Why Fundamentalism Reflects The Unevolved Mind

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In March 2008, the outspoken Dutch politician Geert Wilders released his short film, entitled “Fitna” onto the Internet. The piece is a savage critique of fundamentalist Islam, and purports that the religion as a whole has an intrinsically bellicose nature.

Wilders supports this suggestion with a selection of warlike quotes from the Koran, such as:

“They but wish that ye should reject faith, as they do, and thus be on the same footing as they, so take not friends from their ranks until they flee in the way of Allah. But if they turn renegades, seize them and kill them wherever ye find them, and take no friends or helpers from their ranks.”

In order to indicate a link between these modern-day atrocities and the age-old texts, he shows us images of 9/11, the Madrid and London bombings and footage of the beheading of hostage Eugene Armstrong. We see clips of various extremist Islamic preachers, proclaiming in no uncertain terms that it is the Muslim’s duty to terminate any non-believers with extreme prejudice; “Annihilate the infidels and the polytheists”, “Allah is happy when non-Muslims get killed”, etc.

Wilders’ film ends with a written postscript:

“It is not up to me, but up to Moslems themselves to tear out the hateful verses from the Koran. Muslims want you to make way for Islam, but Islam does not make way for you. The government insists that you respect Islam, but Islam has no respect for you. Islam wants to rule, submit, and seeks to destroy our Western civilization. In 1945, Nazism was defeated in Europe. In 1989, Communism was defeated in Europe. Now, the Islamic ideology has to be defeated.”

The International community was acutely aware of the film’s prospective impact, even before it was released. When a video alleged to be a trailer for the short film was put on YouTube, Pakistan blocked the site from being accessed across the entire country. This actually resulted in the site going offline around the world for two hours.

When the film became available on the Internet, tensions grew. Political condemnation was worldwide and virtually unanimous. Public protests took place in Dam Square, Amsterdam. On the 7th of April, Indonesia blocked and continues to block YouTube because of its refusal to remove Fitna from its servers. Muslim nations have invariably threatened, at the very least, a review of their diplomatic relations with the Netherlands.

And a Fatwa has been put out on the life of Wilders himself. This is no empty threat; another Dutch filmmaker, Theo Vah Gogh (a descendant of Vincent’s family) was murdered after he made a film entitled “Submission”, about the physical and mental abuse that women often suffer in Islamic societies. The film was well received by some, but caused an uproar in Muslim communities.

As a result, on November 2nd 2004, a Muslim extremist named Mohammed Bouyeri murdered Van Gogh in Amsterdam as he cycled to work. Bouyeri shot Van Gogh eight times, slashed his throat (almost to the point of decapitation) and stabbed him in the chest. He also left a note pinned to the body, threatening jihad against Jews and Western governments. That was the climate in which Wilders made his own, arguably more controversial film.

Considering the circumstances, it seems very difficult for any non-religious person to side with Wilders’ film. Certainly, yes, it only presents one side of the story, but regardless of the film, the evidence seems highly stacked in favour of his argument. Fitna‘s featured preachers unequivocally desire conflict against the kuffars (non-believers) and believe that Islam can and should be the world’s sole religion.

The problem is that religious intolerance is considered such an awful taboo, such anathema to the mores of Western civilization, that it allows hate speech, indoctrination and mob mentality to exist untouched as long as it poses as the free expression of religious tenets. This allows aspects of fundamentalism to insinuate themselves into mainstream culture.

Islam is just one example of this phenomenon; Christian fundamentalism is rife in the USA; children are sent to camps to learn total submission to antiquated Catholic values. They speak in glossolalia and shed tears of joy, believing themselves to be conduits of the good Lord’s will. Of course, this all has practical uses, it creates an army of non-questioning youths who disdain abortion, divorce, sex before marriage etc; and who support totally the actions of a Christian president who wants to spread democracy overseas.

(Indeed, there’s been a lot of controversy recently about Barack Obama’s preacher, Jeremiah Wright, mainly because he has stated that 9/11 was a direct result of US’ interference with Middle Eastern nations. The very idea that America may have actually been partially responsible for the attacks that day is abhorrent to good American Christians, so they call the man a “traitor”.)

I don’t think that any religion is immune to this phenomenon (except possibly Buddhism, which embraces the questioning of even its most sacred beliefs), and Islam tends to enforce its rules with particular brutality. And it does so at the expense of countries that allow it to flourish. Indeed, the tremendous hypocrisy is that it abuses the open laws of countries that allow people of varying religions to settle there. They are allowed to practice their religions unmolested, and then preach hatred against the openness of the very cultures that allow them the freedoms of speech to do so in the first place.

I’m aware that it’s quite difficult to make this argument without getting into countrified “Not In My Back Yard” moralities. But there is a line. For example, the Latvian government recently jailed an Englishman for urinating on the Freedom Monument in Riga. The Freedom Monument is a tribute to those who fought and died in the Latvian War of Independence, and some drunken guy taking a piss on it was a terrible insult to the Latvian people. The Latvian foreign minister called the English “pigs” and threw the man in jail. And there was no international condemnation of the action.

On the other hand, when an English teacher in the Sudan allowed a class to name a teddy bear “Mohammad”, she was convicted of “insulting religion, inciting hatred and showing contempt for religious beliefs” by Islamic authorities. She was sentenced to 15 days in jail and was deported upon release. Not only that, but

“…approximately 400 protesters took to the streets, some of them waving swords and machetes, demanding Gibbons’s execution after imams denounced her during Friday prayers. During the march, chants of “Shame, shame on the UK”, “No tolerance – execution” and “Kill her, kill her by firing squad” were heard. Witnesses reported that government employees were involved in inciting the protests.” Wikipedia

Wanting to end someone’s life because of the name they gave a teddy bear suggests something more to me than simple religious offence. I think that many people, and certainly those who subscribe to the fundamentalist aspects of any religion, are assuming a personality type; the kind that tends towards the total abdication of individual responsibility.

True responsibility is an imposing prospect. It involves a lot of work. It involves searching the Gods, quite literally, for the meaning of life. It involves the realization that everyone else’s actions make just as much sense to them as yours do to you. It involves the admission that you, and you alone, are responsible for your actions; if you insult your friend, beat your wife, kill someone, it’s because you chose to do it, not because some ancient text gave you permission. It’s liberating, but it also deletes a huge portion of one’s ego and cuts you adrift from the woolly cotton braids of what at least purports to be “tradition”.

In that sense, it’s interesting that the word Islam actually means “submission”. Because that’s what fundamentalism demands. And it’s attractive. It entices so many because it offers the promise of an easier life. It offers a psychological return to the womb, where some all-powerful entity will provide you with all you need to survive; you don’t need to make any decisions for yourself, because everything has been already decided for you.

The problem with that, though, is that when these people see others taking responsibility for their lives, exploring the wonders and limits of existence, it drives them hog-wild. It wounds them so deeply because in their heart of hearts, they know that they are missing out. If there is any spark of human curiosity left in them, it flares up and reminds them that they have cravenly abandoned their duties. It’s like ol’ Fred Nietszche says; “Fear is the mother of morality”.

It seems similar, to me at least, to the actions of the classic sociopath. This person indulges in anti-social behaviour, but, when confronted with the the truth (or any criticism whatsoever) of their actions, reacts with furious disdain. It’s similar to a child who has been caught lying, but who continues lying to maintain their innocence. They know they’re in the wrong, and the only way they can react is with anger, tears and even violence.

Fortunately for religious zealots, this anger, these tears and violence can be channeled through the untouchable medium of religious outrage. Claiming insult of one’s theistic persuasion is thus used as the basis to lash out at others for any and all of man’s frailties; sexual frustration, mortality, depression, fear. All of this encourages a regression to tribalism – mob mentalities that rail against centuries of progress in racial integration. The non-believers are less worthy than believers, and that’s non-negotiable.

To reiterate, this is certainly not confined to Islam. And like other religions, Islam has an introspective, mystic tradition that encourages reflection, non-violence and self-discovery (Sufism). Christianity had a similar tradition, known as Gnosticism. In fact, it could be argued that religion regularly seems to reflect different personalities, or at least, personalities at different levels of maturity. People are drawn to whatever aspects of  their religion that tend to echo their own beliefs and experiences. If you desire peace and love, both Christianity and Islam can be argued to justify that. If you want violence and bloodshed, both can be argued to justify that, too.

(I wonder if so many of these old religious texts, written in such vague aphorisms, are actually meant to be gauges of man’s maturity as a civilization. Since they seem to be textual Rorschach tests, people tend to draw from them what they will; love, hatred, peace, violence, whatever.)

But what if the believers in violence and bloodshed start to encroach on the progress of peace? Well, that’s the heart of the problem; the cultures that have embraced racial and religious integration are slow to do anything for fear of violating their own democratic ideals. In doing so, they may allow hate speech to flow and the warlike traits of the collective psyche to grow.

I recently came across a proverb that went something like this:

“The problem with the world is that wise people are open-minded and unsure, but the foolish are absolutely certain.”

I think that sums it up. The heads of our democracies must be wary of and penalize those who would preach racism, insularity and violence. Doing so does not violate the tenets of democracy, it encourages them.

As I have argued, religion tends to reflect aspects of the individual personality. In the same way that the most peaceful person may sometimes feel a jolt of fury or jealousy, they must dispel these feelings instead of letting them fester and grow. But that involves a personal decision and personal action.

And it’s action that must be taken; otherwise, the fears and tribalisms can take hold from within and undo so much of the progress of personal and social evolution. Although a world of total peace and integration would be wonderful, we haven’t reached it yet. And if the road to it is left unpoliced, we never will.

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Further Viewing:

Geert Wilders’ “Fitna”

Channel 4 Dispatches: Undercover Mosque

Documentary featuring undercover investigation into the influence of religious extremism throughout the UK.

How To Slow Down Time And Live Longer

In his article in New Dawn magazine, Steve Taylor outlines the human experience of how, bizarrely, time seems to pass more quickly as you get older.

We all know the anecdotal evidence; As we age, the birthdays come around faster every year, Christmas seems to blindside us altogether. But there is much more to verify this as a concrete phenomenon. For example, scientists have long been aware of the psychological effect known as ‘forward telescoping’, or “our tendency to think that past events have happened more recently than they actually have.”

This occurs with alarming consistency; when questioned on the chronological proximity of a memorable event, say,the death of a public figure or a major international incident, people generally tend to consistently underestimate the length of time involved. Not only that, but the greater the age of the individual, the greater that underestimation tends to be. Put simply, the older you are, the more likely you are to think that events distant in the past have happened more recently.

The opposite seems to be true of children and younger people in general. The example Taylor uses is that of a restless child stuck in a car on a long journey – the trip will seem to them like a massive, neverending expedition. The space between each “Are we there yet?”, while mere minutes to the parents, seem like wide temporal gaps to the youngsters, who judge it as a perfectly reasonable interim after which to pose the question yet again.

There are multiple theories that attempt to explain this phenomenon. The first involves the human metabolism: A child’s body operates at a much faster rate than an adult’s in terms of blood flow, heart rate, expansion etc. The theory asserts that this directly affects the child’s perception of the world; the child’s metabolism is moving like a cheetah, and the mind is analogous. So if what happens around the kid is anything less than whizz-bang, then boredom sets in and time seems to move more slowly than usual.

The second theory appears more feasible to me at least, and yet not incompatible with the first. This one focuses purely on the psyche and says that how the perceive the passage of time is directly related to how much information we are experiencing at any given time. As Taylor says, “The speed of time seems to be largely determined by how much information our minds absorb and process – the more information there is, the slower time goes.” He refers to an experiment in which students were played two pieces of music; one, a sparse Brian Eno composition, the other a frenetic Rachmaninov arrangement. Asked to guess the running times, the students overestimated the length of both – the Eno by 32 seconds, the Rach by over a minute.

The conclusion would seem to be that when we take in more information, time slows down. Our cognitive processes seem to pull back and allow the data to wash over them, absorbing it. And yet, the neurons are firing like crazy, generating new associations, assimilating the new information. It seems as if this joyous participation with the universe, this tiny step closer to oneness, can slow down time itself.

You might say, “Ok, but that’s not really altering time, is it? Folks around you aren’t going to start walking in slow motion or running at 10x normal speed.” But think about it for a second. How is it that we experience time? We, as humans, only ever experience the here and now. Ideas of the “past” and the “future” are nothing more than constructs and exist nowhere outside of mental abstractions. Much of the science of Buddhism is based around ridding oneself of those tangential thoughts and simply living in the moment (but, of course, that’s a lot harder than it sounds).

So if we think of “time” as nothing more than a way to describe our moment-to-moment existence, then what have we? Well, if we can alter the feeling of how much time has passed between one glance at your watch and the next (the connection to the construct), then, we have altered our moment-to-moment existence, right? And, by that rationale, we have altered time. You don’t need to get into wild notions of Matrix motions; you have the full ability to slow down time, in a perfectly literal sense.

As already mentioned, this should ideally be done by the absorption of information. That sounds awfully dry; what I mean is the act of throwing yourself into the world around you; literature, media, politics, film, psychology, sex, music, society, everything. Sometimes, you get bit by the creative bug and become a filter for this information, pulling data out, connecting it, making fun new things just like you did with Lego and Plah-Doh when you were a kid (Keep the Play-Doh of the sex, though. Just a suggestion.). If we can fill our little worlds up with these things, then time slows down. Life becomes a matter of urgency; there is no time to waste when there’s so much going on, and it’s essential to squeeze the juice out of every last minute.

The effect can also be pharmacologically induced. For example, the psychedelic experience (LSD, Mushrooms) has often been compared to feeling the wonderment of infancy again. One tripper states, “My trip on mushrooms is simply indescribable. The only way I can relate it to people who haven’t done it is that I felt like a child again. Everything was new, beautiful and had some deep and significant meaning.” Indeed, the psychedelic experience seems to be an intense compression of experience; diving through vast volumes of information, whether good or bad. It opens up the creative pathways of the mind, blows out the accumulated cobwebs of cynicism and allows one to interact as excitedly with the world as one did before the jaded mores of state education took root. The only problem is that, if you don’t feel comfortable with this experiential compression, it can quickly become terrifying beyond reason. Suddenly, the information makes no sense, the thoughts become pure staccato, and the feeling of connectedness is reversed to a feeling of utter isolation – a bad trip.

(Just as a side note, I recently watched the original version of The Hitcher, a superb 1986 thriller about a killer, played by Rutger Hauer, chasing a young man, C. Thomas Howell, across the highways of Arizona. In the director’s commentary, Robert Harmon says that what Hauer is doing is educating the protagonist; in that in this single 48-hour stretch of total horror, he is putting the kid through more than most people will even experience in their lives. And he will be wiser and more learned for it. In a sense, Hauer is doing this naive kid a favour by putting him through this nightmare…)

Because oddly, time can seem to slow down to a crawl at the other end of the spectrum too – when the mind and/or body is in pain. Einstein said “When a man sits with a pretty girl for an hour, it seems like a minute. But let him sit on a hot stove for a minute – and it’s longer than any hour. That’s relativity.” (Another example: People with depressive illnesses are often prescribed SSRI medication, which require a three month minimum before the patient can say objectively whether they are feeling better. To most people 90 days would fly by. But for the depressive, on a medication they are not sure will even work, this can seem like an eternity.) Most forms of torture, and particularly solitary confinement, are based on generating this effect. For all the modern Abu Ghraib innovations in the art of torture, the simple act of throwing someone into a pitch-black room for days, weeks, month, years on end is an incredibly potent way to inflict psychic torment on another human being.

Deprived of any external input, the brain perceives time as passing at in interminably slow rate. Though in one sense experientially similar, it is the fundamental opposite to the states of child-like fascination described at the beginning of this article. The brain does in the absence of information what the stomach does in the absence of food; it begins to consume itself. It invents all sorts of wild reveries to stave off the nothingness; nature abhors a vacuum and the mind will do anything to avoid that state.

In an excellent, harrowing BBC Horizon documentary called Total Isolation, we watched the effect of 48 hours of this type of isolation on six volunteers. In just this relatively short space of time, people panicked, paced their rooms endlessly like caged animals, sensed a “presence” in their rooms, and even had full-on hallucinations. Most importantly, however, they all lost their sense of time, and after a short while seemed to have no idea as to how much time had passed in the experiment. This made the experience all the more frightening; since they truly had no idea as to when they would get out. How long had passed? Twenty-four hours? Twelve hours? Six? Three? That total loss of connection with even the passage of time must be a truly horrendous thing to endure.

Going back to the Steve Taylor article, it seems that in the middle of these two extremes of childlike wonder and brutal despair, lies a middle road in which time runs at breakneck speed for the individual. That middle road is routine. Familiarity breeds contempt, and it also speeds things up considerably. For the person who gets up and repeats one day after the next with the same informational patterns, day-in and day-out, time is jet-propelled. And since most people’s lives are based on the 9-5, live-for-the-wage-packet patterns of modern office existence, then we can understand why the great majority of us are frustrated about our lives “flying past us”.

The thing is, routine seems so much easier than the constant investigation, thought and movement that is required for one to experience life in its “slow/fascinated” form. But of course, that’s not true at all. Each is nothing more than a habit, an association with pleasure formed in the neural patterns of the brain. The routine habit is perpetuated around us by a society that constantly pushes the idea of swift gratification – and the fact that public schooling tends to kill off one’s youthful love of learning. We associate learning with “work”, in the same vein as that office job we yearn to leave. But learning isn’t work. In fact, as Robert Anton Wilson once wrote, when done properly, it should feel like play.

If we can make that the habit, then we can become as children once again. We can get up in the mornings and look at the world anew, wide-eyed. We can feel endless fascination with the workings of every facet of the universe, just as we did when we were kids. We can take back the love of learning of which schooling and advertising has robbed us, bombard our senses daily with the joy of new experiences and connections – and by doing so, live longer, more fulfilled lives – regardless of how long we live.

One Thought At A Time

 

In his book, “Zen Meditation In Plain English”, John Daishin Buksbazen outlines a basic meditative technique; that of counting from one to ten with each in-breath and out-breath.

This might seem easy at first, but your mind must be absolutely still as you do it. If your thoughts wander at any time, you must start again from ‘one’ with more determination to do it properly. The goal of this practice is to train your mind to stay focused, to not go off on flights of fancy.

It is based on the intriguing fact that the mind can only ever focus on one thing at a time. As Buksbazen says, “Nobody can really concentrate on two things at once.” Basically, this means that whatever thought we have automatically expands to fill our entire consciousness for time we allow it to stay there.

This could be wondering where you put your car keys, or working on the big project you have to have prepared for Friday. Not only that, but it is of course reflected in how we interact with the world: the car keys will bother you while you should be enjoying your dinner or that movie, and even though you’ve have a month to work on that project, you are still making last minute changes on Thursday night. Just as the thought of the project expands to fill the mind entirely, the project itself expands to fill entirely the time allotted to it (another truism, this time of design / multimedia production).

We can see the results of this on a practical level, every day. It could be argued that it is why textual information (books, magazines etc) are separated into sections, chapters and even paragraphs. We recognise that this is a reflection of how we think, and it seems more attracive to us than uncut reams of text. Pictures, in particular, are attractive to us because, to paraphrase the old saw, we can take in a thousand words at once.  

It is a well-known fact in the publishing world that if you want your audience to feel smarter and more involved, make your chapters shorter. Dan Brown’s bestseller the Da Vinci Code used this technique brilliantly to help weave together historical information and fiction without losing the reader’s interest.

In fact, it feeds directly into the standards of memory theory. For example, languages are always best taught not when the student is presented with pews of black and white text, but when the language is a part of a narrative, a small adventure, something interesting. In that case, the primary thought is to complete the adventure or task at hand, and the language becomes secondary. It becomes a means to an end, not the end itself. The mind absorbs the information so much faster because it is feeding into a larger, more entertaining thought.

If we can take this basic Zen axiom and use it to convey information more effectively, we could not only improve obvious things like the educational system, but change how we think about our own mental processes, and the erronious belief that our thoughts are in control of us, rather than the other way around.