In this mutli-part series, Sanat Mohanty discusses why we have to look for alternatives and what kinds of alternatives we should look for. In this second piece of the series, the focus is on understanding fundamentalism.

Part I: What is the point of this discussion?

Part II:Fundamentalism in Our Societies

While certain parts of our world are defined by religious fundamentalism, how can you argue that we live in a fundamentalist world? Surely, you must concede that we largely live in a modern world that transcends fundamentalism?

I see fundamentalism (see “Altars of Constructs” ) as a way of understanding reality that argues that all aspects of reality, all living, can be understood to spring from a single dogma or set of ideas. In doing so, we seek to provide meaning to all these worlds through one underlying dogma or set of ideas. We define these worlds on the basis of divinity or on the basis of our economies and “man’s penchant to profit” or “survival of the fittest” or perhaps the “primacy of nature (disjoint from humans, as it were)”.

In this broader sense, then, there are societies that are founded on religious fundamentalism, and those founded on free market fundamentalism and those founded on fundamentalism of technology.

Karl Polanyi said that we have gone from an economy embedded in a society to a society embedded in an economy. Societies need economies – they cannot exist without them. However, a society run as a free market is violent.

A society is based on economic fundamentalism when all major decisions of the society – how people live, where they live, what they do, how the community defines success, what programs and policies it takes up for welfare of people – are defined by economic metrics. Needs of communities that cannot be (or are poorly) expressed in economic terms or that are not important (for example, presence of arsenic in the water in Bangladesh, needs of individuals to be with families, security of children, hunger of people who are poor and destitute) from an economic perspective are marginalized or unattended. In forcing the identity, the nature and the behavior of the human to be defined completely by forces of the market, or a certain interpretation of divinity, or a certain interpretation of the environment and forcing the human to behave only by that definition, these societies have – and continue to – perpetrate untold violence.

Thus, the aim to civilize the brown man led to untold misery in the colonization of large sections of the world. Similarly, the goal of increased profits has wreaked havoc in large sections of South America (Free Market Fundamentalism: Friedman, Pinochet and the "Chilean Miracle", http://www.bidstrup.com/economics.htm, http://www.democracyctr.org/waterwar/), leading to sections living barely human existences.

Similarly, society has gained much from modern science (the knowledge that is based on assumptions of subject-object distinction) and technology that is based on that science. However, a society that argues that the only valid knowledge is to be based on the assumptions of subject-object distinction and all other knowledge forms are invalid is violent. It marginalizes communities and societies that are based on other knowledge forms – empirical, subjective, etc. Such societies can also be hegemonic (‘Science, Hegemony and Violence: A Requiem for Modernity’, ed. Ashis Nandy, 1998, OUP, Delhi.).

Policies that ignore other forms of knowledge are often skewed and cause more problems. For example, modern scientific knowledge suggests that water is a certain molecule and has certain physical and chemical properties and this is the basis of its numerous uses. Communities around the world have specific relationships with water – as a nature, as divine, as a cleanser, as a social and cultural place, etc. Communities and traditions are built around such an understanding of water . These relationships also imply a certain political role of water. In the absence of such an understanding, policies around water are increasingly focused on grand technologies (such as the interlinking of large rivers) or on increased economic profits (such as privatization of water for increased GDP), and can cause conflicts, riots and immense violence.

We do not live our lives by any one dogma – logic and reasoning play a role as does economics, religion and spirituality, emotions, social and cultural forces and traditions. To claim that decisions must be made on the basis of any one or that one of the above has no place in the process of decision making will marginalize concerns of a certain kind and all people who share those concerns.

That is the violence of fundamentalism of any kind – fundamentalism that is usually leads to certain kinds of hierarchy and bestow political powers to certain individuals at the cost of others.

- Sanat Mohanty

Related Links and Articles:
Fundamentalist Groups Blamed in Murder of Professor in Bangladesh
Pakistani Textbooks: Politics of Prejudice
Questioning Ideologies, Rethinking Strategies