In historical terms fundamentalism is a hermeneutic principle, linked to the interpretation of a holy book. Modern Western fundamentalism was born in Protestant circles in the nineteenth-century United States, and its characteristic feature is the decision to interpret the Scriptures literally, especially with regard to those notions of cosmology whose truth the science of the day seemed to doubt. Hence the frequently intolerant rejection of all allegorical interpretations, and especially of all forms of education that attempted to undermine faith in the biblical text, as occurred with the triumph of Darwinism.
This form of fundamentalist literalism is ancient, and even in the days of the Fathers of the Church there were debates between partisans of the letter and supporters of a suppler hermeneutics, like that of Saint Augustine. But in the modern world strict fundamentalism could only be Protestant, given that in order to be a fundamentalist you have to assume that the truth is given by a certain interpretation of the Bible. In the Catholic world it is the authority of the Church that guarantees the validity of interpretation, and so the Catholic equivalent of Protestant fundamentalism takes if anything the form of traditionalism. I shall omit any consideration of the nature of Muslim and Jewish fundamentalism, which I leave to the experts.
Is fundamentalism necessarily intolerant? On a hermeneutic level it is, but not necessarily on a political one. It is possible to imagine a fundamentalist sect that assumes its own elect to be the privileged possessors of the correct interpretation of the Scriptures, without however indulging in any form of proselytism and consequently without wishing to oblige others to share those beliefs, or to fight for a society based on them. «Integralism,» on the other hand, refers to a religious and political position whereby religious principles must become at once the model of political life and the source of the laws of the state. While fundamentalism and integralism are in principle conservative, there are forms of integralism that claim to be progressive and revolutionary. There are Catholic integralist movements that are not fundamentalist, fighting for a society totally inspired by religious principles but without imposing a literal interpretation of the Scriptures, and maybe prepared to accept a theology like that of Teilhard de Chardin.
The nuances can be even subtler. Think of the phenomenon of political correctness in America. This sprang from the desire to encourage tolerance and the recognition of all differences, religious, racial, and sexual, and yet it is becoming a new form of fundamentalism that is affecting everyday language in a practically ritual fashion, and that works on the letter at the expense of the spirit—and so you can discriminate against blind persons provided that you have the delicacy to call them the «sightless,» and above all you can discriminate against those who do not follow the rules of political correctness.
And racism? Nazi racism was certainly totalitarian; it had pretensions to being scientific, but there was nothing fundamentalist about the doctrine of race. An unscientific racism like that of Italy’s Northern League does not have the same cultural roots of pseudoscientific racism (in reality it has no cultural roots), yet it is racism.
And intolerance? Can it be reduced to these differences and the kinship between fundamentalism, integralism, and racism? There have been nonracist forms of intolerance (like the persecution of the heretics or the intolerance of dissidents in dictatorships). Intolerance is something far deeper, lying at the roots of all the phenomena I am considering here.
Fundamentalism, integralism, and pseudoscientific racism are theoretical positions that presuppose a doctrine. Intolerance comes before any doctrine. In this sense intolerance has biological roots, it manifests itself among animals as territoriality, it is based on emotional reactions that are often superficial—we cannot bear those who are different from us, because their skin is a different color; because they speak a language we do not understand; because they eat frogs, dogs, monkeys, pigs, or garlic; because they tattoo themselves…
Intolerance for what is different or unknown is as natural in children as their instinct to possess all they desire. Children are educated gradually to tolerance, just as they are taught to respect the property of others and, even before that, to control their sphincters. Unfortunately, while everyone learns to control his own body, tolerance is a permanent educational problem with adults, because in everyday life we are forever exposed to the trauma of difference. Academics often deal with the doctrines of difference, but devote insufficient attention to uncontrolled intolerance, because it eludes all definition and critical consideration.
Yet the doctrines of difference do not produce uncontrolled intolerance: on the contrary, they exploit a preexisting and diffuse reservoir of intolerance. Take the witch hunts. This phenomenon was a product not of the Dark Ages but of the modern age. The Malleus Maleficarum was written shortly after the discovery of America, it was a contemporary of Florentine humanism; Jean Bodin’s Démonomanie des sorciers came from the pen of a Renaissance man who wrote after Copernicus. My intention here is not to explain why the modern world produces theoretical justifications for witch hunts; all I want to do is point out that this doctrine became successful because popular fear of witches was already a reality. That fear can be found in classical antiquity (Horace), in the edict of King Rotari, and in the Summa theologica of Saint Thomas. It was considered a part of everyday life, just as the penal code provides for muggers. Without this popular belief a doctrine of witchcraft and the systematic persecution of witches could never have gained currency.
Pseudoscientific anti-Semitism arose in the course of the nineteenth century and became totalitarian anthropology and industrialized genocide only in the twentieth. But it could never have arisen had an anti-Jewish polemic not been under way for centuries, since the days of the Fathers of the Church, or if common people had not translated anti-Semitism into practice, a situation that endured for hundreds of years wherever there was a ghetto. The anti-Jacobin theories of Jewish conspiracy circulating at the beginning of the nineteenth century did not create popular anti-Semitism, but rather exploited a hatred for difference that already existed.
The most dangerous form of intolerance is precisely the kind that arises in the absence of any doctrine, fueled by elemental drives. This is why it cannot be criticized or curbed by rational argument. The theoretical foundations of Mein Kampf can be confuted by a battery of fairly simple arguments, but if the ideas proposed in it have survived and continue to survive all objections, it is because they are founded on uncontrolled intolerance, which is immune to all criticism. I find the intolerance of the Italian Northern League more dangerous than that of Le Pen’s Front National. The historical background of Le Pen’s movement is characterized by the perfidy of a certain class of right-wing intellectuals, while Northern League leader Bossi has nothing but uncontrolled drives.
Look at what is happening these days in Italy, where twelve thousand Albanians have entered the country in little over a week. The public and official model was one of welcome. Most of those who want to stop this exodus, which could become more than the country can handle, use economic and demographic arguments. But all theories are rendered superfluous by a creeping intolerance that gains new ground with every day that passes.
Uncontrolled intolerance is based on a categorical short circuit that is then leased out to every future racist doctrine: if some of the Albanians who have come to Italy over the past few years have become thieves or prostitutes (and this is true), then all Albanians are thieves and prostitutes.
This is a frightening short circuit, because it constitutes a constant temptation for all of us: all it takes is for someone to steal our baggage at an airport anywhere in the world, and we go back home saying that the people of that country cannot be trusted.
The most frightening form of intolerance is that of the poor, who are the first victims of difference. There is no racism among the rich. The rich have produced, if anything, the doctrines of racism. The poor, on the other hand, have produced its practice, which is far more dangerous.
Intellectuals cannot fight uncontrolled intolerance, because when faced with pure unthinking animality, thought finds itself defenseless. But it is too late when war is waged on doctrinal intolerance, for when intolerance is transformed into doctrine the war is already lost, and those who ought to fight it become the first victims.
Yet it is here that the challenge lies. To inculcate tolerance in adults who shoot at one another for ethnic and religious reasons is a waste of time. Too late. Therefore uncontrolled intolerance has to be beaten at the roots, through constant education that starts from earliest infancy, before it is written down in a book, and before it becomes a behavioral «skin» that is too thick and too tough.
The Intolerable
There are irritating questions, as when someone asks you what has happened just after you bit your tongue. «What do you think about that?» people ask you at a time in which everyone (with a very few exceptions) thinks the same thing about the Priebke case. And they are almost disappointed when you reply that, obviously, you are indignant and bewildered, because essentially everyone asks this question of everyone else in the hope of hearing a word, an explanation, that
