6-06-06, 9:00 am
The Battle for God, Karen Armstrong New York, Ballentine Books, 2005
In this ambitious book, Karen Armstrong attempts to explain the origins and goals of the major fundamentalist movements in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. It is an heroic attempt which she ultimately fails to accomplish. Along the way, however, she presents an entertaining, if superficial, account of the history of religious fundamentalism over the last five hundred years.
Why do I think she fails to accomplish her task of explicating the origins and goals of fundamentalism? The reason is that she does not really understand the social role of religion and its relation to the economic base of society. Her explanations are almost uniformly conditioned by idealist fantasies on the nature of religion as an independent force which exists to make us better people (more compassionate) and to help us find a 'truth' about the nature of life that 'reason' cannot provide...
She tells us that in olden times there were two ways of thinking and 'acquiring knowledge' – namely 'mythos' (religion) and 'logos' (philosophy/science). Then religion was primary as it gave meaning to life, and although science 'enabled men and women to function well in the world...[it] could not assuage human pain or sorrow. Rational arguments could make no sense of tragedy. In other words, religion is a support which people who cannot face the world science reveals to them fall back upon to find comfort.
The book is divided into two unequal parts. The shorter first part deals with the pre-history of modern fundamentalism from 1492 (the expulsion of Muslims and Jews from Spain) to 1870. It is well worth reading for the orientation it gives on the pre-modern relations between traditional religion and science. In Islam, for example, after an early embracing of science, or at least toleration, and critical thinking in its first centuries, the social conditions it found itself confronted with (Mongol invasions, conflicts with the West) led it to retreat from rationality into mysticism and dogmatism – forces also at work in Judaism and Christianity for other reasons.
Some of her explanations are not acceptable, however. In her chapter 'Jews and Muslims Modernize' we are informed that the 'Jews would... have to adopt modernity in an atmosphere of hatred.' This she blames on the 'modern ethos' of the Enlightenment and on Karl Marx who 'argued that the Jews were responsible for capitalism, which, in his view, was the source of all the world's ills.' She mentions in passing, many pages later, that Christianity had been anti-Semitic for centuries.
It will come as news to Marxists that Marx blamed capitalism on the Jews. This would be a big disappointment to the ultra-rightists who blame them for communism or the followers of Nietzsche who blame them for Christianity. It will also be news that all the ills of the world are due to capitalism. Marx and Engels devoted many pages to the problems and the 'ills' of pre-capitalist economic formations that plagued humanity – serfdom in Russia, feudalism and semi-feudal land tenure in Germany and Eastern Europe. It might surprise Armstrong that Marx and Engels even spoke of the progressive role that capitalism has played in world history.
She justifies her claim that Marx held Jews responsible for Capitalism by a general reference (no quote) to an early work of his, 'On the Jewish Question.' Had she read this work, she would be hard pressed to find any statement by Marx to the effect that the Jews were responsible for capitalism. This despite her own comment about 'the fabled business acumen of the Jews.' If Armstrong's readers are interested in Marx's views on the origins of capitalism, they should be referred to the first volume of Capital.
Part Two of her book deals with fundamentalism per se. She provides a detailed history of its development in the twentieth century focusing on Iran, Israel, and the US. Pakistan and Egypt also come in for special mention. These are important chapters, as she describes some of the more extreme movements in Islam and Judaism, and the reaction of some fundamentalists to the aggressive policies of imperialism and its Zionist offshoot.
However, we are also told that the main reason for fundamentalism is that for humans it is almost impossible to live without a religious belief in the ultimate meaning of life, and that fundamentalism is a reaction to the extreme threat of the Western scientific outlook to this religious need, especially as it is manifested in less developed areas. Armstrong maintains that these ultimate questions of meaning cannot be addressed by science. (She means fundamentalists don't like the answers of science.)
She discusses the recent history of the West in order to show that science is no substitute for religion. World War I was brought about by 'a nihilistic death wish, as the nations of Europe cultivated a perverse fantasy of self-destruction.' A good dose of Lenin's Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism would remedy this misdiagnosis of the causes of the First World War.
Nevertheless, we get a good introduction to the men who founded modern fundamentalist movements. Unfortunately, too much of Armstrong's criticism is based on her own religious sensibilities. She condemns the violence of fundamentalism because she thinks it violates 'one of the central tenets of all religion: respect for the absolute sanctity of human life.' Distressingly, no such 'central tenet' exists for any of the world religions, as their bloodstained histories attest.
She does mention the expulsion of the Palestinians from their homes by Zionism, as well as the Western role in the overthrow of Mossadegh and the restoration of the Shah in Iran. But these appear as incidental to the root cause of fundamentalism, which is based on man's search for meaning which has been road blocked by the Western scientific outlook.
She tells us World War II, the Holocaust, and the bombing of Hiroshima demonstrate 'the limitations of the rationalist' worldview. Reason 'is silent: there is – literally – nothing that it can say.' She appears to view the Nazis as the product of 'unfettered rationalism,' and again the mass destruction of WW II reveals 'a nihilistic impulse.'
What can the response be to Armstrong's position here? I can only say that reason is not only not silent but has in fact, through the medium of Marxist analysis, explained the reasons for the wars and acts of mass destruction which the imperialist system, in its quest for market supremacy and economic domination, has inflicted and is still inflicting on the peoples of the world.
The attack on reason as inadequate and unable to explain our world, a mainstay of the arguments of bourgeois commentators, is motivated by a refusal to admit that a rational solution involves a Marxist solution. The existing capitalist relations of production are irrational and engender the contradictions in the world economy. It is these relations, not the 'nihilistic impulses' of European rationalists that have been, and still are, responsible for the social anarchy we see about us.
Still, I recommend this book for the mountain of facts, names, movements, and historical accounts it gives for the fundamentalist religious movements of our times. But her conclusions are themselves nothing more than religious nonsense. 'At the end of the twentieth century, the liberal myth that humanity is progressing to an ever more enlightened and tolerant state looks as fantastic as any of the other millennial myths we have considered in this book. Without the constraints of a 'higher,' mythical truth, reason can on occasion become demonic and commit crimes that are as great as, if not greater than, any of the atrocities perpetrated by fundamentalists.'
'Reason' will not take the rap for the irrationality of the capitalist system, and no higher 'mythical truth' will solve the problems of humanity. The solution remains as it was first enunciated to the world in 1848 in The Manifesto of the Communist Party. The working people of the world must unite to end the oppression of an economic system that puts profits, at any cost, before the wellbeing of humanity.
--Thomas Riggins is the book review editor of Political Affairs and can be reached at
