The most striking thing on the front page of the Straits Times the following Monday was not the text, nor even the headline, but the photograph. Young boys, some no more than 9 years of age, were holding placards that said "No to liberalism" and "No to secularism". How many of them even understood the concepts of liberalism and secularism, you might ask?

 
Straits Times front page, 22 May 2006

Quite clearly, the march was no spontaneous affair, but a highly organised show of strength by certain groups. What kind of groups is evident from the green banners behind the boys.

It's a well-known fact that many Islamic groups have seized upon this bill to further their agenda of having Shari'a law recognised in the country. An attempt was made a few years ago, but was rebuffed by Parliament as antithetical to Indonesia's secular constitution. This new campaign is an attempt to hijack an issue -– that of more and more magazines with pin-up girls and (tame) centrefolds -– to wedge Islamisation back into the agenda. This explains the wide scope of the anti-pornography bill, which is less about pornography per se, but more about imposing conservative Islamic standards of propriety.

The ultimate aim is still the same -– the adoption of Shari'a law across Indonesia. Thus the placards against "liberalism" and "secularism".

To many of us, all this is very difficult to understand. Why do people get so worked up about relatively small things like appropriate dress for women? Why do people want to live in an illiberal place? Why choose a religious and social prison over freedom?

Not just in Indonesia. The questions are the same everywhere that we see religious militancy and fundamentalism.

 
Mythos and logos

Karen Armstrong, in her book, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, argues that despite appearances, fundamentalism is a very modern approach to religion. To understand why this is so, we need to be able to step out of our time into the past and see the place of religion in it.

There is a basic distinction between mythos and logos. Logos is "the rational, pragmatic and scientific thought" that is needed when we have to "make things happen, get something done, or persuade other people to adopt a particular course of action." This could be anything from figuring out the best time to plant crops, to trading with the next village, or organising for mutual defence.

Mythos, on the other hand, is concerned with that which is "timeless and constant in our existence." It looks back "to the origins of life, to the foundations of culture, and to the deepest levels of the human mind."

"Myth [is] not concerned with practical matters, but with meaning," for without significance in our lives, why are we striving? How do we find courage? Endurance?

Economics, politics and technology -– e.g. irrigation works, building boats, making bronze -– were largely founded upon logos. Religion, on the other hand, provided the mythos. It taught people about themselves, speaking to them about love, responsibility, guilt, betrayal, forgiveness, redemption and such like. It also spoke to them about their place in the larger scheme of things, what came before us, and what comes after life.

Traditional societies knew this very well. Unlike their approach to logos, their approach to mythos was always bound up with mysticism and ritual. They usually relied on some kind of specialists, whether we call them priests, shamans or monk-instructors, to spend a lifetime imbibing the spirit of the texts, not only through learning, but perhaps through trance or rituals too. These specialists' role in society was to transmit and interpret mythos to the common people.

Despite not having the practicality of logos, religion had real uses. In a time when technology was limited, religion helped reconcile people to the limitations of their lives. There was virtually no technology to counter disease or natural disasters. It was useful to have a way to teach people to accept these without despairing altogether, to overcome loss and to carry on.

There were also social inequities to address, for example, women, slaves and lower castes had much restricted personal autonomy. In small, isolated communities, escape was impossible; better that people be taught to accept their stations in life.

In that sense, traditional religion was conservative. It tended to speak of the past as sources of good example and it tended towards acceptance of present privations rather than encouraging revolt.

However, starting about 300 years ago in Western Europe, the balance between logos and mythos became unstable. The Europeans increasingly learnt to use logos to illuminate areas that had previously been the domain of mythos. Science started to explain the mysteries of stars and planets. It discovered new worlds that opened up the possibility of migration, i.e. escape from social and political restrictions. Medicine started to advance and people began to look to logos when ill than to mythos.

Things accelerated with the industrial revolution. Within our own lifetimes, we could see vast improvements in material comfort. Education spread and people had the means to make a better life for themselves, women and the lower classes included.

As logos demonstrated its power to change lives for the better, the thought styles of logos became seen as the superior way of thinking. Rationality and empiricism were invested with a prestige well above myth and religion. It was not for nothing that Marxism, the most extreme development of logos humans have yet seen, dismissed religion as mere superstition, and the opiate of the masses.

Yet, rationality does not have to stop at the scientific. It can and did penetrate into questions of society, such as why should kings claim a divine right to rule? Why shouldn't all men be equal? And while we're on the subject, why not women?

In due course, the question became, why aren't the dark-skinned equal to the fair-skinned? Why is your speech privileged and my speech censored? Who are you to define morality for me? Why isn't homosexuality equal with heterosexuality?

These "liberal" ideas are extremely disturbing to people who are used to a more traditional social order. In patriarchal societies, the increasing empowerment of women, particularly in the matter of their sexual autonomy, an area that has long been regulated, sometimes forcefully, by males, is the most upsetting.

The cumulative effect of all the social trends set in motion by modern logos is seen by traditionalists as an onslaught against the their way of life. They see their world as under siege, facing extinction. They see themselves fighting an existential battle to preserve orderliness against entropy, good against evil.

To those who feel threatened by change, "liberalism" is a catch-all word for everything that contradicts the old social order. In countries outside Europe and America, "Westernisation" is another term that is loaded with the same idea of invasive evil.

The other word on the boys' placards (in the photograph above) is "Secularisation". That's quite interesting in itself, in the way it reminds us how these campaigners also demand the institutionalising of their religion as a state religion.

To many of us, a secular state is the only sensible way to keep the peace in diverse societies. The moment the state gets involved in promoting one religion, or imposing its edicts upon non-believers, strife will break out. But this doesn't mean that an individual cannot practice his own religion. So why do these campaigners insist on dismantling the secular state?

We need to see it from their angle. To them, their religion is The Supreme Truth. Their God is sovereign. For a state to say, we recognise no god and all religions are equal under the law, is to deny the One True God. How can He be considered no more equal than idols and false gods? It is an intolerable affront.

The way traditionalists react to unwelcome change is not new in the history of humans. Yet today's fundamentalism contains something new -– and that is the relatively high degree of literalism involved.

Partly, this came about from the spread of literacy. People began to read the scriptures for themselves, rather than rely on priests and monks to deliver sermons. Even in Islam, at least in Singapore and Malaysia, despite high mosque attendance, there is a thriving cottage industry of door-to-door religious instructors. It's quite unregulated.

But in relying upon their own reading, the interpretive role played by truly learned religious leaders has been lost. Instead, many people now tend to read religious texts using a logos mindset, reading them the way they read instruction manuals: If you encounter situation A, then do B, if you see X, then do Y.

Far from seeing scripture as mythos, speaking about the past, with some insight into the human condition and our relationship with the divine, modern humans see it as an operating manual, a set of rules to follow in order to obtain a perfect society. That being the case, it must be inerrant. Not even a punctuation mark can be wrong, for if the operating manual leads to a perfect future, how can the manual itself be imperfect?

When one's mind is closed to questioning the text, or looking behind the words, another funny thing happens. Scholarship is reduced to being able to find a suitable citation to support the political demand of the day. Conversely, any argument that relies merely on the spirit of the religious teaching without a specific quote to support it cannot be "true".

It all flies in the face of how humans have approached religion in centuries past. In Islam in particular, this tendency completely ignores the tradition of Ijtihad (independent reasoning). Ijtihad is an integral part of Islam, a tradition of rational analysis -– religiously-sanctioned logos, so to speak -– by learned men that sets out to find solutions to questions not anticipated by the Qu'ran and other scriptures, and also to re-interpret old practices for new times, but within the spirit of Islam.

The marchers in Jakarta weren't calling for Ijtihad. They were calling for state coercion for Taqlid (imitation of the past) in dress, gender relations and a literal Shari'a. One doesn't see reason in 100,000 people, including boys, marching in the streets. One sees mere manipulation.

© Yawning Bread