The Secular Fundamentalist

A Personal Late Modern Experience

Chapter 5: A Personal Late Modern Experience

We are all still living in my country of Australia, under the comfortable protection of The Empire of Capital.  My world is still snug and secure in a Middle Earth suburban village, not unlike Tolkien’s Hobbiton-Under-Hill.  However, unlike the central character of ‘The Lord Of The Rings’, Frodo, I have not had the benefit of a wizard like Gandalf to urgently impress on me the necessity, purposes and risks of making what must be a perilous journey.  It has been left to much more remote figures, like Alexander Solzhenitsyn and the French philosopher Herbert Marcuse, to signpost the way.
 
For me it has been a very solitary and slow process of discovery and reflection, to bring together all the elements of the larger picture.  My fellow Hobbits, almost to a man and women, are at best only politely interested if I attempt to inflict my ideas on them.  I do not possess The Great Ring of Power, but as with all my fellow subjects under The Empire, I possess a very small number of shares in it.  Like Gandalf, I am convinced that it must be thrown into the cracks of doom before we and everything around us are overwhelmed by its terrible might; this superpower that is our own exponentially accelerating industrial productivity, technology and organizational systems.

To have such a bleakly divergent view in the face of a culture of overwhelmingly sunny optimism and marketed enthusiasm requires more than an ordinary sense of intellectual disgruntlement or personal eccentricity.  It really helps to have a lifetime of outsidership behind you.  The earlier the start, the better the chances of escaping the immense gravitational pull of the dominant consciousness.  If one is born a lemming, it requires certain defects of character, malfunctions of education and serendipitous errors of judgment to escape the lockstep.

My career as an outsider started early in life.  By the time I was five I was already showing signs of ‘not being quite as others are’.  My social behavior was often inappropriate and this had a way of both annoying my peers and worrying my parents.  I was as poor a listener and empathizer as I was a reader of emotional subtext and body language.

My sports career was marred by poor hand eye coordination, clumsiness and inability to measure and balance force against skill.  Repeated failure did nothing to alter my behavior.
 
And I would regularly ruin tools and the objects of their attention by insensitivity to their material and mechanical limits.
 
As family and acquaintances got to know me better, they recognized this as incompetence rather than willfulness, selfishness. malice or aggression.  At school I became adept at absorbing the punishment of my peers and then gratefully accepting their eventual forbearance, if not forgiveness.
 
During my later schooling, I became more than ordinarily disciplined and routinized in my studies to the point of excluding everything else from my life.  At university, my intellectual development allowed me to develop a verbose and lecturing style to the point that only my good looks saved me in my relations with women, some of the time; who I kept bumping into without twigging what was going on.

Over fifty years later my wife noticed an internet site that discussed Asperger’s Syndrome, which is a cousin of or alternative name for high functioning autism.  I took one look at the symptom set, and it was me!  At last, I could put a name to my disease; a syndrome no less, even if it is now off the psychology list of recognized conditions, for the time being!

What is more, this ‘syndrome’ isn’t all bad news. Some of the world’s greatest philosophers, scientists, inventors, entrepreneurs, poets, artists and spiritual pilgrims have been perhaps fellow ‘sufferers’.  Spending vast amounts of time in one’s own headspace has its meditational benefits. Whilst one could speculate that many of the Not-So-Great-Ones veered unhappily from loose cannon to ineffectual introvert, at least there was hope for me still.

As a first cohort Baby Boomer in the England of the nineteen fifties, I experienced what was to turn out to be the twilight of a traditional Judeo-Christian society.  Its loosening grip still left vivid and indelible marks on me.  It was a densely ritualized, strictly disciplined and hierarchical world.  It was certain about what it stood for, was possessed of a stern moral toughness and didn’t accept excuses or give second chances to those who crossed it.  No one questioned its authority or its right to be severe if it thought it necessary.  The boarding school I went to ran much as it would have done in my grandfathers’ day.

By the middle nineteen sixties that world was all but swept away.  When the headmaster of my Australian secondary Grammar School rather foolishly tried to assert that this institution was dedicated to turning out Young Christian Gentlemen, there was an embarrassing round of titters and guffaws.
 
For a great many of my generation, not only had the notion of being a gentleman become quaintly old fashioned, but so had our religious beliefs.  I went to considerable lengths to try and resurrect mine, but to no avail.  They no longer seemed either emotionally compelling or intellectually plausible.  This was not a problem in my later teens, as I was far too bent on bathing in an exuberant mixture of study, sex, popular culture and the politics of the Vietnam War.  However, as a character I was now rootless in the same way as a cut flower sitting in water.  The bad news took but a short while to arrive.

I trained to be a historian because I wanted to understand the frames and fabric that assembled and unfolded our future out of our past.  What I later realized I was really looking for were spiritual roots fertilized by visions not of a familiar and comfortable past that was irretrievably gone, but a future that would have to be created.
 
Despite having a serious go at trying to make Marxism do the job, I found it couldn’t paper over the seeping sense of existential vacuum.  It was as if I lived in a world that kept itself frenetically busy by over producing and consuming mainly junk, so that it would never have to look down into itself.  In so doing we were subjecting ourselves to forces that were so voracious, it was as if we were riding an industrial tiger which we could neither afford to get off nor stay on for much longer, except at a terrible price, either way.

However, the world didn’t crash and burn.  I did.  It was only decades later that I realized that I had become clinically depressed.  I didn’t go to doctors.  Instead, I worked for a year as a laborer on seismic firing lines and oil platforms.  I spent another year in the desert working on a rail line being built from the Hamersley iron ore lodes to the sea.

One day I crashed an explosives truck with two to three hundred kilograms of gelignite and a box of detonators on board.  They didn’t explode.  This remarkable piece of dumb luck gave rise to the absurd conceit that I had been spared for something, which was to find revelation and redemption, even if it took me the rest of my life.  And while this worthy intention did nothing to save me from the consequences of my later errors and foolishness, it never dimmed.

The revelation I sought was not exactly knowledge, or even wisdom, but it did underlyingly inform these things.  It was and is what gives us our faith in the value of what we do and believe.  It is the wellspring of our strength.  It fortifies us in our hours of need and distress as much as it humbles us in our moments of triumph and success.  It lights our path even as we approach death. It demands everything of us to attain its critical mass; to coalesce sufficient energy to fire and keep firing.  It is not acquired so much as gestated and born out of the intuitive depths made possible by systematic and concentrated meditation on all that we have ever remembered and understood.  While it may be as much idiosyncratic as universal and trite as it is profound, it is nothing if not utterly truthful; for it is the totality of one’s humanity, completely addressed, comprehensively understood and aware of its limitations.

Thus it was that I plunged into blithe and ingenuous experiment.  Marxism, the anti-Vietnam War movement, environmental activism and alternative life styling provided some leverage, but when I tried to put the package into practice it blew up in my face, leaving me with a broken family and two children to support.  I cannot blame anything but my own naive mismanagement for this personal catastrophe.  It rammed home the understanding that well-intentioned ideology is no defense against incompetence and the more difficult lessons of life.

As my life went by, I fitted in as best I could to meet my responsibilities and get what satisfactions I could.  I never completely embraced the world I found myself in, partly because I couldn’t and partly because I didn’t want to.  I never stayed in any industry for longer than ten years and was neither offered nor sought positions of higher responsibility.  However, what I continued to do was meditate on that world to create an overview of what I was going through and how it and I had got there.  I assembled both a personal and potentially collective ‘ride out’ strategy for what I felt increasingly appeared to be coming.

Over a period of a decade, which started on the 11th September 2001, this project reconstructed my life.  When the planes crashed into the World Trade Centre towers, the earth did not immediately move under my feet, yet inexorably that is what it started to do as the years passed by.
 
It was not just an attack on Imperial America, so much as one on the modern world, by men who intended to return it to what it was at the time of The Prophet.  War had been declared on the values of modern Indulgence Capitalism and the social and existential structures that it had produced.

This attack overlaid doubts about the ecological sustainability of consumer capitalism and drew attention to its social and existential unsustainability, and the possibility that it had lost its way and lost touch with the most fundamental reasons why human society exists and what it is supposed to accomplish.

The people down at Al Qaida may be mortal enemies, but they drew an absolute bottom line about the shape of future society and what it might look like.  9/11 was a very modern way of posting Reformationary theses on the cathedral doors of our age.  And for the first time, the inevitability and legitimacy of the ongoing rise and rise of the modern project was in question.

This terrible act could not be absorbed into the fabric of its structure as a domesticable if fissiparous tendency, which would gradually be baffled, maneuvered into impotence and absorbed into the fabric of society in the way that socialism was.  The suicide bomber cannot be remonstrated with, for if the bomber’s life is forfeit, what can be negotiated?  The politics of prudence and self preservation are bypassed.  The sacrificial final answer cannot be answered easily, for the enemy values heavenly salvation above all earthly things, including life itself.

9/11 was the start of the battle over what societies and economies are for, and while the Muslim vision of it is very culture specific, how are we seculars to respond to a system that for all its comforts and privileges, increasingly looks like a destroyer of worlds, in every sense?

I became overwhelmed by the very deep fundamentalism that I have kept at bay for most of my intellectually active life.  The very traditional little English boarding school that I attended between the ages of eight and ten, in the middle-late 1950s, that I was so glad to be free of when I left for Australia, had speared itself  not so much into my beliefs, but more profoundly, my character. Its traditions, which were rooted back into the classical world, may have failed, but the instinct to build new and evolving ones was all the more powerful for that.  And while the tumultuous events of the later twentieth century poulticed it in my heart and buried its memory, it waited.  And like rain to a frog that hibernates in the banks of a billabong during drought, the rising waters of a new flood roused it.

It is the same kind of reformationary fundamentalism that drove Martin Luther to put at stake his career and life.  This desire to recover the fundamentals of his religion by going back to the unadorned Christian message made him rage at not just at the abuses and corruptions of its message, but the accumulated barnacles of excrescent practices on its hull, that threatened to sink it.  And he was prepared to rent his world asunder to get them off, if it didn’t kill him first.

This fundamentalism doesn’t really fall easily into the ordinary left and right wing categorizations because it is radical in its intent, transformative in its vision, non-traditional in its inspiration and open to carrying whatever is portable and useful in our times, into whatever it is we must ultimately face.

For Muslims, conservative fundamentalism means going back to the literal word of The Prophet. For seculars like myself, it means reaching down into ourselves and asking the really hard questions, stripped of messages from the sponsors, about what is really important and what isn’t. For us, there are no prefabricated answers or established structures or messianic traditions to draw on.  We will be building a Post-Modern Testament as we go along.

Beyond the needs of physical sufficiency; air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat, shelter and clothing to insulate us from the elements and professional health care when we are sick, the rest is about the quality of the software in our heads and the productive, social and cultural relations it makes possible. 

In the struggle to reconstruct our social and existential commons, we will attempt to once again reproduce ourselves sustainably to the highest possible sociophilic standards, invest heavily in foundational work to rebuild social character development and collective habits, arm ourselves with uncompromising defenses against those who would try to tear them down, and keep doing it generation after generation, indefinitely.

And when I refer to ‘existential’, I mean the ‘software’ between our ears that grounds us as stable, secure and robust characters armed with a sense of the common good and an active desire to consistently invest in it.  And that sociophilic principle underpins and informs everything we do to sustain the intergenerational product that we leave behind as our legacy to the future.

Uncluttered by superstitious fancies, this potentially represents the most powerful ideological software artifact since the emergence of monotheism.  And indeed as a late modern set of tools, it can use this period’s powerful intellectual analysis to invest in and manage new emerging existential and social infrastructure.  These things are not ethereal, airy fairy and laissez-faire. This software and commons building is as much of a business enterprise as any other and should be structured, capitalized, maintained, policy driven, researched, regulated, accounted for and audited in exactly the same fashion.

One might well be able to show that our current system of social reproduction is trading while insolvent, deprived of ordinary regulatory oversight, auditing and ‘market’ discipline, and producing poorly designed, under-constructed, unsafe, unreliable, resource guzzling and overweight product.  Although it goes fast and allows its industrial drivers to overload it when it isn’t broken down or malfunctioning, it is dangerously risk prone, especially in tough conditions. And it is ruinously expensive to maintain and repair as its bad manufacturing and patterns of misuse prematurely age and waste it, even as the technology to keep it going well beyond its use by date continues to improve.

As I age, this vision consumes me and much of my waking time.  And there likely isn’t much time left before events catch up with and surpass this critique of late indulgence capital.

I do not get any pleasure from political activity.  Worse, being a ‘fundamentalist’ who loathes the status quo, I am the hostile and distrusted antagonist of all sides, and must endure everybody’s name calling clichés and miserable rationalizing excuses for themselves.  So I have nowhere to go except my own way.

Such activity as I do commit to is an onerous and irritating duty made worse by having to humor green ‘progressive’ humanitarians. Ecologically based criticism of capitalism and welfarist/anti-imperialist/anti racist ‘Poor Thingism’ saved the left from the bankruptcy of the class struggle and the end of dialectical and historical materialism.  And yes, left environmentalism was an excellent stick to beat capitalism with, but it also meant that the cause was bound to suffer the same marginalization as its socialist precursor, instead of saving our collective bacon.

The environment isn’t just capitalism’s Achilles heel.  Its degradation is the biggest threat our species (and every other one that has to share the biosphere with us) has ever faced.  If there were ever a need for a united front to deal with this catastrophe-in-the-making, this is it, now! Yesterday!  But the ideological waters are so muddied in the political struggle of capital and its antagonists, that problems of survival and having a future have been lost.  And both sides are as bad as each other: bloody minded business-as-usual versus green fairies-at-the-bottom-of-the garden.  What a horrendous recipe for ideological gridlock right in the middle of an enveloping ecological emergency.  How really smart is that!?

Within ‘the system’, the humanist ‘progressives’ represent much of all there is by way of an alternative view to a suicidal lock step of the industrial lemmings, but I am forced to hold my nose almost every time they opine their social ideas.  Although they are politically oppositionist, at a cultural level, their equally unsustainable laissez-faire and deregulatory all-rights-no-responsibilities libertarian ‘progressive’ ideas neatly dovetail with those of consumer choice and those of their neo-conservative industrial ‘progressive’ cousins.  The latter easily overwhelm and subsume the former in a protracted, massively funded and increasingly totalitarian barrage of marketed consciousness management, to the point that it is now difficult to tell the difference between civil and market thinking.
 
On the other hand, when I try to discuss ‘Capitalism Lite’ with industrial ‘progressivists’, their eyes glaze over, or they trot out the latest marketspeak gobbldigreenism about latest generation aircraft that are twenty percent ‘greener’, even though traffic is expected to double in the next 15 years!  I bewail the loss and waste of their entrepreneurial and administrative talent and focus, to rescue what can be salvaged, so that we have some useful baggage to take into a very difficult coming time

Thus in the post-Marxist period, the libertarian left has had its agenda bent into playing an important role in bedding down, legitimizing, masking and dancing to a market agenda that holds mass populations in its thrall by substituting market for social discipline, with help from libertarian radicals of both the ‘right’ and the ‘left’.

In some ways I find myself in a situation not unlike that in Britain of the middle to later 1930s. Fear of communism and military weakness caused the British Tory establishment to go into denial about the threat of fascism.  The ‘progressive’ liberal/socialist left was infected with a post WW1 pacifism and guilt that was in denial of fascist aggression and accused its opponents of ‘warmongering’ against unjustly treated ‘poor things’ who were given such a hard time after the treaty of Versailles .  The US, which was by far the largest industrial power in the world was in denial about its international responsibilities and left fascism to do what it did best; aggression. And the communists, led by the Comintern, having followed a principled anti fascist line throughout the 30s, come the crunch, went into ideological denial and joined in its aggression, only to be almost overrun by it themselves later.

Everybody at some point went into some form of denial about fascism that enabled it to grow, thrive, eventually put the whole world order under siege and very nearly overwhelmed it.  Today we are similarly afflicted by a looming ecological, social and existential sustainability crisis. And lamentably, the only people who actually have the really bulletproof war plan and institutional infrastructure to deal with it at all levels, with the insurgent means to deliver solutions right now, are the Muslim fundamentalists.

They intend to rebuild the world as a global caliphate that will be running a society and economy obeying the rules and observances laid down by The Prophet in the seventh century, or else. Capital would become an economic second fiddle subset of the rule of theocrats and Sharia Law, where one’s standard of well being, security and social standing are in some measure about how good a Muslim one is, as much as economic wealth and social power.

When modern consumer capitalism starts to unwind when all goes ill; when it exposes populations to its and their real vulnerability in the face of unsustainability at all levels; when in the absence of  the appearance of secular fundamentalisms that are prepared to rebuild the basic infrastructure and disciplines of the social commons, and its inter-generational system of reproduction; then it will be the old style religious fundamentalists who will become the prime contenders to get the business of post-modern reconstruction.

I am becoming increasingly sure that when dysjunctional change does eventually arrive, not only will it not be particularly democratic or ‘humanitarian’, it will bring in its wake much tighter, tougher, survival driven, more pragmatic and disciplined social organization.  Much as I hesitate to admit to it in ‘nice’ company, this might come as something of a relief for me, for I am almost certain that the road to hell is paved by the originally fine intentions of idealists and do-gooders.

In the meantime, I mostly stay in my comfort zone by writing tracts like this, perhaps talking to myself more than anyone else.  However, I have a faith that these musings might strike chords in others who like me have felt something was drastically wrong, but couldn’t quite put their finger on it.

Even the meanest and least intended communication or event can sometimes make an enormous difference.  We are all capable of quite sudden and unexpected shifts in our lives, where something comes into clear focus and enables us to move in a completely different direction.  And although I am extremely pessimistic that we will alter our collective consciousness in a timely fashion to positively adapt to coming conditions, I am optimistic that significant numbers will abandon their past and make such a journey.  Even as humble a contribution as this writing can prompt such a life changing shift in consciousness, in quite unexpected ways.

I remember travelling in a tram early in 1966, to enroll at the Melbourne University Law School. There was a rather well fed looking young man in a tweed jacket (with leather patches in the elbows and a bow tie around his neck) in the seat opposite me, sipping away on a Peterson pipe. We fell to talking and it turned out that he had just finished his fourth year reading law and was about to start his articles.  He proceeded to give me a comprehensive rundown on the Brilliance and Genius of the British Common Law.
 
It took him less than ten minutes to convince me that whatever his virtues as an individual may have been before he started studying the law, he had been turned into positively the most pompous, conceited and self-opinionated fellow I had ever met.

Moreover, even at the tender age of eighteen, I could see enough of myself in him to guess what would happen to me if I followed in his footsteps.  A quick inspection of the Law School’s pseudo gothic lecture theatres confirmed my worst fears and I fled.  Some of my potentially most disabling follies were no longer destined to be set into a thick layer of institutional aspic.

A ten-minute conversation in a tram with a total stranger irrevocably changed my life in ways I could have only dimly foreseen at the time.

The propositions that I am laying out before you here are so at odds with conventional ‘common sense’ and so dark in their sentiments, many readers might be forgiven for thinking that they are more a reflection on the writer than his subject matter.  I am not immune to this and suffer doubt. Am I an Asperger lost in the seductive poetry of his thoughts?  Could the cultural displacement that I experienced with the loss of my religious roots prejudice my judgment?  Can depression at an impressionable period of one’s life keep inspiring negative thinking for the rest of it?
 
All of the above are possibilities, but they are the ones that make me an outsider and enable me to articulate the perhaps otherwise unthinkable.  The world is already very amply supplied by insiders whose reasonable, balanced and orthodox judgments reinforce the overwhelming status quo.  Negativity is not necessarily a vice just because the dominant culture repels it in favor of what I think are institutionalized megalomania and hubris.  I recovered from my bout of depression several decades ago, but the analysis that contributed to it steadily became more damning as it became clearer and more comprehensive.  And yes I lost my religious roots, but they taught me enough to know just how impoverishing goods and services worship is.

In the end, the unfolding events of history will determine whether my thoughts were but an intellectual fantasy.  Nobody will be more relieved than me if this proves to be the case.