 Hello, welcome to another one of my Dr. Seven Chalk and Talk videos. And in this one I am actually addressing a question which I decided, instead of actually being put to me, I decided to appropriate for one of my colleagues. The context is this. We were having this Facebook discussion in which he was talking about his medieval political theory class. And of course the Bin Laden news that came up brought up the issue of fundamentalism. And he had said that his class actually in some ways had to do with fundamentalism. And I said, well, that doesn't make that much sense to say that about medievals. And here's the question that oriented his class, his medieval political theory class. Are fundamentalists medieval or anti-modern? And I put anti-aggressives there because to the anti-modern, in certain ways it means actually being pre-eminent and modern as well. And part of the goal of his class was to lead his students through some Christian philosophers and some Muslim philosophers and only Augustine and Aquinas. And to show them that medieval philosophy and medieval attitudes towards religion and the confidence of faith and reason is something very different from contemporary forms of what he was calling fundamentalism. And then I even made a religious studies scholarship and a task for using fundamentalism in a very loose and what I consider sloppy and in some ways a responsible way. And he said yes, and religious studies people always get on me about this but I think it has a certain utility. And I do grant that there is a certain utility in using the term. I don't think that these are actually an impediment. Here's what I want to actually talk about tonight then. Two different topics. One, what does it actually mean to be a fundamentalist? What does that mean in a rigorous sense? What does that mean in a broader sense? When does one legitimately use the term and when does one reinforce stereotypes by using that term? And then I want to talk about the issue of time, temporality through history and how different ages and different groups within those different ages understand the flow of time, the passage of time, and development. And then I'm going to actually have a suggestion about how best to understand the notion of fundamentalism and some of the other groups that we call fundamentalists in our time and we're using it in a very non-rigorous, loose sense. So, let's talk about fundamentalism to begin with. Now, this is something I would stress to my students in a religious studies class is from the very beginning. As soon as somebody used that word I would say, what do you mean by that word fundamentalist? And it usually turned out they didn't actually mean, unless they were fundamentalists themselves, what the precise signification of the term is. Instead, what they meant was something more like this in this very loose sense. And yes, I am in fact oversimplifying here. This is not a false dilemma because I'm not claiming that these are the only ways of using the term. But these are two very fundamental ways in which the term is used. Usually they were using it in a very loose or careless sense where they mean anybody who has fairly strongly held traditional, conservative views on religious matters and they're coming from a particular faith tradition which usually they know fairly well. They tend to be literalists about whatever religious texts they're using and they tend to be fairly aggressive, fairly, how to put it, fairly in your face, fairly confrontational and condemnatory. Does everyone who gets called a fundamentalist meet this bill? Definitely not. And as a matter of fact, it's used as a slur word. This is part of why I'm against using it in a loose sense. Because unfortunately it gets used all too carelessly in a majority of way to tar groups, to dismiss opponents, instead of actually taking them seriously and tackling them intellectually. By the way, I am not a fundamentalist. I don't fit into the fundamentalist spectrum whether you want to talk in a straight sense or even in many understandings of the loose sense. But I think that you also should have called people fundamentalists when they're now, especially if your goal is to dismiss them or to try to get other people to not take them seriously. It's a convenient handle that gets used a lot. But before we talk about that, let's look at the straight sense. Who are the actual fundamentalists? It's a 20th century movement within Protestant Christianity, within what we would call low church Protestant Christianity. And it has to do with issues of biblical criticism and the inerrancy of the Bible. And as a matter of fact, there were these books while they were actually pamphlets originally but you can get them in a nice two-volume version. These are the fundamentals. This is the stuff that made fundamentalists what they are. These are the actual fundamentals. Why do they call them the fundamentals? Well, their view was there were certain traditional bits of Christian doctrine that were absolutely fundamental to the Christian message, to the Christian way of life, to salvation. And if you compromised on those, you might be able to compromise on something. But if you compromised on those, the whole thing is over. It's no longer Christianity. So, they are dealing with a particular notion of the essence of Christianity. They're also coming out of a late Protestant reformational type of thought. So, a genuine fundamentalist would blanch at the notion of, one speaking, of a Catholic fundamentalist or Mormon fundamentalist sects or Islamic fundamentalists. They would say, hey, those aren't even Christians. Hardcore fundamentalists don't consider Catholics to be Christians. And they would say, you know, fundamentalist refers to those who actually subscribe to the fundamentals and go one step further. This is how fundamentalists are different from evangelicals. Another major group within the American religious landscape and also within the world Christian religious landscape as well. How do they differ from evangelicals? Well, evangelicals think that if you're dealing with people who have a mistaken understanding of things, what are you supposed to do? You're supposed to even, you're supposed to preach the Evangelon, the Gospel, the Evangelon, that's the French comic for it. You're supposed to evangelize. Fundamentalists are basically separatists. They say, look, that doesn't work. You have to actually separate yourself off from those people who may claim to be believers but aren't really believers. That's one of the big divides between actual fundamentalists and evangelicals who get called fundamentalists all the time. And generally get called fundamentalists by people who are either ignorant of what the term really means and the history of it and the groups that it belongs to, or they're doing it deliberately to try to discredit evangelicals by tying them in with the, in some ways, more radical and more conservative fundamentalists. So yeah, there's a loose or careless sense of the term. If we just look within the Christian spectrum, you see that there are quite a few people who will call any conservative Christian of any group fundamentalist even when it doesn't really make much sense to talk of Catholic fundamentalists who are really stretching the term and it's difficult to figure out what exactly you mean. It's better to actually use some of the jargon that's out there like the word in traditional has got kind of hijacked or ultra-montanists or things like that to be specific. If you talk about Mormon fundamentalist sects out in the desert that are still practicing polygamy and occasionally getting gun battles with each other, again, you're just really stretching the term. Same thing if you're applying it to Muslims. I mean, in one sense, any orthodox Muslim is going to be a fundamentalist because they believe that the Koran and the Hadith are inspired. Any real Islamic life is going to have to be oriented by that. Well, that makes almost everybody a fundamentalist. So that means that it's a sloppy use of language that's not very helpful if you want to actually distinguish things. People speak of Hindu fundamentalism as well. I think there are Jewish fundamentalism and I think that this is not a very helpful way of looking at things. Where does that come from? Well, here's where I'm actually going to use some talk. Let's think about the old-time one. Going from antiquity all the way through Madera Divi. We should probably put the Enlightenment, Revolution and all those things in there as well. In the ancient world, did they have the conception as often many people have had of them that things were just going to be static or cyclical? Many people did. Did all the ancients believe that? No. As a matter of fact, if you read Aristotle, you will see Aristotle speaking about progress, talking about how things have changed over time, how perceptions, how we now understand more and projecting a little bit ahead as well. Very often the ancients are representatives that they have this static conception of the universe or cyclical conception and things just have to keep on going the same way. If you're an attentive reader of ancient philosophy, you'll find out that that's not always the case. And then there's this sort of notion that, well, how did history get introduced? It got introduced through Judaism and Christianity. That's a great oversimplification. Let's say that that's actually true. Let's go with that. So Christianity comes in in late antiquity. Judaism kind of abes the way. And then we get thoroughly within the medieval period. How did these medieval stick to themselves? I love these medieval shows where they actually talk about themselves as being medieval or as being in the dark ages, because the dark ages, yes, people did actually think of that not as the dark ages, but as something tended on to the end of the world and the scourge of God coming upon them, because civilization was crumbling, because of these barbarians. But if you actually look at medieval history and approach it with fresh eyes and you look at medieval texts, what do you find? You find a constant ferment of intellectual and physical and organizational work. You find progress taking place all over the place. Every monastery that went off to the wilderness, all the way to being alone so they could think about God, did not just replicate old texts. They added to the things. They founded schools. They cultivated the earth. Towns formed around them, because they were instruments of progress. If you actually look and you actually read medieval thinkers, you will find out that those dark ages quite often were not as dark as the later ages made them out to be. In order for the medieval to necessarily think of themselves as heading towards something or being in between something, they did look to the past because they thought that the people in the past were not a bunch of dummies and still had something to offer them. And yes, there was at times you might say a slavish promotion to the past, but was that often the case? Read some medieval texts and find out. Read Thomas Aquinas. Read Augustine. Read Anselm. And see just how slavish followers they are in various novel or Augustine or Play-Doh or pick whoever you want. You won't find out to be the case at all. As a matter of fact, here's one thing that I actually use in some of my classes. You may see this as a little bit of a digression. St. Anselm. I asked my classes in the Middle Ages that did people think the world was flat around it? Oh, the Alphard was flat. Really? Then why does St. Anselm say, well, you know, the world is this globe, as we all know. In the sense that, hey, we all know this, I'm going to begin from some starting point because it'll make sense to you. And then it's called. Really, that's the case. Where did they get this weird notion that the mediables were all these sort of united people of faith who put their trust in blind dogma and didn't think about things? They got it from later on, didn't they? So interesting things do take place. You know, the Renaissance, the Reformation, new contributions to the world of ideas. But, you know, those who are continuing out on this may continue throughout Manera at least to rethink things. You can find Thomas philosophers today who are taking up all the great thoughts of these figures and trying to assimilate them. Alistair McIntyre is a great example. Norris Clark, another great example. Now, from the perspective of the Reformation and the Renaissance, they were both trying to imagine a kind of antiquity, a moment. You know, what was the Reformation about? Let's get away from this church. Let's get away from these accretions. Let's get back to original Christianity. What was the Renaissance about? We need to get back to the original insights and the texts and the beautiful ideas and the ways of life that the Greeks and the Romans had. Yeah, you know, there's something to that. What goes on in modernity? Modernity. And especially in writing understands itself as one of two ways. Either counter-posed all of this which was bad or as, you know, beginning with the seed of this which goes back to this and all of this in between here, the medieval period. This was all bad. This was dark ages. This was foolishness. This was priestcraft. This was, you know, superstition. We can go on and on and on. What's interesting about modernity is that modernity unleashes forces that cannot actually be controlled within what we, you know, what in philosophy called the dialectic of enlightenment. And eventually it leads to all sorts of crises, all sorts of collapses, all sorts of people who just don't believe in the modern promise the way that some of the early moderns represented it some of their contemporaries were, you know, going on in a very dogmatic fashion. There's some terrible catastrophes to this place. Economic, political, military, you know, to do that. And now you find yourselves in a time that some people want to call it post-moderity. I call it late-moderity following Jameson because I don't see it as fundamentally detached from the modern thing. I don't see it as cycling around within the modern or at best replicating some of the insights that the medieval has actually expressed and expressed much more systematically and with more insight. So, if we want to ask ourselves, fundamentalists, let's say we're talking about fundamentals in a strict sense, are they medievalists? No, because they're not returning to anything remotely medieval. And the sort of discourse and debate that went on first in the monasteries and in scholastic, sorry, in monastic theology and philosophy, and then even more in the schools in scholastic philosophy and theology before it became more. Contemporary fundamentals, they're not doing anything remotely like that. As a matter of fact, where do you locate them? Thoroughly within modernity. Now, here's where I actually have a suggestion and idea. And I get this from fascist studies. There have been a lot of different theories about what constitutes fascism. There's no actively general agreement within the field. There have been a lot of, you might say, half-baked or cockamated theories, you know, Marx is one that the fascists are just agents of the bourgeoisie clearly not an inaccurate conception of fascism. Some people saw it as sort of a return to, you know, primitive or primitive or, you know, pre-modern ways of being. I don't find it. I think that the better theories out there are that fascism is not just anti-modern, not just archaic national socialism to an integral nationalism. That's why I have those abbreviations. I find that they have a different variation of modernity. So what goes on when fascism comes on the scene is very similar to what's going on when Marxism and communism comes on the scene. We are being presented with a fundamentally different version of what modernity should look like and should be doing from within modernity itself. It may take some pre-modern elements to it, if you look at it carefully. I think that this also here's where I have some suggestions that I think people could reject or might say, yes, that makes some sense. I think that fundamentalists in the strict sense where we're talking about this, I think that they fit that same dynamic. They are, you might say, a kind of anti-modernism only by virtue of being modern. Being so thoroughly modern that they can reject it from the inside out. And they can reject what they see as detritus, as non-essential to them. The liberal or our political spectrum conservative way of having what we call liberal democracy. Which is not in fact the form of political life that makes people most enthusiastic. I think that you can say the same thing about totalitarian Islam. And I want to be very careful to stress here. I do not think that all Muslims are totalitarian or consumption of things. I do think that some of what we call Islamic fundamentalists or radical Islam are better described as totalitarian Islam. Not, you know, as modern fascism or anything like that. I think that it's a different type of totalitarianism in some ways more difficult to deal with and with greater staying power. And of course its own history going back all the way to an intellectual crisis after the modern and smashed some of the Muslim powers. I think it has a much greater ideological base than fascism did. Or any contemporary Christian fundamentalism which is fairly non-political actually. But I think that all three of these and then these two things Christian fundamentalism fundamentalism in a strict sense totalitarian Islam are both things that can be called by certain fascism fundamentalism. Actually something you can call just fascism too. So what we should understand all of this is is something going on here. I'm purely here and haven't lost any sort of real contact with the medieval views on this. I'm less convinced about Islam when it comes to that. I do think that a lot of the Muslim conceptions of Muslim middle ages are rather hazy and ideological a lot of the things that went on are things that Islamic, totalitarian Muslims do in fact reject. But that's a subject of a different thing. So, are fundamentalists medieval or anti-modern? I think the answer is clearly that they are anti-modern.