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div.Section1 {page:Section1;} --> There are a lot of
reasons to be concerned about (even to fear) "religion,
faith and spirituality", but none of them are good reasons
not to be holding conferences on these topics and most of
them are reasons to be holding more conferences. The
current wave of eschatological millenarianism that is
rapidly eroding the consensual glue alleged to be the
moral underpinning of western liberal democracy is,
hydra-headed, something that geography can bring a unique
and varied critique to.
Consider. We are moving through the middle/beginning/end
of a global economic crisis underpinned by a
neo-classical, economistic world-view that is shown to be
no more than a belief-system. Paul Krugman said, of the
academic sphere of that belief system, “Everything that
has been written in macro-economics in the last thirty
years is at best useless and at worst dangerous.” Yet he
misses the point; the neo-classical macroeconomics were
never designed to provide objective, predictive models
based on an empirical reality, but rather a nomothetic,
self-justificatory, moral explanans for a capitalist
explanandum.
Even now, the same market fanatic shamans that explained
away the Great Depression as being the fault of the Fed,
or Hoover, or any other manifestation of the Big
Government, are compiling excuses for this recession – out
of fanatical belief and in defiance of empiricism. If this
doesn’t convince you, how about the implosion in the US of
popular politics into various sects, Truthers, Birthers,
Creationists, Warmers and Palintologists (like
scientologists, except their alien leaders come from
Alaska)?
How about what the conservative right in the US and Europe
alike are so pleased to refer to as islamo-fascism, which
is in fact a co-constitutive, dyadic simulacrum with what
we might call cristo-fascism? One sustains a reality
around the revival (but really first birth) of a
monolithic, mythical-reality Caliphate, the other around a
fictionally constructed End-Times that encompasses a
constantly-changing set of white supremacist beliefs and
incorporates Israel and Zionism as key components.
Across the global south, forms of evangelical Christianity
and Islam, along with other increasingly fanatical
belief-systems are moving into the void left by the
massive failure of modernity and the development project.
They give untold millions of people some kind of
value-system through which to make sense and endure their
grinding, unendurable poverty – and also scapegoats on
which to vent their anguish, whether they be homosexuals
in Uganda, albino witches in Tanzania, Christians, Sunnis
or Shias in Iraq. Corrigan “[w]riters representing those
[religious] traditions sought correspondence between, on
the one hand, the articulation and delineation of space in
myth, and, on the other, the environments --natural,
social, emotional – in which people lived their daily
lives” (157) – O yeah, but this leaves out one of the most
powerful components of all, which is using these
traditions to delineate spaces of hatred, to point out
when it’s OK to discriminate, to feel alright about
murderous rage, to take, as a Hindu, your Muslim
neighbour’s baby and bash its brains out against the wall…
Caedite eos – novit enim dominus qui sunt eius.
--
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU
E-mail: [log in to unmask]
Tel: 00 44 07984 813681
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