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07/17/2004: "On fundamentalisms"
Kenneth Minogue, professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, has a terrific piece in the New Criterion entitled "Fundamentalism Isn't the Problem." Here's a taste:
The second attack on fundamentalism is normative. It affirms toleration as the highest value. Tolerating the tolerant presents no problems. What do we do, however, when confronted with the intolerant? Should we tolerate the people whom liberals denounce as racists, sexists, homophobes, indeed even "judgmentalists"? In actual fact, liberals are highly intolerant of such people. They ostracize them socially, treat them intellectually with contempt, and invoke the law on them whenever possible. In these ways they force upon us the paradox that the norm of tolerance can lead directly to intolerance. The ideal of toleration sounds like a formal condition allowing all flowers to bloom, but it turns out on examination to adumbrate a determinate form of life no less intrusive than the Sharia or "fundamentalist”" Christianity. The liberal solution to this problem in the long term is a reversion to cognitive fantasy. It is that we must try to achieve right-thinking by "educating" the young: everyone must be taught the egalitarian doctrine that men and women, black and white, heterosexual and homosexual, Christian, Muslim, and Buddhist, and so on are all part of the one human family and must be treated as brothers and sisters.
From the point of view of this aspiration, fundamentalists are those who reject this world community. They are people who demand from society a certain cultural compatibility with their fellow citizens. And in that sense, of course, most of us are fundamentalists. This does not mean an end to pluralism, but, for those living in Western societies, it does mean a considerable resentment against the kind of narrow multiculturalism that would suppress every traditional custom on the ground that it might offend the sensitivity of immigrants. For liberal internationalists, however, any kind of cultural particularity that cannot be bracketed off as merely private blocks the path to a better world.
A better world? Which of us could refuse to sign up to such a project? But it is that very project which sets the problem. As we push forward with our lives from day to day, most of us act, according to our lights and in a small way, to make the world a bit better. But that is not what "a better world" means in this context. It means a collective project to transform the human condition. It means, in fact, playing fantasy ruler of the world, perhaps even god-like creator. It means transforming the human race. This ambition of making a better world is one we inherit from the eighteenth century, when reason first seriously embarked on its program of sweeping away prejudice, bigotry, superstition—indeed, religion itself. Christians might well regard the Enlightened as a set of people too impatient to wait for the delights of heaven. They want love and brotherhood, and they want it now! The twentieth century was convulsed by people enthused by this project, and some of them are still around. They may be wrinkled, but they are not repentant, because (so they convey to us) at least they wanted a better world. They may have supported some pretty vile causes, but at least, they cared! One ancestor of these idealists was Voltaire, who satirized Leibnizian theodicy in the character of Dr. Pangloss, Candide’s philosophical mentor, who believed that “this was the best of all possible worlds” and that every evil was a (logically) necessary evil. In our time, after the massacres of peoples, we are not likely to accept the whole program of justifying the ways of God to man, but I have always had a soft spot for Dr. Pangloss. Right or wrong, he had found the secret of happiness: this is the only world we have, and we had better accept it. It is the belief elaborated in the famous serenity prayer, which invokes a distinction between what we can change and what we must endure. The project of a better world is an ambition that loses all grip on wisdom of this kind. And it is an ambition abandoned in the ultimate wisdom at which Voltaire’s Candide finally arrives: Il faut cultiver notre jardin.
Read the whole thing, and be edified.
