Religious Fundamentalism in Orwell and Pynchon

[Terrance]

jbor 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.
> 
> In the Foreword he hooks it up with anti-Semitism, which might imply that
> he's referring to the long-standing conflict in the Middle East. If he is,
> it's not really "fundamentalism" or a "religious war" like, say, the
> Crusades were religious wars.

Can never tell when P uses a term. Fascist and Sloth he sort of
re-defines, but we can't even pin him down on those who deplore racial
differences most. It's a problem and the implications are big. How does
he reconcile the fundamentalist rejection of enlightenment progress, 
individualism (Locke, we own ourselves), and technology with his luddite
and American-Left sympathies? 


An article worth reading. 

Islam and us 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,908217,00.html





> 
> It might have been lucky that he didn't say too much more about this and
> that he just left it as a hopelessly vague assertion ("involving various
> sorts of fundamentalism"), because I don't know that it holds up to much
> scrutiny. It would have been an opportunity to connect fundamentalist
> attitudes with ideology as a primary motivation behind post-1945 wars and
> uprisings - capitalism, communism, nationalism, civil struggles between
> different ethnic groups and interests etc, as variants of "fanaticism"
> (though not really "religious" in any sense of the word) - but he doesn't do
> that at all.
> 
> best


Right, but of course this is exactly what he does in his novels.