A friend recently informed me that politics and political discourse force his brain to shut down. During political seasons this is particularly true as he tends to disengage completely. There is a certain irony here since I’ve always thought this friend had the physical presence to make a good politician. On top of that, he’s intelligent, charming and has a good sense of humour. If that weren’t enough, he has used his law degree to work for his state’s government in order to help and protect his fellow citizens. What better person to elect to office?

This revelation of his, though, goes far to explaining why he would always give me dirty looks whenever I suggested he pursue a career in politics.

I can understand how he feels about politics. I often find myself yearning for those days when I had an apolitical approach to the world. Those were the days when I believed that the best government was one that governed from a distance. But those days belong to a dreamy past that existed before the Reagan years. When Reagan moved into the White House, I began to really listen to the rhetoric of the Right Wing and the Left Wing. I discovered that their screaming and whining was purposeful white noise meant to prevent people from finding out their true agenda. When I filtered out the noise, I discovered how intolerant and filled with hate and anger the members of these groups are. The Right came out of the closet during the 1991 Republican Convention. The Left waited nearly ten years to reveal themselves, when they threw their weight behind Ralph Nader in his bid against Gore for the presidency.

As an amateur student of history, I know that moderates are forever in danger from folk on either end of the political spectrum. After all, it was the Left that was responsible for the Cultural Revolution in China 50 years ago. It was the Right that controlled Christianity for more than a thousand years. Throughout history, the moderates have fallen victim to the forces of extremism. It has been those who refused to march lockstep, those who have asked questions, those who have sought the harmony found in compromise, those who have believed in and embraced egalitarianism who have died whenever the Left or the Right tried to impose their reality upon everyone else.

The Left and Right sneer at moderates and scorn compromise because they are incapable of comprehending the world in any manner other than dichotomies. For them, answers and solutions are always ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ Positions and ideas are either ‘right’ or ‘wrong.’ People and things are ‘good’ or ‘evil.’ The world exists in an ‘on/off’ state with only males or females who are either heterosexual or homosexual.

Everything is black or white. There is nothing in between. There are no shades of grey. You are either for us or against us. No modifiers, no qualifiers, no wiggle room.

No tolerance for anything that doesn’t fit into one of two boxes.

I remember as a child once reading that if one were to go far enough to the Right, they would find themselves on the Left and vice versa. In other words, the apparent differences between the Right Wing and the Left Wing are illusion. Their supposed political differences are only window dressing.

Our brains are the source of our subjective reality. The electromagnetic fields, photons, atoms of an external, quantifiable reality are converted by our brains into the people, things and abstractions we experience. A dichotomous universe exists only as the end result of these neural processes. The Left Wing and the Right Wing are the same because their brains are only capable of creating the same, or nearly same, subjective universe of simplistic dualities.

In September 2001, as a result of George W. Bush’s failure to take seriously his responsibility to protect Americans and American soil, Americans developed the impression that Islam is a religion of crazies and violence. Since Americans as a general rule tend to be ignorant of other cultures, they are easily beguiled by the propaganda put forth by their government as to who the “evil doers” really are.

An alternative to the crazy Muslim theory has been the notion that the violence of today is the fallout of the horrible international and economic policies carried out by the United States. But those policies are really no different than those carried out by any other group of people, powerful or not so powerful, throughout time and throughout history. Modern examples are the British, the French, the Germans, the Russians, the Japanese, and the Chinese. In recent times, there has been the Iroquois Confederacy, the Spanish, the Aztecs and the Incans. Further back there were the Vikings, the Mongols, the Turks and the Arabs. In ancient times, there were the Persians, the Egyptians, the Greeks and the Romans. That’s the short list and compared to most of those groups, the policies of the United States have been extremely benign.

We have also been told that 9/11 symbolizes a cultural war between the East and the West. It is a battle between the medievalism of the Middle East and the materialism of the United States. However, in a world where it is possible to travel its circumference in less that 24 hours, terms like East and West are fairly obsolete. They are terms used by a lazy mind to oversimplify the complexity and dynamics of cultural diversity found in our world.

In reality, however, the real East-West struggle, we are told, is a clash between world religions. Specifically, it is the attempt by Islam to gain world domination. The Muslims, we are told, are fanatics bent on wiping out all other forms of belief. Of course, Christian nations tend to forget that they have their own brand of religious fanatics in their midst. Apocalyptic religions e.g. Mormonism abound. These religious groups look forward to a future where God leads his legions to defeat the enemies of his chosen people and then reward those chosen few with sole possession of the world. At the end of the last millennium, members of these groups did their best to bring about those worldwide cataclysms that prophecy says will be necessary for the End of Times to occur.

When we take a closer look at world history and world events, what we see is that the conflict is really between extremism and moderation. In respect to religion, the conflict is manifested in a battle for dominance between fundamentalism and humanism. Fundamentalism has much in common with the Right Wing and the Left Wing. The world is seen in terms of black and white.  There is right and there is wrong and there is nothing in between.

Contrary to the claims of fundamentalist preachers, humanism and religion are not mutually exclusive. Fundamentalism and humanism are two ends of the religiousity spectrum. Humanistic religion emphasizes the human experience, believing that this experience has inherent value. Humanistic religion focuses upon the care of other people as well as accepting the differences between people. Humanists, like political moderates, doesn’t see the universe in stark black and white terms. As moderates can see greyness in any political situation, humanists accept and value the wide range of human possibilities.

Just as the reality of political extremists and moderates is determined by brain processes, so too is the reality of religiousity determined by the type of brain one has. Twin studies during that last two decades have unveiled a genetic component to religiousity. The genes one inherits from one’s parents do not influence whether one is a Jew, a Muslim, a Hindu, a Christian, a Muslim, a Buddhist, a Zoroastrian, a Wiccan or a Taoist. Instead, according to some studies, genetics has an influence upon where one lies on that Fundamentalist-Humanist continuum. Put another way, genetics influences what type of reality one’s brain creates.  That, of course, should come as no surprise.

The Selfish Gene Theory was a popular theory a few years back. It argued that any set of genes in competition with any other set of genes will do whatever is necessary to perpetuate itself. Altruism is simply an alliance of self-interest between sets of genes that have more commonality than differences. On a macro-behavioural level, groups of organisms with common characteristics compete with “other” groups for limited resources. In respect to human history, some have suggested that such competition existed between Neanderthals and early Homo sapiens. In that war, Neanderthals lost.

The conflict seen between extremism and moderation or more specifically, fundamentalism and humanism, is nothing less that a war over resources between brain types or gene pools.  History is replete with examples of one group wresting control from the other. The clearest examples of the cyclic nature of this competition can be seen with the collapse of the humanistic Greco-Roman world. In its ashes rose a fundamentalist reality that gave rise to the Dark Ages. At that same time in the Middle East, the newly established religion of Islam embraced and expanded upon the humanistic philosophies of the Greeks and Romans. This was the Golden Age of Islam with great advances made in science, mathematics, literature and medicine. Instead of locking up the mentally ill as the Europeans were doing, the Muslims created the first mental hospital and introduced a humane approach to treatment.

The Crusades helped re-introduce the humanistic ideals to the heirs of the Greco-Roman world. In rapid succession, Western Civilization had the Renaissance, the Reformation and the Age of Enlightenment. As humanistic principles rose in the West, fundamentalism began to dominate the Middle East. After the Polish knights utterly destroyed the Turkish army at the gates of Vienna in 1683, humanism and moderation all but disappeared in the Muslim world. In short, though fundamentalism and other forms of extremism lost its control of Western civilization, it gained ascendency over the Islamic world. Since then, the West has made great advances in science, mathematics, literature and medicine. In the Islamic world, moderates and humanists have had to speak quietly lest they attract too much attention from the Right Wing.

The events of 9/11 can be linked to many issues: the greed for oil, poor understanding of the Middle East resulting in poorly developed foreign policy, disparity in wealth and trade as well as the religious friction between Christianity and Islam that has existed since the armies of Islam first tried to conquer Europe over 1200 years ago. At its very core, however, 9/11 symbolizes the fact that this war between two genetic types or two realities has come to a head. Though it has been the most dramatic and caused the greatest loss of life, the destruction of the World Trade Towers was not the only event in recent modern times telling us that this war was alive and well. Only a few years earlier, the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City was bombed by another group of extremists. Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, Mohammed Atta, Marwan al-Shehhi and the other hijackers may have come from different countries and cultures, but they are bound together by a common reality. They were genetic cousins. In fact, it is most likely that there would be very little variability in those “reality genes” between Jerry Falwell and Osama bin Laden. After all, aside from the superficiality of their particular religious expression, the underlying fundamentalism of their world view was much the same. And both were beacons for hatred and intolerance.

This genetically-based war between fundamentalism and humanism, between political extremism and moderation, is alive and well. Today, these groups are in a death-struggle for dominion over the world. Fundamentalists and extremists, if successful, would drive their opponents underground or destroy them outright. Ironically, because of their tendency towards tolerance and acceptance, humanists and moderates would feel the need to build a world that allowed fundamentalists and extremists to go about their business.

Is it possible to build a safe world while your enemies live within your midst? For those who can only experience the world as dichotomous, the answer would likely be “no.”

Pace è Bene