Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon/: kracht's "1979"

[Terrance]

lorentzen-nicklaus wrote:
> 
> > I'm not sure what, exactly, Pynchon means by "the religious wars with which
> > we have become all too familiar, involving various sorts of fundamentalism".
> >
> > Ayatollah Khomeini? Pakistan v. India?



Too bad P didn't say more about this. 

In the Luddite essay he hooks it up with the machine. 

Karen Armstrong is the author of The Battle for God: fundamentalism in
Judaism, Christianity and Islam

 

This is not a centuries-old phenomenon. Fundamentalism actually began in
the US early in the 20th century. Today, it is by no means confined to
the Muslim world, but has erupted in every major faith as a reaction
against rational, secular modernity. It did not become widespread in the
Islamic world until a degree of modernisation had been achieved in the
late 1960s, after secular solutions such as nationalism or socialism
seemed to have failed. 

Wherever a westernised secular state has established itself, a religious
fundamentalist movement has developed in conscious rejection.
Fundamentalists typically withdraw from mainstream society to create an
enclave of pure faith, from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities in New
York to the training camps of Osama Bin Laden. Surrounded by a world
that they perceive as hostile, fundamentalists often plan a
counter-offensive, resolved to drag God and religion from the sidelines
in secular society and bring them back to centre stage. 

Fundamentalism always begins as a response to what is experienced as an
assault by the liberal or secular world. The American fundamentalist
movement began in earnest in 1917, after liberal Christians mounted an
attack against their more conservative brethren, accusing them of
undermining the war effort and of being in league with the Germans. The
fundamentalists believed that the End of Days was nigh; they condemned
democracy as mob rule, and saw the League of Nations as the abode of
Antichrist. To this day, American fundamentalists are at best highly
suspicious of democracy, and they regard the United Nations, the
European Union and the World Council of Churches as satanic. 



In "Is it O.K. to Be a Luddite?" (1984) P says, 

The craze for Gothic fiction after The Castle of Otranto was grounded, I
suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time
which had
come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal,
folks
in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things
had been
possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons, spells. The laws of
nature
had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true
working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere
machinery.
Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan,
had fallen
from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism
and
nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife,
for
salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist
movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a
broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included
Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel.
Each in
its way expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of
faith,
however "irrational," to an emerging technopolitical order that might or
might not
know what it was doing. "Gothic" became code for "medieval," and that
has
remained code for "miraculous," on through Pre-Raphaelites,
turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and comics,
down to
Star Wars and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery.


http://www.cs.hofstra.edu/~vbarr/Politics/armstrong.html