Not in the United States?Psychology Press Interview with Peter Herriot - Transcription
The audio version of this interview can be found on our podcast page
Psychology Press: I would like to introduce Peter Herriot. Peter has spent most of his working life as an academic. His subject is organizational psychology, where he specialized in personnel selection, career development and the employment relationship.
Subsequent to retirement he has sought to apply social and organizational psychology to the understanding of religious fundamentalism.
We are here to talk about his research into religious fundamentalism and his forthcoming book published by Routledge entitled Religious Fundamentalism and Social Identity. In this book Peter seeks to provide a psychological as opposed to a sociological analysis of fundamentalism by applying social identity theory to the phenomenon.
Case studies of Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers and of current controversies in the Anglican Church about gay priests and bishops demonstrate how fruitfully this theory can be applied to fundamentalist conflicts.
So Peter, in your earlier career you concentrated on the psychology of work and employment, what prompted you to shift your attention to Religious Fundamentalism.
Peter Herriot: I suppose the first reason was that I looked around and here was an issue that was an extremely important current world issue and I could only find one psychology book that dealt with it, so there was a spur and an impetus to do something.
The second reason is that I myself was brought up in a fundamentalist family, so I thought that I might have some personal experience that could shed a bit more light on it. I would say that first of all my upbringing was an extremely loving and kind one and secondly the results of having a fundamentalist upbringing aren't necessarily all bad so for example if you are faced with a really restrictive intellectual framework then it certainly stimulates you to start questioning and getting at its assumptions and trying to move out of it.
Psychology Press: What do you as a Social Scientist mean by fundamentalism? Isn't it just a term used to deride many aspects of religion that you disagree with? And couldn't it be argued that western discourse is dominated by what could be called atheist or secular fundamentalism.
Peter Herriot: That is a good question. A social scientist has to say that the answer to that question ought to be an empirical one. If we are going to have a category called fundamentalism, then we are going to have to show that there are social, or religious movements which differ from others and they differ in the sense that they have certain features in common and other religious/social movements don't have those features or have one or two of them but not most or all of them. So really the question is an empirical one and only if we can show empirically that there are movements that have these things in common then we are justified in looking at it from a social scientific point of view.
Psychology Press: What would you say are the main features of fundamentalism?
Peter Herriot: Well the first and easily the most important feature of fundamentalism is its defining feature is that it is reactive. That is to say fundamentalists are reacting against certain features of the modern world; they don't like the consequences of the enlightenment for example. They don't like the fact that society is now pluralistic and very few people would want to argue that there is only one truth.
Secondly they don't like the notion that people themselves are responsible for their own social arrangements. So society is not god-given, it's a human creation and it is our responsibility. Because it is reactive it also has a related ideological feature which is that it is dualist, which means to say that it tends to see things in black and white. It thinks of God or the devil, good or evil and indeed it thinks of us or them and that gives it its momentum, because if we can think of us or them then we have somebody to oppose and opposition is the raison d'etre of fundamentalists.
Another feature of fundamentalism is its strong emphasis on authority and that authority is usually the authority of the holy book so if you think of the three religions of the book, that is Islam, Judaism, and Christianity, all three have as their basic authority a book and fundamentalists treat that book as being the final authority on matters both of belief and of conduct.
Of course they have authoritative interpreters of the book who are fundamentalists in the way that they deal with it but that is where the authority comes from the holy book. Needless to say, however they don't take the book as a whole as mainstream and orthodox believers seem to do. Rather they pick out the bits that they want to pick out and emphasize because those are the features of belief that in their view will motivate the faithful to do what the organization wants them to do.
If you think for example the notion of Jihad looking at the news you would think that Jihad was an absolutely central part of Islam, well it isn't. It is one concept that features in the Koran but mainstream Islam has five pillars of belief and Jihad certainly doesn't feature as one of them, rather it was emphasized by radical Muslim clerics in the middle of the 20th Century and has been used to justify revolutionary Islam.
So then selectively choosing from the holy book is the fourth feature of Fundamentalism and the final one is the fact that its millenialist, that is to say fundamentalists always believe that in the short or the long term God's kingdom is going to come, and it is going to come in highly apocalyptic scenarios and dreadful things will happen but after that God will reign and all will be well as the world becomes a theocracy.
Psychology Press: So what are the misconceptions surrounding religious fundamentalism?
Peter Herriot: Well it is hardly surprising that there are a lot of misconceptions flying around because people haven't really paid too much attention to fundamentalism until after 9/11 and as a consequence of that popular journalism and other media have perhaps painted pictures which have given false impressions. So for a start fundamentalism certainly isn't necessarily violent. By far the vast majority of fundamentalists don't endorse violence at all and many of them believe in having no contact what so ever with the political process, others of them engage in the political process, but very very few seek to subvert it.
A second and related misconception is that because it is violent, therefore it can't be religious and those of us who are religious of course want our religion to be a religion of justice, peace and love. And when people come along bombing people of course we are very upset about that and don't want to call it religion. But of course we only need a historical perspective to realize that all the great religions have been violent at particular times throughout the course of history.
We can't be saying that fundamentalists aren't religious, we can't be saying that the 9/11 bombers want to be doing it for criminal reasons and they just put a cloak of religious spurious justification on top of it. On the contrary we have to admit that fundamentalism is at one end of a religious continuum for all major religions of the world.
Another misconception is the notion that these people must be straight out of medieval history. Their beliefs and speech is so incredibly antique and contrary to modernity that in some sense they are throw backs to the medieval times. This again is a great mistake; it conceals the facts that all fundamentalisms are in fact 20th Century phenomena. They are all modern phenomena, they have to be by definition because they are reactions against modernity. So their modern phenomena and the reason they look medieval is because they all go back to a mythical golden age which embodies for them the real purity and truth of their belief. Everything that has happened since then is on the downward hill to the everlasting bonfire.
Psychology Press: Can you tell us a bit about the development of Religious Fundamentalism and why it has now become a global concern?
Peter Herriot: I think that basically here are sets of people who are very afraid for the traditional religion that means so much to them. They are also afraid for the conservative institutions such as the family which are associated with their traditional religious beliefs. They see them threatened by Pluralism, the pluralist society that they find within modernity but modernity and pluralism are really pretty abstract enemies and they need enemies they need more concrete enemies, they need opponents.
When you look at the history of fundamentalisms you see that their sequence of opponents seems to have developed, so if you look at them historically, for example in America the first enemy they picked on was liberal theology. Here are people who are challenging the literal authority of the word of God, their modern ideas. So if you think about that one the way you deal with people like that of course is to argue against them and produce learned clerics to put them down. But soon they moved on to the enemy of declining morals and so again taking the American example in the 1980's you had the moral majority who campaigned against the various outcomes of modernity, in the form of feminism, rights of minorities of all sorts and so on.
From the moral agenda the next move is to say "we are against the whole society that spawned this moral quagmire that we find ourselves wallowing in" so we are anti-secular society and that you could say is the theme song of very modern Islamic and Christian fundamentalism, but of course some have gone further still and said "who is the personification of modern secularism, it is the great Satan over the water there who has invaded Islam and who is our sworn enemy". That is perhaps the way in which the search for an enemy has gone from being a search for a theological enemy to a search for an enemy against whom one is totally justified in being violent.
Psychology Press: Can you explain why and how religious fundamentalism can sometimes turn violent?
Peter Herriot: Well now you are asking a question about how can individual people who appear to be relatively normal people in many ways and who are devoted family members and who do a lot of good in their local communities. How is it that they can actively be persuaded to shoot, bomb and kill people. And of course psychology has had an answer to that for quite a long time, well not the answer but an approach to it which says "If you have a stereotype of another set of people if you have an us and them situation in which them you can classify as being all the same", because they are all examples of the godless secular throng. If you can say that then having de-personalised them you are not harming another individual you are harming the enemy, and Mohammed Attar for example when he gave his instructions to the hijackers, what he said was "don't exercise vengeance on individuals you are doing God's will by fighting the Jihad".
If you de-personalise people then you are more likely to be able to inflict violence on them because you can in no sense have an empathy with them because they are not individuals in the same way as you are or perhaps you are not an individual either. Perhaps if you are Mohammed Attar you think of yourself as simply a loyal soldier in the army of the almighty. And so neither you nor they are individuals both you and they are actually simply actors in a cosmic war. I suppose the other reason why individual become violent in the interest of their fundamentalism is simply because of what the belief system says. If you actually believe what you are told then you will believe that if you kill people in the war against the infidel then you yourself will become a martyr. You will hasten the kingdom of God by your action, so the beliefs of fundamentalisms however crazy they appear to the rest of us. Those beliefs are actually of crucial importance because their content tells people what it is that they should be doing. Of course a final reason for engaging in mayhem is that by so doing you are hastening the apocalypse, the final victory, the arrival of the kingdom of God.
Psychology Press: Leading on from that how do you think an individual can come to embrace a counter cultural world view?
Peter Herriot: Well basically it comes with joining. If you join a fundamentalism then the beliefs and the values and the Norms of behaviour that you embrace are part of the sub culture of that fundamentalism and you can't be a member of a fundamentalism without embracing its subculture, otherwise you are excluded. But of course there are other reasons as well; more individual reasons perhaps why people embrace a particular world view, a fundamentalist world view. The reason is of course is that it meets certain very basic psychological needs that we all have. For a start it boosts our self esteem so we know as fundamentalists that we are really somebody special, we have been chosen by God. We are us and all the rest of them are them, and second and equally important in a confused modern world it gives us meaning and structure, so we know who we are, we know what we ought to believe, we know what values and attitudes we should have and what issues we should think important, we know how to behave in all the moral dilemmas that we are faced with and they are not moral dilemmas any more they are clear it is in the good book.
Finally and even more significant perhaps we know what out place in history is, we understand history as being something which is in God's control he has wrought it. We know where we are at the moment, we understand where we have been and what's more (and this is untrue for everybody else but us) we know where we are going.
Psychology Press: Obviously religious fundamentalism is a subject that has been of particular political and social relevance in the last few years. What would you say are the main advantages that social identity theory offers the consideration of the subject?
Peter Herriot: Social identity theory is a very inclusive theory, it bridges the gap between the sociologists perspective on fundamentalisms as social groups and the psychologists perspective or rather a traditional psychology perspective that treats individual psychology as being the only psychology worth doing which tends to look at fundamentalism as though it is totally within the mind and the preference of the individual. Social identity theory bridges the gap and neither sociology or individual psychology is sufficient to explain how it is that perfectly ordinary people can believe and do very unusual things.
Social identity theory bridges that gap by saying, look peoples selves are at least partly constructed out of the categories or groups of people they think they belong to. And so if I believe myself above all and absolutely centrally to be one of the only true believers then that is part of myself and therefore as soon as anything happens to the group of believers, as soon as they are persecuted or they achieve a great victory then it is me that benefits it is myself that is enhanced or it is myself that is threatened. As soon as the self is threatened or as soon as it is enhanced that is a fundamental motivation for continuing.
To sum up I guess that social identity theory bridges the gap and it explains satisfactorily so many of the phenomena that fundamentalisms give rise to.
Psychology Press: What do you hope this book will do for the current debates on how religious fundamentalism is positioned in present society?
Peter Herriot: Hopefully it will disabuse people of some of the stereotypes that they have about fundamentalism so there are plenty of things that occur only to easily to people.
For example they could follow Freud in treating all religion but particularly fundamentalist religion as being pathological. If it is pathological then extraordinarily large numbers of people in the world are suffering from mental illness.
Secondly people can attribute religious fundamentalism to people's personality. A certain sort of person they may say is attracted to fundamentalist movements and others are not. What the evidence shows is there is only one aspect of personality that is reliably attracted to fundamentalist adherence and it is authoritarianism.
So the more authoritarian you are the more likely you are to engage in fundamentalist belief. If we don't have stereotypes about fundamentalists, then we could avoid falling into the trap which they are only too eager that we fall into so if we ourselves stereotype fundamentalists as being ante-diluvian hicks for example then we are playing into their game by categorizing them as them and us as us, and that is setting up precisely the situation they want because they thrive on being oppositional and when we provide them with a ready made enemy then they are away. That is why president bush's response to 9/11 played absolutely into fundamentalist hands. If we call them the axis of evil or indeed just straight evil as he did and say that we are going to wage war on them that is precisely what they want. We should instead dismiss them as a group of criminal plotters. If we are disabused of some of the stereotypes about fundamentalists that we may have harbored then there is another thing that we can recognize and that is that fundamentalism is basically another grand narrative contrary to what most modern theory would have us believe large numbers of people in the world need and welcome grand narratives. Grand narratives provide a structure which gives us meaning for our lives. Fundamentalisms basically are grand narratives; they meet the psychological needs of self esteem and of meaning and structure. Unfortunately other grand narratives for example the salvation of the planet don't appear to be making as much headway as fundamentalism and the key question is to recognize the fact that fundamentalism is a grand narrative but it dies have psychological benefits for its appearance and to work out how it is that alternative grand narratives for example if we are wishing to be religious, the fact that we should construe human beings all as children of God could gain preferential treatment over fundamentalism as a grand narrative.
Psychology Press: Finally where do you think this issue is going in the next 10 years and beyond? Also can you actually see a resolution to the problem of religious fundamentalism in the world today?
Peter Herriot: The next 10 years as far as fundamentalisms are concerned are a mere drop in the ocean. All fundamentalisms although they are modern historically have their roots in very very ancient cultural traditions. So for example if you start with the USA, American protestant fundamentalism has its roots long long ago in the Calvinism of the refamation that explains the legalism of some protestant fundamentalism. Also in dissenting tradition we are enthusiastic followers of the almighty who talks directly to us. Likewise if you think about Islam, with Islam historically over centuries politics and religion have been absolutely inseparable for a Muslim how the people of God fair in the world is a religious question, it is a religious issue. If you think down the centuries Islam has had a succession of great empires and then in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries those empires fade the west industrialization, modernity takes their place. Those are the long term origins of Islamic fundamentalism, long term roots, similarly if you think about Judaism the Jews have quotes they are God's chosen people, they will be redeemed, they will return to the land, the whole land which they were promised. The roots to fundamentalism are deep in culture and therefore to expect fundamentalisms in some sense to fade away in the face of modernity in ten years time or whatever is a false hope a false nation. So a resolution doesn't relate in any way to conquering fundamentalisms the resolution of the issue may lie simply in refusing to play their own game.
Psychology Press: Thank you very much Peter. Peter's book Religious Fundamentalism and Social Identity is published in January 2007. It doesn't aim to give a total psychological explanation to fundamentalism but rather it shows how one particular theory - social identity - can go a very long way in helping us to understand the phenomenon.
The audio version of this interview can be found on our podcast page
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