Fundamentalism - Freudian and Buddhist views
Walter A. Davis wrote an interesting analysis of fundamentalist psychology from a
Freudian point of view which was published in
Counterpunch
last January. There are some thought-provoking similarities with the kind of
Buddhist analysis that I would suggest, as well as some
differences.
First, I will summarize Davis's argument. From
Charles Strozier's book
Apocalypse,
Davis takes four basic aspects as defining fundamentalism:
1. Literalism or inerrancy
2. Conversion or being "reborn in
Christ"
3. Evangelicalism or the duty to
proselytize
4. Apocalypticism or the crucial role of
Revelation
Underlying all of these, Davis says, is the psychological mechanism of "splitting." The fundamentalist mind (and Davis is referring here not only to Christian "fundamentalist" sects in the usual sense of the term, but also to other Christians, and non-Christians, who share this type of psychological make-up) chooses to deal with the inner conflicts and contradictions that all humans find when they introspect by calling on the power of God to wipe out the old mind, so beset with sin that it was helpless to straighten itself out, and replace it by a wholly new, pure, "saved" soul.
The belief in biblical literalism or inerrancy is necessary to this psychic mechanism because it provides a solid support which the fundamentalist craves in order to deny what seems like an inner chaos. As Davis says,
Thus, the Bible is used as a perfectly reliable and impossible-to-misunderstand handbook for organizing the disordered soul. Once reborn, that is, wholly remade, the believer's soul need not be further probed or agonized over. But the conflicts which are thus blotted out of the believer's awareness are not actually eliminated, of course; "sins" remain to urge him or her in "forbidden" directions. The stark choice is between "backsliding" or moving forward; the latter requires projecting the forbidden desires on the outside world so that the believer does not notice them within. Once projected outward, the believer is compelled to denounce the corruption of the world and overcome it by converting others. Hence the compulsion to evangelize -- i.e., meddle in everyone else's lives, either by personal "testimony" or by political activism. Only when the believer no longer finds himself or herself confronted by "unbelievers" (including other Christians who have other interpretations of Christianity, of course) will the torment be still.
But of course this ultimate peace is still nowhere in sight. Hence the fixation on the End Times as described in Revelation. The outward projection of the inner, unacknowledged conflict is always threatening to return, and the only way to be entirely safe from this is to expect a divine wrath which ultimately will wholly cleanse the corrupt world. Davis's description of this process is telling:
(Of course, the reference to the Christian holy scripture Revelation does not limit the argument: one can find basically the same psychic process occurring in various other religious and non-religious movements, as well.)
Finally, Davis argues, in more or less customary Freudian style, that a perversion of natural sexuality underlies this whole process. Eros, being the psychic force that urges connection with all life and motivates one to participate in bringing new life into being, is the medicine that would cure the distress the fundamentalist, like all of us, feels, if only she or he would allow it. But being taught from infancy by one's parents and society that eros must be suppressed, the only alternative is the splitting process which constructs an artificial conflict-less soul; the four aspects of fundamentalism are all merely different modes of maintaining this split. Following Freud, Davis argues that the fundamentalist mind works to convert eros into thanatos -- love of life into love of death. Only in death -- of the individual and ultimately, as Revelation portrays, of the whole corrupt world -- can peace be achieved.
As do other critics of Freudian psychology, I would suggest that the eros/thanatos part of the argument would benefit from a bit more empirical evidence. But what I want to do here is to compare and contrast this analysis with one that I would put forward, from a Buddhist perspective.
Buddhists would replace the Christian belief system operating here with the concepts of samsara and nirvana. Samsara is the ceaseless round of birth and death, in which all sufferings of life are implicated. Psychologically, it is the inner world of confusion, anguish, conflict, and ambiguity which the fundamentalist finds it beyond her or his ability to directly confront. However, the Buddha counsels a very different method for dealing with it than splitting: awareness or mindfulness. Rather than appealing to a "higher power" to erase the suffering, the Buddha's recommendation is to quietly and determinedly "sit with it." Practicing awareness of all aspects of one's mind, body, and the external world that come into one's consciousness, moment by moment, one learns to live with the suffering one encounters, and eventually a new perspective on it develops. This is nirvana: literally, "going out," like the extinguishing of a candle flame or lamp. Nothing is different in the world, except that the anguish one felt in it is no longer there. As it is said in the Zen school, "Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; at the moment of enlightenment, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; after enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers." Except that, as Daisetsu Suzuki remarked (according to John Cage), in the last stage your feet are a little bit above the ground.
Of course, the mechanism of splitting, being a very human activity, occurs in the East as well as the West; therefore, one can find, even in the ancient Buddhists of Asia, cases in which nirvana was taken to be a total denial of the ordinary world, and enlightenment a wholly asexual, indeed a vigorously anti-sexual state. The argument was that, since conception by the actions of ones parents and birth were the way one entered the world of birth, suffering, and death in this life, the only way to get out of it, to end the endless sequence of rebirths, was to renounce and destroy one's sexuality. But, as I plan to argue in one or more posts in the "Buddhism" category of this blog, this is by no means a necessary interpretation of the Buddha's teaching, and I do not believe that it is correct.
If it is not, then enlightenment and nirvana can be understood as embracing sexuality and all other aspects of the psyche (including hatred and tendencies to violence) in a wholly integrated understanding of one's mind. The "five precepts," which are often presented in elementary introductions to Buddhism as its basic moral code, are:
1. No killing
2. No lying or other misuse of speech
3. No misuse of sexuality
4. No taking of what has not been given to one (i.e., theft)
5. No abuse of intoxicants which cloud the mind
While they are presented in this negative form, the negativity does not mean that we must formulate a false sense of the self in which one is "reborn" as a creature in which these impulses do not exist. In fact, the illusion that one is, or ought to be, such an ideal being is precisely one way of understanding the illusion of the self, a fundamental Buddhist principle. Instead, through the process of mindfulness mentioned above, one comes to understand that the impulses which can lead to violence, harmful sexual activity, and the other actions advised against in the five precepts are in fact useful and beneficial parts of one's psyche if properly understood and integrated with the whole.
One could argue that the Buddhist concept of samsara is not really very different from the Freudian eros, since it understands that the world of suffering originates, in a very real sense, with the act of sexual reproduction. But I do not think that nirvana, as the resolution of the problem of samsara, can be found in Freud. In any case, it is clear that both the Freudian nor the Buddhist way of life are very far from the fundamentalist's way of life.
Underlying all of these, Davis says, is the psychological mechanism of "splitting." The fundamentalist mind (and Davis is referring here not only to Christian "fundamentalist" sects in the usual sense of the term, but also to other Christians, and non-Christians, who share this type of psychological make-up) chooses to deal with the inner conflicts and contradictions that all humans find when they introspect by calling on the power of God to wipe out the old mind, so beset with sin that it was helpless to straighten itself out, and replace it by a wholly new, pure, "saved" soul.
The belief in biblical literalism or inerrancy is necessary to this psychic mechanism because it provides a solid support which the fundamentalist craves in order to deny what seems like an inner chaos. As Davis says,
God's role is set by the limmitations of the literal 'imagination.' His job is to lay down the law, once and for all, and in no uncertain terms; to be that super-ego who operates by the only logic that literalism permits--binary opposition. All conflicts and confusions must be resolved into a sharp, simple, and comprehensive opposition between Good and Evil. Else comes again the fit of contingency and ambiguity... In all these operations sustaining a literal interpretation of the Bible is a desperate necessity. Once let go of that and the Book slips away into the hands of those who eventually will find anything in it--liberation theology, Bonhoeffer's religionless Christianity, a searing message of love--since they will be guided in their reading by nothing but the attempt to sustain a heart in conflict with itself using a book to pry open the deepest and most conflicted registers of its own interiority.
Thus, the Bible is used as a perfectly reliable and impossible-to-misunderstand handbook for organizing the disordered soul. Once reborn, that is, wholly remade, the believer's soul need not be further probed or agonized over. But the conflicts which are thus blotted out of the believer's awareness are not actually eliminated, of course; "sins" remain to urge him or her in "forbidden" directions. The stark choice is between "backsliding" or moving forward; the latter requires projecting the forbidden desires on the outside world so that the believer does not notice them within. Once projected outward, the believer is compelled to denounce the corruption of the world and overcome it by converting others. Hence the compulsion to evangelize -- i.e., meddle in everyone else's lives, either by personal "testimony" or by political activism. Only when the believer no longer finds himself or herself confronted by "unbelievers" (including other Christians who have other interpretations of Christianity, of course) will the torment be still.
But of course this ultimate peace is still nowhere in sight. Hence the fixation on the End Times as described in Revelation. The outward projection of the inner, unacknowledged conflict is always threatening to return, and the only way to be entirely safe from this is to expect a divine wrath which ultimately will wholly cleanse the corrupt world. Davis's description of this process is telling:
Apocalypticism thus brings to completion the psychological operation that has been employed repeatedly from the beginning. First, one cleanses oneself by projecting one's disowned desires unto the world. The resulting split must then be maintained rigorously with nothing allowed to fall outside its scope. The psyche must be voided of everything save the serenities of the saved. For that to happen, however, the world must become the object of an unstinting attack on all that one has externalized there. This act must be endless lest the projections return. By its internal logic, fundamentalism is thus driven ineluctably to a need for quantitative expansion through the discovery of greater, more insidious forms of evil. ... The world becomes the polluted chamber of one's foulest imaginings with no way to check the demands of that vision. Within the psyche an even greater transformation occurs. One craves the constant exercise of an emotion that one must just as strenuously disclaim. Hatred. One needs fresh supplies of it as badly as the U.S. needs to ransack the globe for fresh supplies of oil. No matter how loudly one proclaims one's salvation, purified in the blood of the lamb, hatred has become the innermost necessity to which one is wedded. And that necessity has now broken lose [sic] of any containment. Hatred of one's former self is no longer sufficient. One now hates the world and is driven to seek out everything in it that one can claim caused or can cause an inner condition other than the purity of the saved. One hates, that is, everything that resists surrender and absolute obedience to the system of literalism and literal commands to which one has committed oneself.
(Of course, the reference to the Christian holy scripture Revelation does not limit the argument: one can find basically the same psychic process occurring in various other religious and non-religious movements, as well.)
Finally, Davis argues, in more or less customary Freudian style, that a perversion of natural sexuality underlies this whole process. Eros, being the psychic force that urges connection with all life and motivates one to participate in bringing new life into being, is the medicine that would cure the distress the fundamentalist, like all of us, feels, if only she or he would allow it. But being taught from infancy by one's parents and society that eros must be suppressed, the only alternative is the splitting process which constructs an artificial conflict-less soul; the four aspects of fundamentalism are all merely different modes of maintaining this split. Following Freud, Davis argues that the fundamentalist mind works to convert eros into thanatos -- love of life into love of death. Only in death -- of the individual and ultimately, as Revelation portrays, of the whole corrupt world -- can peace be achieved.
As do other critics of Freudian psychology, I would suggest that the eros/thanatos part of the argument would benefit from a bit more empirical evidence. But what I want to do here is to compare and contrast this analysis with one that I would put forward, from a Buddhist perspective.
Buddhists would replace the Christian belief system operating here with the concepts of samsara and nirvana. Samsara is the ceaseless round of birth and death, in which all sufferings of life are implicated. Psychologically, it is the inner world of confusion, anguish, conflict, and ambiguity which the fundamentalist finds it beyond her or his ability to directly confront. However, the Buddha counsels a very different method for dealing with it than splitting: awareness or mindfulness. Rather than appealing to a "higher power" to erase the suffering, the Buddha's recommendation is to quietly and determinedly "sit with it." Practicing awareness of all aspects of one's mind, body, and the external world that come into one's consciousness, moment by moment, one learns to live with the suffering one encounters, and eventually a new perspective on it develops. This is nirvana: literally, "going out," like the extinguishing of a candle flame or lamp. Nothing is different in the world, except that the anguish one felt in it is no longer there. As it is said in the Zen school, "Before enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers; at the moment of enlightenment, mountains are not mountains and rivers are not rivers; after enlightenment, mountains are mountains and rivers are rivers." Except that, as Daisetsu Suzuki remarked (according to John Cage), in the last stage your feet are a little bit above the ground.
Of course, the mechanism of splitting, being a very human activity, occurs in the East as well as the West; therefore, one can find, even in the ancient Buddhists of Asia, cases in which nirvana was taken to be a total denial of the ordinary world, and enlightenment a wholly asexual, indeed a vigorously anti-sexual state. The argument was that, since conception by the actions of ones parents and birth were the way one entered the world of birth, suffering, and death in this life, the only way to get out of it, to end the endless sequence of rebirths, was to renounce and destroy one's sexuality. But, as I plan to argue in one or more posts in the "Buddhism" category of this blog, this is by no means a necessary interpretation of the Buddha's teaching, and I do not believe that it is correct.
If it is not, then enlightenment and nirvana can be understood as embracing sexuality and all other aspects of the psyche (including hatred and tendencies to violence) in a wholly integrated understanding of one's mind. The "five precepts," which are often presented in elementary introductions to Buddhism as its basic moral code, are:
1. No killing
2. No lying or other misuse of speech
3. No misuse of sexuality
4. No taking of what has not been given to one (i.e., theft)
5. No abuse of intoxicants which cloud the mind
While they are presented in this negative form, the negativity does not mean that we must formulate a false sense of the self in which one is "reborn" as a creature in which these impulses do not exist. In fact, the illusion that one is, or ought to be, such an ideal being is precisely one way of understanding the illusion of the self, a fundamental Buddhist principle. Instead, through the process of mindfulness mentioned above, one comes to understand that the impulses which can lead to violence, harmful sexual activity, and the other actions advised against in the five precepts are in fact useful and beneficial parts of one's psyche if properly understood and integrated with the whole.
One could argue that the Buddhist concept of samsara is not really very different from the Freudian eros, since it understands that the world of suffering originates, in a very real sense, with the act of sexual reproduction. But I do not think that nirvana, as the resolution of the problem of samsara, can be found in Freud. In any case, it is clear that both the Freudian nor the Buddhist way of life are very far from the fundamentalist's way of life.
Posted: Mon - August 1, 2005 at 07:18 PM | |
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Published On: Dec 09, 2005 10:19 PM
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