Bless 'Em All, The Long and the Short and the Tall....

Once again, we are in the era of violence unleashed by religious feelings being hurt by attacks on religion in the name of religion. I will say little about the obvious moron who is behind the so-called film about the supposed life of the Prophet Muhammad. Thinking about the whole thing from the vantage point of a late summer day in a pretty part of New England, I do reflect how attitudes to religion vary not just among cultures but even within cultures. Here in Fairfield County, CT, religion is not something people get very worked up about. I am sure there are frothing-at-the-mouth atheists and fundamentalists lurking about and but in general they are an eccentric minority. People in my little part of Connecticut go to temple, church, synagogue and mosque as they wish without much raving and ranting or self-righteousness. Like much else in the Northeast, religion is all about moderation. Which is possibly the reason why most Northeastern politicians, whether Democrats or Republicans, don't make it to the national scene. Clearly, moderation is not a virtue that goes down well in the battleground states.

That was brought home to me quite strongly during this car trip out West. While in Minnesota, I put little M. into a swim camp for a couple of weeks. I waited poolside along with the other moms and watched as the kids learned to float and put their faces in the water, etc. The first sign I got that I wasn't, ahem, in Kan...Connecticut anymore was when one of the moms whipped out a religious text and began to read it in frowning concentration. I am fine with this, having grown up with people playing with prayer beads, whispering mantras and chanting slokas sotto voce in public places.

Had it remained just a personal conversation with one's inner soul, no problem. But soon, the peaceful scene of head bent over holy book was replaced by another act in a play that ran every day of the week: a conversation between this lady and another mom who also waited while her kids learnt swimming. The dialogue would follow a similar pattern each time: first, a recounting of the benefits of some local religious school, next would follow a recital of the joys of homeschooling, the grand finale would be the denunciation of the evils of secular society and the siege that religious people were under. One particularly outstanding interchange involved the evils of doctors and medical education and how these two mothers would encourage their children to think of careers other than in medicine because of the irreligious ethics taught at medical school (this was a thinly-veiled criticism of birth control and of the abortion techniques that no doubt apprentice physicians have to be made aware of in order to intervene in an emergency situation).

To me, what stood out was the tone of victimhood. These home-schooling mothers of six and five children respectively felt victimized and persecuted despite the fact that secular society had not prevented them from having as many children as they wished, nor from home-schooling these children. Indeed, these women had benefited from the educated doctors who had delivered their babies. I'm waiting to hear if any of these ultra-religious women ever handed over their physical well-being to doctors who hadn't had a conventional medical education. Further, secular society never banned these women from expressing their views nor did they put them behind bars for grumbling about "secular society". Which brings me to the second point I noted about this loud opinionating: hypocrisy.

Hypocrisy is what allows such people to feel that they are above secular society even as they see no problems in extracting every last benefit it offers them. The swimming pool evangelicals were harmless, bored suburban women with more time on their hands than sense in their heads. In a different setting though that swirling mix of anger, perceived disempowerment and pious canting that defines fundamentalists of all faiths, can have devastating consequences. Combine victimhood and hypocrisy and place the combination in a lawless land like present-day Libya and you get to see how murderous bigots can not just slaughter a man who supported an oppressed people's fight for liberty but even celebrate the demise of the freedom for which he gave his life. RIP, Ambassador Stevens.

How do these different pieces connect? No, I am not part of the "It's all America's fault" brigade. Neither am I reiterating what other people do - that America too has its fanatics and fundamentalists. Far from it. Quite the opposite, in fact. I am drawing on domestic examples and linking them to external developments precisely in order to dispel the bafflement that many Americans feel about the current upheaval in parts of the world that target America as a symbol and as a political enterprise. What I am pointing out,hopefully without the smug self-righteousness that characterizes so much analysis on America's global role,  is that religious fanaticism everywhere is rooted in anti-modernity and hypocrisy and is fueled by a false sense of victimhood. Its contours must be recognized, whether it comes in the shape of tracksuit-clad mothers or disheveled, raggedy teenage boys. America may not have been the force behind the Arab Spring, that laurel rightfully belongs to the young people who braved their own dictators. But neither were religious fanatics the creators of free societies in their countries. In fact, religious fanatics everywhere use the cloak of freedom to overthrow the revolutions that young activists launched and drove home to their logical conclusions.

Religious fanaticism is not the Revolution, nor is it the Arab Spring. Rather, it represents the counter-revolution, the absolutist vengeance on the Revolution. In every culture and every country, its goals are the same  - the overthrow of the secular, modern state of laws. And that state, however imperfect, must be preserved if Benghazis are not to be repeated elsewhere. I feel this last point especially strongly, as a minority immigrant. As a minority, I am very aware that a strong state with just laws (important to stress this as plenty of strong, unjust states have existed throughout history) is absolutely essential to my personal security. The breakdown of the state is inevitably followed by the law of the jungle, not the collective lovefest about which anarchists and hippies dream. That chaos is the vacuum in which fanatics seek to step in to create a strong and unjust state governed by the absolute power of tyranny.  I want to keep the modern constitutional state safe from the marauders who firebomb its ramparts, its symbols, and its culture of law. And modernity and constitutional law in its local variant is what I wish for the brave young men and women of the Arab Spring. That they may courageously undertake that most difficult of tasks: " to create a just state by just means." (Jawaharlal Nehru to Andre Malraux)