I realize this is an awfully broad topic, but it keeps coming up indirectly on other threads, so perhaps discussing it can help clarify what it is, how it arises, and how it interrelates with other facets of cultural life and evolution. I'll share some of my initial impressions for starters.
Fundamentalism appears not only to be the tenure of most religions, but expresses, in part, the most basic fears of any society seeking to secure its survival needs; this basic need orientation is most secure when "the good of the one" is subordinate to "the good of the many," and so a society that has the most difficulty overcoming threats to its basic viability is most likely to develop fundamentalist ideologies that reinforce a tribal cohensiveness toward the end of resolving those problems. Once those basic problems are resolved for an extended period of time, indicating a self-sustaining communal system, the next levels of Maslow's paradigm seem to come into play, which of themselves challenge the tribal orientation and the fundamentalistic ideology.
So how does this kind of fear perpetuate itself once threats to survival have largely diminished, as in the U.S. where socio-economic status doesn't appear to entirely predict whether or not a person adopts that narrower way of viewing reality (yes, higher education, especially of the liberal arts variety, appears to inoculate many, but the exceptions are common enough to question the rule)? Of course, survival needs are never completely secured in the minds of mortal organisms, but enough people depart from that unreflective collective mentality (still needing community and family)to posit needs other than survival ones for meaning and identity.
Most everyone at Shalom knows my biases re: psychosocial development, complexity models, etc . . . I'll not withold these, but would like to hear other arguments/explanations that might take issue here.
One of the reasons this topic comes to mind is how I see the fermenting of fundamentalism occuring in the U.S., and what the constraints are in laws, Bill of Rights, Constitutional freedoms, etc. that keep this growing force from becoming a more formative influence at those same levels. In terms of historical development, there is of course much indebtedness to the European Scientific Revolution, a radical departure in cultural paradigm subordinating religious edict to individual sovereignty, the ultimate basis for protecting both church and state from each other's ulterior aims, and the basis for capitalistic free market economies that can at once exploit human selfishness and protect its citizenry through representational politics. Had we tried to be more pure, as Islamic Muslim society has often tried to be, it might have never succeeded; it is as though we needed to establish a highly viable, selfish system congruent with a fallen human psychology before pretending to other comforts of higher individual aspiration. Islam, on the other hand, seeks to purify these selfish tendencies before setting about to form a stable, pragmatic base for a more evolutionary social dynamic.
This topic also converges on an area that might draw some interesting, divergent reponses from forum members who are, like myself, valuing some of the current administration's foreign policy, while fearing what it might want to do with Rowe vs. Wade and other human rights issues.
On the front of psychosocial development, the first place I look for conflict in fundamentalistic ideologies is how they bear upon the psychobiological impetus of childhood growth; in other words, where the needs to individuate and the need of the family to maintain a largely collective identity engage each other. And so what's implied here for me is how fundamentalism emerges in family and social systems apart from its more obvious religious manifestations. Herein is one of my biases: that religious fundamentalism isn't the first effect of what we're calling fundamentalism, but derives itself from more primary tribal systems of family structure, community and political organization.
And so, tenatively, I might define the prevalence of fundamentalism as the fear of emerging complexity - complexity expressed mainly in increases of individual coherence. As such, this degree of evolution (actualizing Maslow's hierarchy) would be represented in the minority. But to the extent that I've seen it in families that are capable of supporting this impetus toward individuation, there is a closeness not of implied loyalties, but where individual growth/awareness continues to flourish through intimate connections(sounds abstract, and though it isn't a perfect system, it is indeed a different way of life with different tendencies for problem solving).
