So the world had its foundation in freedom – but this seemed like having no foundation at all. And if it worked all by itself, then where was the need for a God? We could develop instead a discourse which accepted the world in its autonomy and left aside its absentee manufacturer. This was known as science. God had been made redundant by his own creation. There was simply no point in retaining him on the payroll. It was his rashly big-hearted decision to allow the world to operate all by itself that had finally done for him. Like an inventor whose scheme for an indestructible brand of leather is bought up by a shoe company and consigned to the flames, he had been too clever by half and had done himself out of a job.
There was, however, no shortage of alternative candidates for foundations. Nature, Reason, History, Spirit, Power, Production, Desire: the modern age has seen all of these come, and in most cases go. They were all in their different ways narratives of Man. Man could serve as the new foundation. But this was scarcely satisfactory either. For one thing, it seemed oddly circular to see Man as the foundation of Man. Man seemed a more promising candidate than God for foundational status because he was fleshly and palpable. The invisibility of God had always been a grave drawback to his career prospects as a foundation, leading many to the not unreasonable conclusion that it was not that he was there but hiding; it was simply that he was not there.
For another thing, Man had to be stripped of his flesh and blood to perform this role. He had to be reduced to the abstract human subject – the word ‘subject’ meaning that which lies underneath, or foundation. To play this august role, he had to shed his carnal reality. Man as historical was too finite to be an effective foundation, whereas Man as universal subject was too intangible. Since he, too, was constituted by freedom, he ran into all the problems which had already scuppered God. To take your stand on freedom seemed like taking it on thin air. If to be free is to be unknowable, then Man became as inscrutable as God, not least to himself. At the very peak of his powers, then, he was self-blinded. Man was an enigma at the centre of the world. He was the baseline of the whole business, but could not be represented within it. Instead, he was a haunting absence at its heart.
It was flattering, naturally, for Man to be raised to this quasi-divine status. It was satisfying to feel that the whole world depended on ourselves, and would disappear if we did. But it was also a potent source of anxiety. It meant that there was nothing independent enough of ourselves with which to conduct a dialogue, and thus assure ourselves of our value and identity. All dialogue became self-dialogue. It was like trying to play hockey with oneself. What conferred supreme value on us was what simultaneously undermined it. We were free to do what we wished, as authors of our own history – but since it was we who invented the rules, this freedom seemed grotesquely gratuitous. We were absolute monarchs whom nobody dared to cross, yet whose existence seemed increasingly pointless the more power we had. What made us special was also what made us solitary. We were stuck with ourselves for all eternity, like being trapped with an intolerable bore at a sherry party.
So in time Man, too, became ripe for overthrowing, a coup proposed most notably by Friedrich Nietzsche. It was he who pointed out that God was dead, meaning that we no longer stood in need of metaphysical foundations. Cowardice and sickly nostalgia were alone what leashed us to them. We no longer believed in absolute values, but could not acknowledge that we did not. It was we ourselves who had murdered God, kicking away our own metaphysical foundations through our aggressively secularizing activity, which was even more reason for concealing the corpse. We were assassins of divinity, but cravenly disavowed our deicide. And this disavowal was the artificial respirator which was keeping a terminally ill God alive. Nietzsche, like his postmodern disciples, was simply asking us to come clean about this. We were like a couple whose marriage has been dead for years but who will simply not admit it. We were caught in a performative contradiction, our protestations absurdly at odds with our behaviour. A banker or politician may claim he believes in absolute values, but you can generally see that he does not simply by observing what he does. You do not need to peer into his soul. The White House believes devoutly in the Almighty, and transparently believes in no such thing.
For Nietzsche, there was no point in replacing God with Man. This was just another crafty ruse to avoid confronting God’s demise. Nothing was to be gained by substituting the idolatry of humanism for the idolatry of religion. The two creeds stood or fell together. The death of God must entail the death of Man, who is merely God’s avatar on earth. This, ironically, was simply an inversion of what Christianity itself had taught. For Christian faith, the death of a man (Jesus) was the death of the image of God as vengeful patriarch. God is revealed as friend, lover and fellow victim, not as Nobodaddy. In Lacanian jargon, a Master Signifier is replaced by an excremental remainder. It is this image of the patriarchal God which Nietzsche is out to dislodge, unaware that this is to kill God twice over. We must have the courage to live relatively, provisionally, without foundations. Or rather, we must have the candour to confess that this is how we live anyway, allowing our beliefs to catch up with our practices. What we say must be rooted in what we actually do; otherwise it will lack all force.
In this way, Nietzsche anticipates the movement of bourgeois civilization into a post-metaphysical era. Absolute values like God, Freedom, Nationhood and Family are splendid guarantees of social stability, but can also stand in the way of your profits. If it comes to a showdown between money and metaphysics, the latter will have to go. The system needs to find new ways of legitimating itself, and has come up in its post-Nietzschean phase with a startlingly root-and-branch solution: Don’t try to legitimate yourself at all. Or at least, not in any ultimate way. Legitimation is part of the problem, not the solution. It is pointlessly circular in any case, since your apologias for what you do must inevitably be framed in language drawn from the way of life which you are seeking to defend. The Protestant obsession with self-justification is what is making us ill. Who, after all, is there to justify ourselves to?
There is a difference between believing in foundations and being a fundamentalist. You can believe that there are foundations to human culture without being a fundamentalist. Indeed, quite what fundamentalism is is a question worth raising, bearing in mind that it flourishes just as much in Montana as in the Middle East.
In one sense, everyone is a fundamentalist, since we all harbour certain fundamental commitments. These commitments need not be sound or zealous or even especially important; they just need to be fundamental to the way you live. You do not need to be ready to fight to the death for them – though you can always fight to the death for a trivial commitment, not to speak of a false one. To believe that nothing is worth anything is just as basic a commitment as to believe in reincarnation or a world Jewish conspiracy. Some of my beliefs, such as the conviction that I do not want to spend the rest of my days living in Mullingar, are fairly provisional, in the sense that I can imagine changing my mind about them. It might not take all that much to persuade me that in terms of sheer dynamic quality of living, Mullingar beats Vancouver hollow.
But there are other beliefs I hold – the opinion, for example, that Henry Kissinger is not the most admirable man on the planet – which run so deep in my identity that not to hold them would feel like being a different person altogether. It is not that I am dogmatically closed to evidence which might prove Kissinger to be less obnoxious than I take him to be; it is rather that accepting such evidence would demand such a drastic make-over of my identity that it would feel like abandoning it altogether. But if Kissinger really is a shy, soft-hearted old teddy bear who has simply been misunderstood, this, presumably, is what I should be ready to do.
In fact, it is only because we have those more basic kinds of commitments that we can speak of having an identity at all. In the end, there are commitments which we cannot walk away from however hard we might try; and these loyalties, whether commendable or obnoxious, are definitiv
e of who we are. The commitments which run deepest are only in a limited sense ones we can choose, which is where voluntarism goes wrong. You cannot just decide to stop being a Taoist or a Trotskyite, as you can decide to stop parting your hair down the middle. To be who you are is to be oriented towards what you think important or worth doing. All this, to be sure, can change; but if the change goes deep enough, what will emerge will be a new identity which also has such priorities. Anyone who genuinely believed that nothing was more important than anything else, as opposed to running this line because it seems fashionably ‘anti-hierarchical’, would not be quite what we recognize as a person. And you would only need to observe them in action for five minutes to recognize that they did not actually believe this at all.
Fundamentalism, then, is not a question of having certain basic beliefs. But neither is it a matter of the way you have them. It is not just a question of style. You do not stop holding fundamentalist beliefs because you express them with exquisite tentativeness and self-effacement, humbly confessing every few minutes that you are almost certainly wrong-headed. The left-wing historian A. J. P. Taylor was once frostily asked at an interview for a Fellowship at Magdalen College, Oxford, whether it was true that he held extreme political views, to which he replied that it was, but that he held them moderately.
By contrast, there are those who have quite moderate political views but who hold them extremely – those, for example, who are vociferous about particular political issues such as racism or sexism, but who otherwise hold impeccably middle-of-the-road opinions. Taylor may have been insinuating that he did not really believe what he was supposed to; or he may have meant that though he indeed believed what he believed, he did not hold with hanging others bound and gagged from the rafters while he hectored them about his opinions. In fact, this may have been one of his fundamental beliefs.
The opposite of intellectual authoritarianism is not scepticism, lukewarmness, or the conviction that the truth always lies somewhere in the middle. It is a readiness to accept that you may cling to your basic principles quite as fervently as I do to mine. Indeed, only by acknowledging this am I going to be able to worst those Neanderthal prejudices of yours. Tolerance and partisanship are not incompatible. It is not that the former always murmurs whereas the latter always bawls. The opposite of tolerance is not passionate conviction. It is just that among the passionate convictions of the tolerant is the belief that others have for the most part as much right to their opinions as they have themselves. It does not follow from this that they hold their own opinions half-heartedly.
‘For the most part’, since this is not of course to suggest that anyone is at liberty to argue anything they like. Almost nobody believes in free speech. People who publicly accuse other people of being war criminals without a shred of evidence may be justly prosecuted. The difference between fundamentalists and their critics is not one over censorship, since there is hardly anyone who does not support it. Fundamentalism is not just narrow-mindedness; there are plenty of narrow-minded non-fundamentalists. Both fundamentalists and anti-fundamentalists, for example, feel queasy about exposing five-year-olds to pornographic movies, while many anti-fundamentalists believe in banning the expression of racist views in public. We seem, then, no closer to answering the question of what fundamentalism actually consists in. It is not a matter of holding basic views, or censorship, or even dogmatism. Nor is it necessarily a question of forcing your opinions on others. Jehovah’s Witnesses are fundamentalists, but they do not usually force their way into your home with a gun, as opposed to sliding one discreet foot in the front door.
Jehovah’s Witnesses are fundamentalists because they believe that every word of the Bible is literally true; and this, surely, is the only definition of fundamentalism that will really stick. Fundamentalism is a textual affair.5 It is an attempt to render our discourse valid by backing it with the gold standard of the Word of words, seeing God as the final guarantor of meaning.
It means adhering strictly to the script. It is a fear of the unscripted, improvised or indeterminate, as well as a horror of excess and ambiguity. Both Islamic and Christian versions of fundamentalism denounce idolatry, yet both make an idol of a sacred text. Al-Qaida can mean law, word, base or principle.
This sacred text is more important than life itself, a belief which can bear fruit in violence. Both the Bible and the Koran can flatten buildings. The Biblical phrase ‘the letter killeth’ has been tragically confirmed in the contemporary world. When a fire broke out on 11 March 2002 at Girls’ Intermediate School No. 31 in Mecca, the religious police forced some of the fleeing girls back into the school because they were not wearing their robes and head-dresses. Fourteen girls died, and dozens of others suffered terrible injuries. Elsewhere in the world, American doctors who terminate pregnancies are gunned down in front of their families by family-loving pro-lifers eager to flatten Iraq or North Korea with nuclear missiles.
Fundamentalists do not see that the phrase ‘sacred text’ is self-contradictory – that no text can be sacred because every piece of writing is profaned by a plurality of meanings. Writing just means meaning which can be handled by anyone, anywhere. Meaning which has been written down is unhygienic. It is also promiscuous, ready to lend itself to whoever happens along. Like matter, language in the eyes of the fundamentalist is far too fecund, forever spawning and proliferating, incapable of saying one thing at a time. One can only achieve clarity in language, yet language itself is a threat to it. Yet if there is no clarity, if no meaning is free from metaphor and ambiguity, how are we to construct a solid enough basis for our lives in a world too swift and slippery for us to find a foothold?
This is not an anxiety to be scoffed at. There is nothing quaint or red-neck about searching for some terra firma in a world in which men and women are asked to reinvent themselves overnight, in which pensions are abruptly wiped out by corporate greed and deceit, or in which whole ways of life are tossed casually on the scrapheap. It is unpleasant to feel that you are treading on thin air. Most people expect a spot of security in their personal lives, so why shouldn’t they demand it in social life as well? They are not necessarily fundamentalists for doing so.
Fundamentalism is just a diseased version of this desire. It is a neurotic hunt for solid foundations to our existence, an inability to accept that human life is a matter not of treading on thin air, but of roughness. Roughness from a fundamentalist viewpoint can only look like a disastrous lack of clarity and exactitude, rather as someone might feel that not to measure Everest down to the last millimetre is to leave us completely stumped about how high it is. It is not surprising that fundamentalism can see nothing in the body and sexuality except perils to be suppressed, since in one sense all flesh is rough, and in one sense all sex is rough trade.
One instance of Biblical fundamentalism might be enough to underline its absurdity. The New Testament author known as Luke is presumably aware that Jesus was probably born in Galilee, but needs to have him born in the province of Judea because of the prophecy that the Messiah will be of the Judean house of David. In any case, if Jesus is to be Messiah, he cannot reputably be born in bumpkinish Galilee. It would be rather like an archduke being born in Gary, Indiana. So Luke coolly invents a Roman census, for which there is no historical evidence, which instructs everyone in the Roman empire to return to their place of birth in order to be registered. Jesus’s father Joseph, who is of the house of David himself, therefore goes with his pregnant wife Mary to Bethlehem, the city of David, and Jesus is conveniently born there. By this implausible narrative device, he acquires for himself the right genealogy.
It would be hard to think up a more ludicrous way of registering the population of the entire Roman empire than to have them all return to their birthplaces. Why not just register them on the spot? The result of such a madcap scheme would have been total chaos. The Roman empire would have been gridlocked from one end to the other. Anyway, if there had been such a massive first-century migration of p
eoples, we would almost certainly have heard about it from rather more reliable sources than the author of Luke’s gospel.
The fundamentalist is adrift on the rough ground of social life, nostalgic for the pure ice of absolute certainty where you can think but not walk. He is really a more pathological version of the conservative – for the conservative, too, suspects that if there are not watertight rules and exact limits then there can only be chaos. And since there can be no rules for applying rules, chaos is always close at hand. Conservatives are fond of what one might call the argument from the floodgates: once you allow one person to be sick out of the car window without imposing a lengthy gaol sentence, then before you know where you are motorists will be throwing up out of their vehicles all the time, and the roads will become impassable. Luminously clear laws, exhaustive definitions and self-evident principles are all that stand between us and the collapse of civilization. The truth is rather the opposite: the paranoid principles of fundamentalism are far more likely to bring civilization crashing to the ground than cynicism or agnosticism. It is deeply ironic that those who fear and detest non-being should be prepared to blow other people’s limbs off.
The problem for the conservative or fundamentalist is that as soon as you have said ‘law’ or ‘rule’, a certain chaos is not kept at bay but actually evoked. Applying a rule is a creative, open-ended affair, more like figuring out the instructions for building the Taj Mahal out of Lego than obeying a traffic signal. There are no rules in tennis, Wittgenstein reminds us, about how high to throw the ball, or how hard to hit it, but tennis is a rule-governed game for all that. As for law, nothing illustrates its slipperiness more than Portia’s legalistic sophistry in The Merchant of Venice, an episode we have glanced at already. Portia gets the doomed Antonio off by pointing out to the court that Shylock’s bond for securing a pound of his flesh makes no mention of taking any of his blood along with it.
After Theory Page 20