the extremist

Conservatism, fundamentalism, extremism, fanaticism. Is there a continuity between them, an inevitable transition from one to the other? Obviously not: many people remain deeply conservative, drawn to some sort of tradition, finding solace in continuities, order, hierarchies, and resistances to the flux in their lives engendered by capitalism, immigration, social 'atomisation'. And yet they still remain fairly 'decent people' (Rawls?). More to the point: who doesn't become conservative as time passes?

Of course, these terms are loaded: other people's beliefs are often viewed as being extreme (Hey, you're a Muslim, aren't you? Aren't your lot against women/jews/the west?). Not everyone can be C of E, and why would a religious person think that following the fundamentals of his or her faith is anything but normal? It's a great put down to say that other people are full of hatred, bitterness-and one way of avoiding looking at one's own excesses.

But this isn't about just religion, is it? The Gulags, the Trenches, the Camps. What is that, but excessive violence (is there a normal amount of violence?). And can't you be excessively in love (with cinnamon rolls, say?). Is there a 'proper' love of the world, or endless lust? Madness, desire, and the need to contain it, circumscribe it: lawlines, cosmos, and civilisation, fighting the chaos in the human heart, the unmoored imagination. At the social level: bourgeois society must be protected from the marginal man, the steppenwolf, the lumpenproletariat.

But when did it begin?

Aren't we transgressive creatures by nature? Our nature to escape ourselves?The Fall, a mark of freedom, not sin? And who but a god decides what is excessive? (That seems too extreme: as if to say: the judgements of human societies and rationality count for nothing).

But on second thoughts, isn't it the deities themselves that are excessive and isn't the plural itself excessive? Excessive in their loving, in their need for devotion (the 'jealous God'), in their punitiveness? And does that inspire an excessive confidence in the believers or is it the other way round: is our excessive confidence in ourselves projected on to our ideal version of ourselves? In which case, maybe we're not really confident of ourselves...

Old Jewish proverb: if a man is right 70% of the time that's very good; 85%? That's excellent. 100% , then? Then shoot him!

'Religious' people invariably think they know it all. This isn't a particularly modern aversion to 'knowing'..after all, there are many traditions that focus on our unknowingness and a sense of humility, on seeing through a glass darkly.

Religious beliefs legitimate and contain our excesses.

1. Transference. It's wrong to say that we create gods in our own image, but who could deny that certain styles of religious thought-or 'imagery', in the broadest sense of the term-appeal to us in certain way because of our temperament? The idea of perfection haunts us.

2. Without the divine we feel uncontained. If God is dead, everything is permitted. We find ourselves too complex for ourselves and therefore need single-minded devotion to something:the Party, the family, tribe, or deity. The 'emperor of one idea' (Wallace Stevens). Compare this to the diabolic.

In the Garden there was the Law and there was knowledge. Or was it: there was knowledge and there was life, and you can't have both? What is the one thing necessary? Or is it that we imagine ourselves complex, and find it deeply satisfying to 'come home', as it were, to some simple reductionist view of ourselves when all along that's what we really were: simple, mundane creatures, lacking, for the most part, imagination or creativity?

If excess is the problem, how are the excesses of religion a solution?

1. Stifle excessive doubt. To ward off 'despair, confusion, emptiness'. Through repetitiveness and a relentless insistence on one's position, one can at least convince oneself that there's some meaning to it.

2. No man is an island. The extremist wants to become 'visible', be someone (even as he becomes another statistic in the catalogue of nihilistic violence); he wants to be noticed, for people to sit up and take notice of him-or at least his views/religion. Not to be messed with. Some sort of recognition (is this different in degree or kind from the person who suffers a loss of identity?). A man of influence: people will sit up and listen. And the 'event' has to be extreme to startle people from their lazy dreams of contentment.

[Of course, as others have commented: is there a sexual element in all this?Don't fuck with me. Purity and danger].

3. Life is full of too much injustice (personal and political). Extremism is an extreme way of coming to terms with the frustration that follows from the recognition that the world isn't the way you want it to be: the final solution. The extremist can't wait, or can't see a way out. Bring it on. This is his moment.

Excess as a sign of our poverty.

All this is highly speculative by Adam Phillips. Psychologically plausible, you'd like to think, but where's the sociological flesh and bones?