© AP / Frank AugsteinPeople embrace and mourn at the massive flower field laid in memory of victims of Friday’s twin attacks in Norway.
The gravest threat we face from terrorism, as the killings in Norway by Anders Behring Breivik underscore, comes not from the Islamic world but the radical Christian right and the secular fundamentalists who propagate the bigoted, hateful caricatures of observant Muslims and those defined as our internal enemies. The caricature and fear are spread as diligently by the Christian right as they are by atheists such as
Sam Harris and
Christopher Hitchens. Our religious and secular fundamentalists all peddle the same racist filth and intolerance that infected Breivik. This filth has poisoned and degraded our civil discourse. The looming economic and environmental collapse will provide sparks and tinder to transform this coarse language of fundamentalist hatred into, I fear, the murderous rampages experienced by Norway. I worry more about the Anders Breiviks than the Mohammed Attas.
The battle under way in America is not between religion and science. It is not between those who embrace the rational and those who believe in biblical myth. It is not between Western civilization and Islam. The blustering televangelists and the New Atheists, the television pundits and our vaunted Middle East specialists and experts, are all part of our vast, simplistic culture of mindless entertainment. They are in show business. They cannot afford complexity. Religion and science, facts and lies, truth and fiction, are the least of their concerns. They trade insults and
clichés like cartoon characters. They don masks. One wears the mask of religion. One wears the mask of science. One wears the mask of journalism. One wears the mask of the terrorism expert. They jab back and forth in predictable sound bites. It is a sterile and useless debate between bizarre subsets of American culture. Some use the scientific theory of evolution to explain the behavior and rules for complex social and political systems, and others insist that the six-day creation story in Genesis is a factual account. The danger we face is not in the quarrel between religion advocates and evolution advocates, but in the widespread mental habit of fundamentalism itself.
Comment: Mr. Hedge's analysis of the problem of fundamentalism (regardless of its particular form) is correct. However, he is evidently unaware of the role that psychopaths play in these situation. Once an ideology, no matter how benign and well-intentioned its beginnings, has been twisted from within by these parasites on society, there can only be one outcome: its use as a means of domination.
The seminal book,
Political Ponerology, outlines the means and methods by which this is accomplished.
Comment: Mr. Hedge's analysis of the problem of fundamentalism (regardless of its particular form) is correct. However, he is evidently unaware of the role that psychopaths play in these situation. Once an ideology, no matter how benign and well-intentioned its beginnings, has been twisted from within by these parasites on society, there can only be one outcome: its use as a means of domination.
The seminal book, Political Ponerology, outlines the means and methods by which this is accomplished.