What is Fundamentalism?

Dan Rickman has written a piece on the Guardian's Comment is Free site entitled "Fundamentalism's flaws". A few things interested me about this article. The first was that at no point does Dan attempt to make any argument about the flaws of fundamentalism. The second is that the article itself seems to be little more than a moan about how Jews in the UK are becoming more religious and starting to believe the things that their ancestors believed for millennia.

But what was most interesting was one line in the opening paragraph:

Fundamentalism is hard to define

It's always, I think, an odd statement to say that a word is hard to define. Since words are nothing other than human constructs to convey a meaning if they were hard to define they would have little use to us. Words become hard to define only when an attempt is being made, or has been made, to change the meaning of the word or to use it for purposes other than the simple conveyance of an idea.

Thus the word "terrorist" is hard to define because its primary use is as a political tool. This is recognised by the BBC's reluctance to use the term (see their editorial guidelines). I looked at online dictionaries and found a simple definition for the term: "strict adherence to any set of basic ideas or principles". It carries no judgement about the truth value of those ideas or principles. It is simple and meaningful.

Dan prefers a definition based on a book by Sol Schimmel under which Orthodox Jews are defined as fundamentalists because they believe that the Torah was divinely revealed which is an "unreasonable" belief given the evidence to the contrary. Suddenly the term makes a value judgement about the truth of the beliefs.

My problem here is that the term is now drained of its meaning and is left as a simple pejorative. If a fundamentalist is someone who holds a belief which it is unreasonable to hold then calling someone a fundamentalist is no more than saying "I'm right, you're wrong but you're too stubborn to admit it!" Since the only criteria for being a fundamentalist are now that you won't accept the opinion of your interlocutor and that your opponent believes they are obviously correct both sides are entitled to call the other fundamentalist when the discussion ends without agreement.

Seemingly we can go further. If the term is used only as a pejorative to indicate ones belief that the other person is too stubborn to admit they're wrong then using the term is the verbal equivalent of stamping one's feet and storming off in a huff. Having failed to convince the other person of the truth of your own position you label him a fundamentalist and leave. It's a case of last word-manship: "I'm obviously right but he just won't accept it".

So I make this appeal - use the word correctly where appropriate and not at all where it's not. And then, Dan, you'd find that it isn't hard to define at all.