Fundamentalist Revolution: Do We Still Live in the Age of Globalization?

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World History Theory and Practice

Gender, Technology, Culture

Conference

May 2, 2015

St. John’s University’s History Department convenes a conference to foster research-driven conversations on the teaching of world history. Manhattan Campus 101 Astor Place New York, NY 10003

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Fundamentalist Revolution: Do We Still Live in the Age of Globalization?

Alexander Mirkovic

Eastern Michigan University

I have always been apprehensive about the last chapter of world history textbooks. That chapter

is invariably about what is going on today, and I am convinced that the consensus about what is going on

today is highly deceptive. If you look at the last chapters of all world history textbooks on the market,

you will get the impression that what is going on today is globalization. In the world history jargon,

globalization is known as “cross cultural connections.” The textbook that influenced me so much in my

early encounter with world history is called “traditions and encounters” where traditions stands for old-

style national histories, where encounters stand for cross cultural connections that are the salience of

world history.1 The formative origins of the notion could be traced back to William McNeill’s emphasis

on “diffusion” as the salient feature of world history.

I see this way of looking at world history as a academic application of Wilsonian Idealism, with

all its positive and negative sides, the positive side being the Wilsonian anti-colonialism, the negative

side being the replacement of European imperialism with the softer version of American imperialism,

which on purpose hides its own footprint. The cosmopolitism and imperialism often go hand and hand

and the world without boarders thus advertised is the world were an ever larger number of migrants die

every day trying to cross these borders that are allegedly disappearing. Thus I would like have a look at

the intellectual environment in which World History came about as a version of Wilsonian idealism.

World History was coming in vogue as America was abandoning the older melting pot model in the

1960s and embraced multiculturalism. This is the time when cosmopolitism of the Enlightenment was

1 Jerry Bentley and Herbert Ziegler, Traditions and Encounters A Global Perspective on the Past, 5th edition (New York: McGraw Hill, 2010), Chapter 38, “A World without Borders,” 953-978.

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renewed as the American Creed. In fact some most of the current textbooks interpret the 20th century

as a process of globalization seen as “making the world safe for democracy,” if I may use the famous

Wilsonian phrase for what could be called globalization/Americanization.2

Let us get back to this process of globalization that is, according to a great majority of world

historians, the salient characteristic of today. Late Samuel Huntington expressed a widely held belief

that the era of ideological conflict was over and it was replaced by an era when the world population

started to prefer culture over ideology. The Wilsonian liberalism might have triumphed over the Leninist

internationalism, but after the Cold War, the world was now more interested in “traditions” and place

the “encounters,” the cross cultural exchanges” on a very last back burner. Unlike World history

textbooks, Samuel Huntington believed that globalization has taken a wrong turn in America, where the

elites increasingly advocate Wilsonian cosmopolitanism, and that the Anglo-Sphere should return to

their cultural roots, namely, Anglo-Protestant identity, religion and morality, and political tradition of

liberty, first of all the free trade.3 Since these were exactly the principles on which, according to David

Armitage, by the British Empire was envisages as Protestant, commercial, maritime, and free, one

wonders are we seeing today a continuing of a long standing process of world history, or something

else? Hungtington obviously argued that borders and not disappearing but that they should be raised

even higher.

Thus, the current enterprise of world history, since McNeill’s seminal book is based on the

assumption that what is going on today is globalization, that globalization was going on forever, or at

least since the agricultural revolution of the Bronze Age, and that globalization is and can be good. There

was an imperialist driven globalization in the past, but today America has a chance to make it into an

2 Erez Manela, Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 53. See also, Amos Perlmutter, Making the World Safe for Democracy: A Century of Wilsonianism and Its Totalitarian Challengers (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), i-xiv. 3 Samuel P. Huntington, Who Are We? (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 38-46.

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ideals driven globalization. What is interesting is that both liberals and conservatives agree that there is

globalization going on. Liberals, such as McNeill like it, and the conservatives such as Samuel Huntington

dislike it, but they both see the process as occurring. This is problem for me, for whenever there is a

consensus, I become worried that there is a cover up operation going on, namely, the elites do not want

us to see what is really going on. As Collingwood used to argue, one of the main moves of modernity is

to make a historical process into an organic and natural one.4

Let me also mention another canard that is often asserted as a corollary to the theory of

globalization, namely the idea that the era of ideology is over and that now we live in the era dominated

by cultural concerns. This is a widely held idea formulated by Samuel Huntington.5 What if this is

actually not true? In fact, what happened is not that there is no ideology in the post-Cold World, but

that ideology had made a huge swing to the conservative, nationalist, and fundamentalist side. If the

large part of the twentieth century could be characterized as a conflict between the Wilsonian vision of

international order and the Leninist vision of working class cosmopolitanism, one can argue

convincingly, that with the disappearance of Leninist cosmopolitanism, what is left is not just Wilsonian

liberalism, but a further ideological struggle between Wilsonian liberalism and American nationalism. As

Anatol Lieven has pointed out, American nationalism could take a very malevolent form and there is a

resurgence of a particularly virulent kind of nationalism in the United States and more generally in the

Anglo-sphere in comparison to which Wilsonian liberalism seems fairly benevolent.6

I would suggest here that what is going on in the world today is not really globalization. The

problem is actually the definition of this globalization, which McNeill envisioned as a material practice

little connected to ideas and symbolic forms. In other words, the ideas of the human mind were made

4 R G. Collingwood, The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 174-9. 5 Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1998), 19-39. 6 Anatol Lieven, An American Right or Wrong: An Anatomy of American Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 126.

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into a social, economic, and even a force of nature. I am not denying that there is globalization, but I see

globalization as a one way street. Some here in the first world reap the benefits, but I doubt that a

Mexican illegal worker who came to work on the hot fields of the California Central Valley could be

define it term of cross-cultural connections. if I’m allowed to cite another example of a fashionably

constructed “cross-cultural connections,” I doubt that anyone in Baghdad in 1258 saw the Mongol

invasion as another step in growing cross cultural connections, the way many textbooks present it.

Actually the evidence points away from “cross-cultural connections.” America today is spreading its

influence over the world usually with questionable results. What we see today is actually

Americanization of the world and most cross-cultural connections are a one way street flowing in the

direction of the rest of the world. The last chapters of world history textbooks are deceiving us that the

process that is going on today is the same process of cross-cultural connections that began with the

agricultural revolution. By naturalizing a process that is happening on the level of culture and ideas,

This Americanization of the world happens in two forms. The one is already well known to us as

Wilsonian liberalism, a vision that was denounced by the left throughout the 20th century as a

conservative idea for the global order and that is now seen as an exceedingly liberal idealistic policy.

Wilsonian idealism encouraged the world to follow the American immigration melting pot pattern

before the Immigration Act of 1924, which gives a superficial hope that all people of the world would be

accepted and assimilated into the American Creed, a benevolent version of civic nationalism. Now, this

is a positive spin on what is going on in the world, a suggestion that the world is going to look more and

more like liberal America, where everyone is going to drink the same generically produced latte, but

with a different national flavor added to it. This benevolent version of American civic nationalism has

suffered a major blow with the growth of the conservative movement since the 1970s. Thus, in addition

to the benevolent version of American nationalism, we also have its very malevolent form, American

racism, or in general the racism of the Anglo-sphere and that form of Americanization is also spreading

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around the world generating quite a passionate reaction. One can see the problem even if we assume

that best case scenario. America is not actually spreading freedom around the world, but it is imposing

the so-called free markets all over the world. What if along these channels of Americanization we are

transmitting to the world not just a benevolent version of Wilsonian cosmopolitism, but also something

much more sinister that is as American as apple pie?

Now, what does all this discussion about nationalism in the Anglo-sphere and Wilsonian

liberalism has to do with fundamentalism? Fundamentalists are, as we all know, those people who

smash ancient statues, blow up planes, and decapitate prisoners. We in the West don’t do these things,

or at least our legal system discourages the population from burning prisoners alive in their cages. But

then again what if we define fundamentalism differently? What if fundamentalism is the peculiar

combination of the doctrine of Divine election (chosen people) which means the intense nationalism or

tribalism, mixed together with the prophetic zeal of the scientific certainty that one speaks in the name

of God? Then fundamentalism becomes essentially the problem of all monotheistic religions and what is

going on today is not some unique shift in emphasis from ideology to culture that occurred suddenly

and unexpectedly at the end of the Cold War, but a perennial struggle within monotheistic traditions of

the tribal exclusivity based on prophetic confidence and scientific certainty to eliminate all its real and

perceived opponents?

As I said before, the end of the Cold War, actually was not the end of ideological struggle, but a

dramatic shift of the field of ideas to the right. In particular, political ideas are now so mixed with

religion that it seems as we have entered one of the phases of world history when political ideas are

expressed exclusively in religious terms. With the appearance of Thatcherism, the conservative ideology

became a combination of (a) Anglo-sphere nationalism, including the beliefs in the racial or cultural

superiority of Anglo tradition of Teutonic liberties, (b) a pseudo-scientific economic doctrine intended to

crush the well-fare state domestically and further the interests of financial capital internationally, and all

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that was couched in (c) a theology of election, a subterranean current of Anglo-Israelism, a theology

which identifies the Anglo-Saxon race with the Lost Ten Tribes. Thus, the pseudo-scientific belief in the

free market economics, plus the theology of election, plus the ethnic nationalism was the recipe that

created a modern fundamentalist movement in the Anglo-Sphere. Hector Garcia simply called it a belief

in an “Alpha God.”7

The irony of the whole situation is that the ideology has no firmly established name. Some

scholars especially in the UK call it Thatcherism, in the US the conservatives love to use the term Reagan

Revolution.8 Some scholars tried to call it racism in the Anglo-sphere and thus see the movement as a

continuation of the Civil Rights era racism, thus making a distinction between racism and

fundamentalism.9 The evidence points in a different direction. Even though I agree that racism has

deep history in the Anglo-sphere and that the roots should be found in that long-standing imperial

tradition, labelling fundamentalism as racists is actually missing the forest from the trees. They are just

various aspects of the same phenomenon, a religious doctrine, an ideology, that recognizes no

legitimate rivals. Those who don’t subscribe to it are deemed irrational, because they recognize the

scientific doctrine of the free market capitalism, but simultaneously they are traitors to their nation who

espouse foreign doctrines, such as French socialism, Catholic work ethics, and such imaginary

constructs. To top it off, it opponents are surely going to hell for taking the side of the devil in the

apocalyptic struggle. This apocalyptic struggle is the culture war going on for the last couple of decades

in the Anglo-sphere.

Thatcherism, where this merger of ideas started, is a form of religion presented as a political

ideology, or at least it covers the economic doctrines with religious justification, and then wraps it up

7 Hector Garcia, Alpha God: The Psychology of Religious Violence and Oppression (New York: Prometheus Books, 2015), 73-79. 8 Stuart Hall argued that ‘Thatcherism’ was able to use the “language of ‘the people’ but for me that’s just a piece of the puzzle that is Thatcherism. Stuart Hall, “The Great Moving Right Show” in Marxism Today (1979), 9 Randall Balmer, The Real Origins of Religions Right (Politico Magazine)

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with Anglo nationalism. I will start here jokingly that it has its own “Sermon on the Mount,”

appropriately called “Sermon on the Mound” after a speech that Margaret Thatcher delivered in 1988 to

the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland, which meets on a hill in Edinburgh called “The Mound.”

It has been noted before that Thatcherism is a merger of free-market capitalism with Anglo-sphere

nationalism.10 This is an accurate statement, except that it overlooks the fact that in the Anglo-sphere,

nationalism is closely bonded with the Protestant religion and Thatcherism cemented that bond in such

a way that it could be called a creed. In fact I would argue that Thatcherism successfully merged Social

Darwinism with a peculiar Anglo-sphere form of non-conformist Christianity, thus replacing compassion

as a centerpiece of Christian Theology for centuries and replaced it with the prosperity gospel. By Social

Darwinism I mean the system of laissez-faire capitalism, which for Thatcherites was never just an

economic doctrine, but a way of life, or a cultural system. Furthermore, the kind of religious doctrine

that Thatcherism grafted on laissez-faire capitalism was not just removing the guilt associated with the

“embarrassment of the riches” but actually added a component of Anglo-nationalism to it by dwelling

on the Anglo-sphere’s popular tradition of a special covenant, the idea of the divine election of the

Anglo-sphere to carry around the principles of freedom and rule of law across the globe. Obviously this

aspect of Thatcherism have their origins in the Puritan Commonwealth and other Reformation notions

of national election and it was then carried further into the imperial enterprise, only to lay low for a

while during the period of de-colonization, and to be revived again under the aggressive Thatcherite

foreign policy.11

In America, however, Thatcherism achieved a special form by merging with what Richard

Hofstadter called “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” I called it here an American theology of

election, but many other names are in use, the culture wars being one of them. Accordingn to its own

10 Nigel Lawson, The View From No. 11: Memoirs of a Tory Radical (London: Bantam, 1992), 64. 11 Anthony D. Smith, “Nation and Covenant: The Contribution of Ancient Israel to Modern Nationalism” in Proceedings of the British Academy 151, 213-44.

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narrative, the Christian Right in America actually began with the Roe v Wade decision in 1973. This is

absolutely incorrect and in that sense I agree with Randall Balmer that fundamentalism has much

deeper historical roots, though I doubt that he would go as far back in history as I would here. In a book

published in 1981 Francis Schaeffer argued several important points that represent the core beliefs of

American theology of election. Because of the staggering popularity of Schaeffer’s book among the

fundamentalist, I think they represent the beliefs of the American right wing much better that most

opinion polls, since most of the opinion polls on religion suffer from a great deal of dissimulation.

The first idea that features in Schaeffer is, of course, the notion that United State is a Christian

nation founded on Biblical principles. This is a long standing tradition in American history, even though it

is rarely presented as such.12 That is why Lieven had correctly labelled it as the undercurrent of

American culture. In fact, immediately after the constitution was adopted there were regrets that it did

not mention Christianity. The treatment of Thomas Paine, whose last book “The Age of Reason” was

received with great hostility indicates that the Enlightenment principles of the framers of the

constitution were not universally accepted. In fact, since his death in horrible poverty in 1809, he was

popularly known as “filthy little atheist.”13 Then there were several movements, the one during the Civil

War, the other during the Cold War, to introduce a Christian Amendment to the Constitution, indicating

that the current resurgence of religious conservativism is not an exceptional, but a recurring

phenomenon. Liberals simply dismiss these undercurrents hoping that their popularity will somehow

disappear.

American fundamentalism dwells extensively on the popular as well as a pseudo-scientific

notion of race. This notion is also present in Schaeffer in a well-known combination of “faith and

12 According to the Democrat leaning Public Policy Polling, 57% of GOP voters support officially making the United States a Christian nation. February 24, 2015. Accessed www.publicpolicypollling.com 13 Called so by Theodore Roosevelt. See, Eric Foner, Tom Paine and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 270.

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freedom” indicating that only in the Anglo-Protestant tradition there is freedom. Freedom is there only

to submit to God and this freedom is followed by a paradoxical demand that dissent to religion should

not be allowed. This kind of religiosity is taken by the fundamentalist to be the most important racial

characteristic of the Anglo-sphere, and it could be defined either cultural or racially. It is not that only

Schaeffer and Huntington wrote about this. Thomas Jefferson also wrote about the liberties of the

Teutonic forests and wanted to put Hengist and Horsa, the legendary Saxon chieftains who landed on

the shores of Kent, on the great seal of the United States. Within the tradition of Anglo-sphere’s ethnic

nationalism, racism is especially strong, but again religion plays a very important role in the construction

of that nationalism. While Schaeffer did not argue for Anglo-Israelism, a belief that Anglo-Saxons were

members of the lost ten tribes of Israel, this notion in America assumes the form of unquestioned

support for Israel and is extremely widespread, actually as a part of general culture. The Mormon

Church made Anglo-Israelism an official doctrine, but the idea is especially strong among all the

evangelicals.14

Thirdly, Schaeffer point out to secular-humanism as the principal opponent of American

fundamentalist. In fact often times the opposition to what Schaeffer called the religion of secular-

humanist is present as an element of American anti-colonial patriotism. Europe, in throes of secular-

humanism is set up an apocalyptic black and white contrast to American religious freedom, understood,

again, as freedom to be exclusively Christian and the absolute revulsion with secular-humanism. What

puzzles me is that while I expect this kind of argument from Schaeffer, the textbooks of World History

have consistently in the past cut down on all the periods of European history when secular-humanism

was popular, namely the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the formation of the European Union. I

don’t want to imply here that these authors are fundamentalist, but that the whole political fields has

14 April 15, 2015 opinion poll by Bloomberg Politics indicates that 45% of American believe that Israel should be support even if that support is not in American national interest.

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shifted radically to the right, and that cutting the Renaissance and the Enlightenment out of our

textbooks is an indication that we are living in the age of Fundamentalism and not in the age of

Globalization.

Following my reading of Jan Assmann’s brilliant book which debunked the notion of the so-

called monotheistic revolution in antiquity, I would argue that this dark undercurrent of a belief in alpha

god has been part of World History almost three millennia.15 Assmann has pointed out that previous

attempts to define world history by the developments of religious ideas have failed because the

religious concepts that we use today are essentially the concepts of monotheism, which triumphed over

the so-called polytheism during what Karl Jaspers called “the Axial Age.” He suggested that instead of

looking through the binary opposition between monotheism and polytheism, will look at history as an

opposition between a religious concepts that are inclusive (such as natural theology), and those that are

exclusive (revealed theology). In other worlds, there are societies and currents within societies that are

open to cross-cultural connections and there are those that see them as a treat. Thus, cross-cultural

connections happen at the level of ideas, symbols, and cultural representations in general, and not at

the level of social and economic structures and practices.

Thus, I would argue that we are living in a period that is undergoing a radical revival in the

revealed theology, namely fundamentalism. There were other periods like that, such as Christianization

of the Roman Empire, the growth of Islam, or the Reformation. There are periods that were dominated

by more moderate cosmological theology. Interestingly enough world history textbooks now severely

curtails such periods as “Eurocentric.” Greek and Hellenistic Enlightenment, Renaissance, and the

Enlightenment, are the period that are dominated by a more inclusive and cosmopolitan theology or

nature. It is no coincidence that Peter Gay called the Enlightenment, The Rise of Modern Paganism,

15 Jan Assmann, Monotheismus und Kosmotheismus. Ägyptische Formen eines „Denkens des Einen“und ihre europäische Rezeptionsgeschichte (Heidelberg: Universitats Verlag: 1993), 12-25.

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because this is what is essentially was, a rise of a more inclusive theology based on the scientific

observation of nature.

This way of organizing World History is, of course, already present in Hegel who saw the

exchange of periods of freedom with the periods of human submission as the development of the world

spirit. I would also rather emphasize the evolution of the human spirit that the so-called cross cultural

connections. In fact Marx had tried to do exactly that, to get away from ideas and make the empirically

measurable categories the primary reason for creating periods in history. The materialism of cultural

connections” is not a given through history, as McNeill wanted to argue and thus place World History a

solid materialistic, that is scientific, foundations. It seems to me that “cross cultural connections” are

primarily ideas, the ideas of tolerance and intolerance. The current concept of world history is deeply

rooted in the social history, which suffers from the same problems, namely the reductionist approach to

symbols and representation. In fact, the current “material turn” in history might offer an interesting way

out. The material turn is actually not “materialistic” in the same way that clio-metrics and social history

was. Quite to the contrary, it actually focuses on ideas and “how they take on realistic force when they

are anchored, housed, and transmitted in objects, technical networks, routine practices, and social

institutions.”16 This is, in my opinion, what the material turn can offer to world historians, an in

particular those who look at fundamentalism. I might be a pessimist here who proverbially sees the glass

half empty instead of half full, but it seems to me that we are living in the age of fundamentalism and

not in the age of globalization. Now, globalization is happening, but it is actually represented by the

spread of Anglo-sphere’s religious type of fundamentalism all over the world.

16 John Tesch: “Cosmologies Materialized: History of Science and History of Ideas” in Darrin McMahon and Samuel Moyn, Rethinking Modern European Intellectual History (New York; Oxford University Press, 2014), 162.