From: Tom Givon tgivon@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU
Subject: THE FUNDAMENTALIST'S MIND
For the last three weeks, I have been listening to the loose talk emanating from my University and getting increasingly mystified at the utter incoherence of what I hear, and at its supreme detachment from reality, leastwise as I know it. What I have been hearing can be divided into four compatible creeds.
One: "Turn the other cheek". Like Christ, like Gandhi, like Martin Luther King. For peace is a supreme, overriding value and must be maintained at all costs. I listen and I wonder if it would be in good taste to remind my learned colleagues about some of the other practitioners of this ancient doctrine: the 50,000 Huguenots on St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572; the 1,000,000 Armenians on Moussa Dag in 1915; the 6,000,000 Jews in Europe in the 1940s; the 600,000 Rwandan Ba-Tutsi in August 1994. They all turned the other cheek.
I am likewise tempted, sorely, to jiggle my learned colleagues' chain about what this world would have been like if we had turned the other cheek to Hitler; to Tojo; to Stalin. Some of the people who didn't turn the other cheek never had the luxury of a rich father, a safe Ivy League haven, or the right exculpatory ideology when they were called to serve. Poor slobs, it never occurred to them they had a choice. They just up and went, and we are eternally in their debt.
Two: "Maintain all civil liberties at all costs, come what may". We all love our liberties, but liberty on rare occasions must be tempered with other principles equally vital to our survival. The dead, wherever their poor soul may come to rest, seem to be conspicuously deprived of all liberties.
Three: Discuss all available options in public, ad nauseam--a national teach-in--before we take any action". Terrific, and let Osama Bib-Laden, al Qaeda and the Taliban watch it all on CNN.
Four, and perhaps most disturbing: "We regret the tragedy, but we deserve it; for we have provoked the poor murderous buggers, the dear exterminating angels, with our rotten foreign policy and our support for Israel". What disturbs me most about this last one is how profoundly detached it is from who them guys are and what really ails them. That is, how utterly wide it falls of the Fundamentalist's mind-cast.
So let us refresh our collective memory about what drives the Fundamentalists bonkers, what really ails them--be they Christian, Jewish, Hindu or Moslem. What drives them to a pitch of exterminatory wrath is not what we do, but what we are and what we stand for:
Above all, the Fundamentalist's truth is cast in the harsh cement of Scripture, in articles of faith, from here to eternity. To question, to doubt, to change one's mind, are worse sins than fornication or adultery (which may be confessed and forgiven).
What worries me most about my learned colleagues, I suppose, is how much they remind me of the Fundamentalist. How adept they seem to be at reducing enormous complexities to shining, eternal, single principles. How little they are inclined to change their minds. Like my ex-teacher Noam Chomsky, the pied piper of hectoring, self-righteous dissent, they seem to have been frozen in time, still raging against the futility of Vietnam, the ubiquity of the CIA, the evil Military, the oppressive Government, the currupting Media, the Molloch of Capitalism. The pantheon of their enemies, like that of the Fundamentalist's, is eternal and immutable. And just as inherently evil. Great Satan incarnate.
There is nothing all that novel about Fundamentalists. The 6th Century sage Heraclitos of Ephesos pegged them rather neatly (Fragment 126):
They raise their voices at stone idolsAll this is not to suggest that I like everything my government does, or that our foreign policy has been immaculate. Just for the record, I had protested our sorry adventure in Vietnam since 1954, and have supported the right of the Palestinians to a state of their own ever since before I can remember. But seeing as how we are under the gun, and all in it together in a complex and fog-shrouded world, the least one would expect of learned folk who are paid to think is a measure of plain old Aristotelian common sense.
As a man might argue with his doorpost,
Having understood so little of the Gods.
Tom Givon
Web page spun on 26 October 2001 by Peter B Gilkey 202 Deady Hall, Department of Mathematics at the University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-1222, U.S.A. Phone 1-541-346-4717 Email:peter.gilkey.cc.67@aya.yale.edu of Deady Spider Enterprises |