All theories attempting to explain the rise of fundamentalism in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries agree that fundamentalism is a problematic and threatening
response to a problematic and threatening modernity. This contention can be
supported, inasmuch as fundamentalists do indeed seem very much at home in a
technological world. However, how much can be extrapolated from this familiarity is
highly debatable. To this end, it is vital for any discussion of fundamentalism to first
attempt to achieve a clear-eyed view of the modern world.
Such a view, at least that which is achievable, seems to suggest that the modern world
is not, in fact, one of heretofore unimaginable horror. The recently uncovered scale of
the genocide committed on the native peoples of the Caribbean and both hemispheres
of the New World between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, for example,
demonstrates that genocide is not, in any sense, a product of modern ways of thought
or even the industrialization of slaughter. Likewise, most of the examples used to
prove the contention of a uniquely traumatic modernity, for example, the rise of
racism or the Holocaust, are, when considered closely, far less novel and
idiosyncratically modern than often considered.
Such a re-evaluation inevitably raises questions about culture, tradition, relativity,
universalism, and not least morality, particularly the question of what morality is,
where it comes from, and what if any role, does religion play in the formation of
morals and ethics. This inevitably feeds back into the question of fundamentalism,
most notably in the question of whether the fallen, sinful world against which
fundamentalists so often proclaim themselves to be rebelling, is in fact, the world in
which we live, or a Manichean world of their own imagining, invented to justify their
rebellion.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:canterbury.ac.nz/oai:ir.canterbury.ac.nz:10092/3443 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Tyler-Smith, Sam |
| Publisher | University of Canterbury. School of Social and Political Sciences |
| Source Sets | University of Canterbury |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic thesis or dissertation, Text |
| Rights | Copyright Sam Tyler-Smith, http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml |
| Relation | NZCU |
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