Abstract
The article analyses the motivations of fundamentalists. Typically, fundamentalism is considered to have its origin in determinate cultural or religious systems of beliefs and norms. In this regard, it is possible to distinguish between metaphysical accounts and moral accounts of fundamentalism. The first state that fundamentalism makes claims concerning the reality of cultures and religions. The second hold fundamentalism to be of practical, not of theoretical, nature. This article argues, on the contrary, that fundamentalism does not have its source in religion or culture. Fundamentalists are not motivated by cultural or religious beliefs and reasons. Their intolerance is, in contrast, caused and driven by purely emotional reactions. What makes a fundamentalist is the emotional non-distinction between the intentions and actions of others and the proper behavior in matters of culture and religion. A fundamentalist has equally strong and intense emotional reactions when it comes to others’ integrity as with regard to his or her own piety.
If fundamentalists can be generally characterized by their forthright intention – in actions, words and gestures – to impose a particular cultural, ethnic, racial, or religious doctrine upon others, 1 it is far less clear what precisely makes them have such an intention. If we leave aside the rather crude analysis proposed by the school of political realism, according to which fundamentalism needs to be explained in terms of pure self-interest and rational choice, contemporary political theory commonly sees fundamentalism to arise from and be motivated by norms. Accordingly, fundamentalism is confronted and its defeat is sought on the level of either truth or normativity. A first strategy is to demonstrate that fundamentalists misunderstand the very nature of the norms they propagate and to defend pluralism in metaphysical terms. Another approach is to show that whatever norms fundamentalists might come to hold, they are not justified to impose these norms upon others. Pluralism is defended here as a matter of morality. As a result, these political theories come to imply that moderates either have more correct and sophisticated ontological insights or are morally more competent agents than fundamentalists.
My intuition is, however, that the fault line between fundamentalists and moderates is neither metaphysics nor morality. On the contrary, moderates attribute most probably the same ontological status to norms as fundamentalists and have just as little claim to be moral agents as do fundamentalists. I am going to suggest, as a working hypothesis, that fundamentalists and moderates have different psychologies. I propose that moderates and fundamentalists have different emotional reactions with regard to what others do and say in matters of culture and religion, the latter’s being much more intense and violent. This is due to the fact that fundamentalists are emotionally unable to distinguish between themselves violating a norm and others not respecting a norm, a distinction moderates are emotionally perfectly able to make. Whereas moderates become emotionally highly troubled when they themselves entertain ideas or desires that break cultural or religious norms, their emotions drastically cool down when others disregard these norms. This difference in the emotional engagement with oneself and with others contributes, thus my thesis, to moderatism and tolerance; whereas the emotional non-discrimination between oneself and others results in fundamentalism and intolerance. I conclude with some policy implications of this psychological theory of fundamentalism.
Metaphysics
The paradigm case today is, of course, Islamic fundamentalism. Enormous efforts have been made to deconstruct the Islamists’ narrative and to reveal the wrongness of their discourse showing that nothing in Islam makes it incompatible with democracy, secularism, liberalism and modernity at large. The main objection is that Islamists go wrong about the nature of Islam, that they do not really understand what Islam is all about. The metaphysical assault on fundamentalism, aiming at re-establishing an authentic Islam or at least at grounding some truths concerning Islam, can be divided into two strands: the foundational and the anti-foundational critique.
The foundational critique, which is probably best represented by the work of Abdullahi An’-Naim, 2 argues that the norms Islamists endorse are simply un-Islamic and therefore illegitimate. Fundamentalists’ norms do not correspond to the core or essence of Islam, as it has been revealed in the Koran and the millennial history of Islam. Foundationalists suppose that Islam exists as much as other types or kinds exist, such as ‘chair’, ‘horse’, etc. Insofar as we can individuate an object as a chair qua its chair-ness or its property of being a chair, we can identify intentions, utterances and actions as Islamic qua their Islam-ness. Note that fundamentalists plainly agree with approaching Islam in foundational terms. The only disagreement is about what exactly are the foundations of Islam.
Many political philosophers, who share the metaphysical stance on fundamentalism, do not necessarily agree with the foundationalist strategy. In fact, they very much doubt that there exists Islam as such and that we can discern the true and authentic Islam with the help of universals. Their claim is precisely that foundationalism is the very sin that leads to fundamentalist thought. Anti-foundationalists are either outright skeptical with regard to norms, conceiving norms to be a matter of language and practice rather than of reality (e.g. postcolonial criticism in the wake of Derridean deconstructionism); 3 or they maintain that human agency is a constitutive element of norms. Norms are instantiated by way of an interpretative process that is always and already contextual and historical in nature (this hermeneutical approach to Islam is most famously defended by Nasr Abu Zayd and Tariq Ramadan). 4 Islam exists as a human construction, constantly in flux, and not as an independent universal. ‘Being Islamic’ is not an inherent property of Islamic norms, but a property that we at least partly come to attribute to those norms without necessarily having any further grounds or ontological justification. From this theoretical insight into the nature of norms, anti-foundationalists draw a moral conclusion. Since there exists not one Islam but a plurality of Islams, fundamentalists are not justified to impose their interpretation of Islam.
Morality
Still, according to a great many political theorists the metaphysical confrontation with fundamentalism misses entirely the point. It is at the same moment too illiberal and too accommodating with fundamentalism. Is not freedom of thought one of the cornerstones of liberalism? Thoughts, ideas and desires, no matter what might be their nature, are part of the material that constitutes the most intimate kernel of our private sphere. Why do fundamentalists not have a right to privacy? On the other hand, the metaphysical critique grants far too much to fundamentalism. How can we seriously try to discuss metaphysics with people who stone women for committing adultery or crash airplanes into the Twin Towers? Fundamentalists are mad! No metaphysical argument can overcome this simple truth. What allows people to be fundamentalist, is not their views about the world, but their incapacity to be moral agents, agents who make autonomous use of their proper reason, respecting others as free and equal despite their differences. The problem with fundamentalism is of moral nature and needs to be confronted on the practical and not on the theoretical level. 5
Whereas moralists and liberals are certainly right on both points of their critique of metaphysics, their solution is not entirely without problems. At the very end of the day, moralists can only come to the conclusion that it must be indeed religion, Islam, that impedes moral agency. Accordingly, they find themselves to have either no other solution than to declare Islam the enemy of liberal democracy and to begin to wage a war against Islam; 6 or to take Islam to be a basically liberal religion, thereby risking a fall into the essentialist trap of metaphysical foundationalism. 7
Psychology
As I see the problem, both metaphysicians and moralists do not get the difference between fundamentalists and moderates right. Fundamentalism is not a problem of norms. I think that both fundamentalists and moderates hold more or less the same views concerning culture and religion. Insofar as I understand moderate Muslims and religious people in general, they do not believe their faith to be a matter of interpretation, but to be more or less grounded in God’s word. Moreover, as Akeel Bilgrami illustrates in ‘What is a Muslim?’, 8 moderates have, even though perhaps only unwillingly, due to the oppressions of colonialism, pretty much the same value system as fundamentalists sharing most of their extremist views: the West and liberal culture in general are to be suspected, the Koran constitutes the foundation of the state, of public and civil law as well as of the economy, it regulates marriage, divorce, the condition of women in the private and public spheres, heritage, etc. Fundamentalists and moderates are not divided on metaphysical grounds. They do not disagree about what Islam really is.
Neither do I think that we can distinguish fundamentalists from moderates in terms of morality. Moderate Muslims are morally not more competent persons. Moderates do not go for global jihad, because they believe it to be morally somewhat unjustified. On the contrary, as we just said above, they consider western culture to be the enemy of Islam and feel certainly to some extent even obliged to resist and fight western civilization. If they are not going to join Al-Qaeda right away, then that is for the simple fact that they are emotionally far less involved with matters concerning the West than are fundamentalists. The idea of infidels triggers diversely intense emotional reactions in moderates and fundamentalists. Whereas moderates might feel unease at thinking about the West and remain with a slight sensation of disgust and anger or perhaps only feel pity for westerners, fundamentalists become fully outraged by the very idea of the West. This different emotivity with regard to others explains, in my view, the different behavior of moderates and fundamentalists.
Moderates are emotionally able to distinguish between what they themselves think, desire, say and do and the intentions of others. While their emotional alarm bells ring in case they themselves are going to transgress in thoughts, words, or actions Islamic norms or rules, while their emotional reaction makes it unthinkable for them to live a life outside Islam (just think of the violent feelings a believing Muslim woman might experience imagining herself leaving the house bareheaded), they react emotionally very differently in the case that others intend or decide to deviate from the good life as it is outlined in the Koran. What enables them to tolerate non-believers is the relative emotional calm they have with regard to them. Fundamentalists, on the other hand, are psychologically incapacitated to make a distinction between themselves thinking and doing something and others thinking and doing something. They are as furious with others breaking the norms as they are with themselves when they come to have infidel tendencies. It is this non-distinguished psychological reaction between themselves and others that makes them fundamentalists. Not that moderates never get offended and outraged by others’ behavior. They clearly do so with regard to moral questions and matters of justice. Yet, their psychologies enable them to distinguish between ethics and morality, religion and politics, private and public.
The most interesting question is of course why fundamentalists are too emotionally impaired to make those distinctions, a question I hope to deal with on another occasion. Still, the psychological approach to fundamentalism already brings along some policy implications. It seems that as much as we are not able to easily change the emotional reactions we have with regard to ourselves, in the same sense fundamentalists are unable to change their reactions concerning others. If our actions are most of the time necessitated by our psychology, fundamentalists similarly appear to have no other choice than to give in to their hostile reactions towards others. If we understand this structural similarity between a moderate psychology and a fundamentalist psychology, if we understand that their reactions are as much caused by the psychological category of the ‘unthinkable’ as ours are, we probably condemn fundamentalism a little bit less and begin to empathize slightly with fundamentalists with regard to the difficult psychological condition they find themselves in. This does not mean that relativism slips in through the back door. But it enables us to get engaged with fundamentalism on the only level that really makes the difference: psychology.
Footnotes
A version of this article was presented at the Reset-Dialogues İstanbul Seminars 2014 (“The Sources of Pluralism – Metaphysics, Epistemology, Law and Politics”) that took place at İstanbul Bilgi University from May 15–20, 2014.