the same exact way they do. And it’s our responsibility to identify such people and keep tabs on them while realizing that violent religious extremism is not the sole domain of one particular religion. It wasn’t that long ago when the KKK terrorized the Bible Belt or when white supremacists from Christian Identity groups tried to bomb government offices and fired their guns at minority kindergartens. Law enforcement came down very hard on them without implicating every Christian as a potential anti-government radical dying to start a race war. Obviously, since most of the country identifies with some form of Christianity, doing so would’ve been political suicide while focusing on minority Muslims is not, but that’s not the issue here. The point is that you need not cast all those under a wide cultural and social umbrella as nefarious evildoers to effectively confront extremist threats. And the second point, as noted above, is that the very things we fear and quote about Muslim extremists is their fundamentalism which goes against everything most of us believe to be trademarks of a modern, better, freer world. Knowing this, we also need to consider that the fundamentalists who oppose Muslim extremists do not want to help us protect this world. It’s more that they disapprove of alien heathens using force to do what they planned to do through politics.

Modernity values individual reason, freedom, and self-determination. Fundamentalism demands obedience, blind faith, and following instructions to the letter. Modernity advocates religious pluralism and secularism so all those who believe in one deity and all those who believe in another are equally protected from prosecution from authorities who disagree with their beliefs, so long as they don’t mandate those beliefs on others with a legislative body of elected officials. Fundamentalism sees only those who believe the right things, and the evil heathens and heretics to be purged and afforded no rights until they convert. Modernity prizes innovation from scientific discoveries and through reasoned debate, adjusting on the fly as new ideas come to light, fostering movements that want to exceed our current limitations. Fundamentalism sees science as either a tool which is to be abused to justify its positions through cherry-picking, or an affront to a deity, and dictates tradition as a mandatory script for life, shunning innovation and dismissing new ideas as sinful and forbidden. Modernity is about growth and change. Fundamentalism is about rigidity and stubbornness, demanding that the world has to adapt to it rather than explore anything outside its own confines. Fundamentalism is antithetical to modern, multicultural, open societies we’re trying to protect. And fundamentalism is what we should be concerned the most about first and foremost because that’s the force that breeds religious extremists of all creeds.