It struck me today that Fundamentalism is at root a desired relationship with the future. Obviously, it looks back, generally to a past that never was, and seeks to impose a reality on the present. But what is really desired is the ability to predict the future, which is all too uncertain in the modern age.
We all want immortality of some sort. For his part, Sade wanted his grave to disappear; but one senses he wanted his books to survive. Ho Chi Minh was buried, as I understand it, on three different unmarked hills, presumably as bones. But he wanted his vision of a socialist Vietnam to endure.
Tradition represents a continuity with the future. You do as your father did. He sees this, and assumes your grandchildren will do as his grandparents did. One can call it a circle or a line, but it is a series of points which are connected, one to the other.
In our own age, it is impossible to see what will happen because we have no–or very few–traditions. We have science, but of its nature science necessarily will always make contingent claims, not final ones. There is no other way to do it.
So we see people wanting to fetishize specific ontologies, particularly orthodox materialism of the ping-pong ball or Relativistic sort. Whatever else changes in science, they feel, this will not change.
And of course we have our genetics. However we modify life, what we really ARE will not change; nor will our perception of what we are. This is very important to people of a certain bent.
This, too, is a fundamentalism, which rather than looking to the past looks to what parts of reality can be assumed to be ineluctably real; that whatever interesting discoveries will be made in 24th century science, if we live that long, will be RELATED to them and their work.
There is so much sadness in this world, and so much pain. People need figurative walls to lean on, floors to hold them. They need, as George Jones sang, “four walls around me, to hold my life, and keep me from going stray”.
Yet there is much light in this world too, and it is infinite. Einstein wanted to make it the only constant in the universe. Perhaps in its form as motion and infinite expansion, we can agree with him.