TWO POSTS ago I proposed a very particular definition of fundamentalism as the byproduct of our conviction that some of our beliefs capture the world as it really is. Subsequently, I explained how an increasingly open society, like the one we live in, clashes with this conviction and pushes it to extremes, resulting in an unprecedented rise of fundamental behavior.
Now, this problem is not new for us westerners and one can accurately say that our current democratic and increasingly tolerant political organization was originally engineered precisely with this problem in mind. “Political liberalism”, the intellectual movement that conceives the government as a purely procedural and neutral body regulating a society of competing private world-views started as a response to the waves of intense fundamentalism sparked by the Reformation and the clash between two very distinct set of beliefs. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration were philosophical attempts to cope with the new reality of a society divided by fundamentally different beliefs. It was Locke’s battle against fundamentalism that gave birth to our modern idea of tolerance and paved the way for the rise of the modern secular State. His ideas have been carried on, develop and amplified up to our days by philosophers like John Rawls who offered us the most updated philosophical version of political liberalism with broader applications of the concept of tolerance in modern multicultural societies. However, as I have discussed in older posts, political liberalism’s solution to the problem of fundamentalism, albeit a genius and useful one, is limited and it is starting to prove inadequate to cope with the present crop of fundamentalism. My main point is that metaphorically, political liberalism did not dismantle the bomb, but rather diffused it.
Now, this problem is not new for us westerners and one can accurately say that our current democratic and increasingly tolerant political organization was originally engineered precisely with this problem in mind. “Political liberalism”, the intellectual movement that conceives the government as a purely procedural and neutral body regulating a society of competing private world-views started as a response to the waves of intense fundamentalism sparked by the Reformation and the clash between two very distinct set of beliefs. John Locke’s Two Treatises on Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration were philosophical attempts to cope with the new reality of a society divided by fundamentally different beliefs. It was Locke’s battle against fundamentalism that gave birth to our modern idea of tolerance and paved the way for the rise of the modern secular State. His ideas have been carried on, develop and amplified up to our days by philosophers like John Rawls who offered us the most updated philosophical version of political liberalism with broader applications of the concept of tolerance in modern multicultural societies. However, as I have discussed in older posts, political liberalism’s solution to the problem of fundamentalism, albeit a genius and useful one, is limited and it is starting to prove inadequate to cope with the present crop of fundamentalism. My main point is that metaphorically, political liberalism did not dismantle the bomb, but rather diffused it.
How did political liberalism diffuse the bomb? It did so by introducing a radical separation between the political and subjective spheres of individuals, which allowed it to successfully develop the category of “citizen” together with the concept of tolerance. The “citizen” is a sterilized version of us that is independent from our individual beliefs, world-views or place in the civil society. The “citizen” of the liberal tradition has no subjective dimension, no beliefs, no world-views, allowing the State to treat him impartially according to what has been pre-agreed as the law. At this point, the State found its legitimacy on itself, in its own laws, dissolving the old relationship between State and religion and relegating the latter to the private sphere, one that the State will only care about if it transgresses the laws of the “citizen”.
In turn, this relegation of religious beliefs to the private realm was only possible thanks to the development of the concept of tolerance. On the one hand you have citizens with equal rights and duties to the State, and on the other you have autonomous individuals with a host of private beliefs that should be kept private and as such, tolerated by the other members of the society as long as they do not become a threat to the citizens themselves. Tolerance was born then as a passive acceptance principle whose pragmatic goal was to minimize conflict in a divided society. It was the answer that modern philosophers provided to the riddle of how to maintain peace in a society characterized by a plurality of world-views. If one wants to live in a society with people that have different beliefs and wants to do it in a peaceful, organized and product maximizing way, one has to tolerate individual doctrines and ascribe to a socially shared procedural framework that clearly stipulates the rules of social interaction.
The concept of tolerance fostered the advance of modern western societies by allowing the peaceful coexistence of different world-views and preparing the ground for the development of capitalism, an economic system that can only flourish within an institutional framework that guarantees the system’s stability and secures private property regardless of the beliefs of the economic agent.
It is foolish to deny the central role that the concept of tolerance played in the successful establishment of stable modern democracies. However, despite its success, tolerance never really attacked the core of fundamentalism: the epistemological conviction that our own private worldview is the one that gets the world as it really is. It only diffused fundamentalism by erecting a conceptual wall that obliged everyone to keep its beliefs in the private realm. This wall worked well in relatively closed societies, but the era of Internet and global communications has made it increasingly difficult to keep one’s beliefs private, and thus the clash has intensified. The pact of non-aggression that tolerance inaugurated after the reformation is breaking as the once “private realm” is becoming increasingly public. And hence, those who feel threatened by this phenomenon are deserting tolerance and mounting their own fundamental comeback.
In the following post I will present my solution to this problem, one that truly dismantles fundamentalism instead of merely diffusing it.
In the following post I will present my solution to this problem, one that truly dismantles fundamentalism instead of merely diffusing it.
