The disciplinary vocabulary of modernity

THE KEY WORDS OF THE CONTEMPORARY GLOBAL SCENE-"secularization," "modernization," "globalization," "fundamentalism," "pluralism," and so on-present themselves to us as a descriptive vocabulary for what is really out there in the world, for what has happened and what is happening. They purport to tell us that this is the way the world is. But in fact these are prescriptive terms: they make up a disciplinary nomenclature that tells us how the world must be, or as some part of the world's population wants and insists that it be. This vocabulary gives normative, politically authorized accounts of the way things are.Take "pluralism," for instance. This word pretends to describe the straightforward reality of many contemporary urban societies, from New York City to Cape Town, in which people who differ from each other ethnically, linguistically, and religiously live together in shared spaces, in mutual respect and toleration, and in harmony. But the fact of population diversity is better called "plurality." "Pluralism'' as a prescription, which is what it is, includes embedded and unarticulated norms of what is and what is not tolerable in this common space, and in particular what "good" or "real" religion is and what is not. It assumes a common foundation of values and belief that all diverse peoples are said to hold, down deep, whatever might appear to separate them outwardly (this distinction between inner/outer is key to the organization and authority of this modern nomenclature); it consequently minimizes differences (differences that are in fact essentially important for the various groups involved, about how to raise children, for example, or how to arrange relationships between men and women, or religious leaders and their followers); and it puts high, but rarely explicit, strictures on what can and cannot be said and done in the public space. So pluralist "harmony" really means the mandated absence of differences that liberal modernity finds intolerable. The modern secular state was born not out of the success of "pluralism" but out of the sharp and dreadful awareness of the dangers and risks of plurality, specifically out of the Christian wars of the 16th and 17th centuries.Such key words of the modern world mask their authority behind this claim of being unproblematic descriptions of the way things are. They assume a certain naturalness, but the very naturalness of the terms results in the invisibility of ways of life we do not wish to see; this, in turn, results in a bad conscience, and this is where "fundamentalism" arises. "Fundamentalism" as an idea, a supposedly descriptive account of certain ways of being religious, is the expression of the deep political, moral, and religious fears of moderns. "Fundamentalism" is the presence that takes shape in the absences secured by the prescriptive language that pretends to describe the world. To borrow from the theorist Slavoj Zizek, because we are unable to integrate certain ways of being into our account of modern reality we are therefore "compelled to experience" these ways of being as "nightmarish apparition[s]."1 The vocabulary of modernity occludes the political decisions, the exercises of power, and in particular the exclusions that went into making the modern world the way it is, and the consequences of these decisions and acts of power. Especially troublesome for those of us who accept the urgent responsibility of finding or making new ways to peace, these naturalized words that hold within themselves fear and denial ("secularization," "modernization," "globalization," "fundamentalism," "pluralism") constitute the normative space of what will be deemed tolerable, acceptable, safe and good, on the one hand, and what will be declared intolerable, unacceptable, unsafe and bad, on the other.I too want to live in a safe and good world, in which people respect each other's rights to live as they see fit, and in a peaceful world. But as a scholar of religion committed to empirically (with all due caveats) engaging religion in the modern world and trying to understand itand very much trying to understand now how we live in a very dangerous world in which men and women with competing visions of how humans best live inflict serious damage on each other-I find these words to constitute a thicket through which it becomes almost impossible to see clearly. …