A reader writes:
The standard for cross-national, social-science research on this subjects is the work put out by Ronald Inglehart’s World Values Survey. Check out Inglehart and Welzel’s (2005) Modernization, Cultural Change, and Democracy and Norris and Inglehart’s (2004) Sacred and the Secular – both Cambridge University Press. It’s a complicated subject, but the short answer to your question is that as ‘existential security’ – i.e. an individual’s survival chances – improves over time societal culture shifts in two ways. The first shift, from the traditional to the materialist/modern, sees society shift away from traditional social organization and dogmatic, fundamentalist religion towards scientific rationalism and more bureaucratic forms of organization. The second shift, which occurs when a society enters its post-industrial phases, sees existential security increase so much that the individual is essentially totally liberated from society. We go, as Ingelhart and Welzel note, from ‘communities of necessity’ to ‘elective affinities’ as we shift from focusing on creating materially better conditions to making the individual as autonomous and ‘free’ as possible.Society goes from extending life through material accumulation to emphasizing quality or meaning of life through the promotion of human self-expression. It’s basically Maslow’s hierarchy of needs applied to entire societies rather than individuals.
So, what’s going on / has gone on is twofold.
First, the move from traditional to modern deeply undermined the role, position, authority, and legitimacy of dogmatic fundamentalism in our culture. So, in general, those that benefit from fundamentalism’s previous status will fight back against modernity. But, importantly, while bureaucratic, scientific rationalism does promise to make us materially better off, we are still, as a society, bound to the same sort of hierarchical relations and the same sort of collective work environments as we were before. Only instead of working in the fields and being beholden to chiefs and priests, we’re working on factory floors and are beholden to rational bureaucrats of various types. This paradox is what Huxley and Orwell wrote about at length in their respective dystopias.
Second, in the shift to the modern to the postmodern the nature of work and society changes again. Out is the collective work on the factory floor that is directed by technical, bureaucratic experts. We’re now in the knowledge economy where individual expertise and creativity is meshed with machine production in ways that de-emphasize collective management and collective work. With existential security so high and the individual becoming the focus of work and consumption there is a shift to emphasize exactly the sort of ‘lifestyle’ questions that has ripped our politics apart for the last generation or so. Individuals go from making decisions that revolve around ‘how do I conform so that I may survive’ to, ‘how do we collectively manage ourselves to produce material abundance,’ to, finally, ‘what way of life makes me happy and content’? Scientific rationalism is also, ironically, devalued because by now many of its flaws have been revealed. There are, in this phase, no ‘savior’ ideologies or belief systems – just individuals choosing what is best for themselves.
So, is fundamentalism related to economic conditions? Yes, but there is more to it than that. Many are also CHOOSING fundamentalism because it adds a sense of meaning and purpose to one’s life that purely materialist worldviews don’t provide for many people. The United States, in particular,is an outlier in the modern west because it has traditionally, for a number of deep-seated reasons, lagged behind the rest of the west on emphasizing scientific-rationalism. So, when folks begin shifting away from the ideologies of scientific rationalism during their post-materialist search for meaning it’s no surprise they return to religion – religion has almost ALWAYS been stronger in the US. In the rest of the West, however, scientific rationalism has nearly destroyed traditional religion. So, when Europeans begin their post-materialist search for meaning they turn to something other than organized, traditional, Christian religion because fundamentalist religion, as a worldview, has become so illegitimate as a belief system for most Europeans. In Europe, religion is usually associated with oppression and tyranny. In the United States, it is associated with freedom. This is why we see the differences that we do.
The Dish 