Amram Blau was an ultra-orthodox Jew in the early 20th century who wrote searing critiques about the efforts of Zionists to accommodate the Jewish faith with modernism, regularly issuing warnings such as this one:
“If we let up even to the slightest degree, God forbid, from our hatred of evil, of seducers and corrupters....if we breach the separateness to which our holy Torah obliges us...then the way is open to every forbidden thing, for we will have left the straight and narrow path for a crooked one.”
Such sentiments are the basis of what Karen Armstrong, in her book The Battle for God, refers to as “principled hatred”. It is principled hatred that leads ultra-Orthodox Jews to throw stones at cars who drive on the Sabbath, to Christian extremists murdering abortion clinic doctors, and to Sharia law encouraging of men to commit honor killings of women. Is it possible that these acts of violence reflect fundamentalism's attempt to kill a buried yearning and attraction in their own hearts?
Blau’s use of the word “seducer” in the above quote suggest it might be. If so, it may offer a key to understanding extremism, and what is needed to overcome it. Fundamentalists feel an enormous tension between all the benefits of modern society and their fear and horror about what succumbing to those benefits might do to them. Their attraction to the benefits of modernity is what Armstrong calls “unacknowledged love”.
Before unacknowledged love can be understood, it’s important to recognize that fundamentalist fear and horror of modernity is not without merit: it stems from a wellspring of evidence repeatedly supplied by secular societies from Nazi Germany to Pol Pot's Cambodia. Regimes such as these have been just as likely to raise the specter of an “end to the world” as the wrathful God of the old Testament and millenarianism does.
Sitting next to that fear, however, is the foundation stone that forms the basis of unacknowledged love: the fact that modern society has come up with countless ways to make life better. That’s why the vast majority of us - regardless of religion - would choose to take an anesthetic before a doctor performed surgery on us, are willing to use the telephone to speak with our sons and daughters, and/or are okay with the idea of using planes, trains and automobiles to get places.
The fact that the tension between principled hatred and unacknowledged love is so systematically denied is a tribute to the power of ideologies. It’s a power that rears its’ head in an equally useless way when rationalist scientists such as Richard Dawkins deny the validity of religious experience. When Freud made this mistake, he assigned religious experience to the regressive desire on the part of adults to return to their mother's "oceanic womb". Dawkins, the late Christopher Hitchens, and others don’t necessarily buy into that theory. But in their dismissive attitude to religious desire they fail to grasp something central to the human experience: the awareness of realities that exist well beyond those of the rational ego.
Because of the ideological rigidity on both sides of the spectrum, critical questions concerning contemporary times are seldom raised: How can spiritual desire be pursued in non-ideological ways? How can that desire be integrated into secular modernity in ways that don’t undermine the value of either?
Asking this type of question is one way we can, as a human society, move beyond extremist approaches. Here are some other steps that might prove useful in that process:
1). Acknowledging that truth is accessed in a variety of ways.
2). Understanding that critical thinking, emotional intelligence, and religious experience all need to be cultivated in society.
3). Developing the capacity to embrace both our common ground AND our diversity as human beings at the same time: a capacity that requires us to be compassionate.
These are all enormously difficult tasks. But they are all central ways of moving life beyond ideological foundations into an arena of welcomed uncertainty - territory which, apart from some in the artistic and literary community, we have yet to explore with any degree of seriousness.