As we work toward my first-year students’ first essay submission in their first-year writing seminar, I invite them to reconsider essay forms, specifically reimagining the standard one-paragraph academic introduction as a much more engaging and purposeful multi-paragraph opening.
My beginnings activity is grounded in the openings of essay collections by Barbara Kingsolver—High Tide in Tucson and Small Wonder. The latter volume includes a number of essays prompted by 9/11, and during the fall semester, this activity often coincides with the anniversary of the tragedy.
In “And Our Flag Was Still There” (originally published as a different version here), I focus on the opening, which creates tension for the reader and incorporates dialogue to create that tension. Kingsolver uses the interaction between her daughter and her to dramatize the tension that Kingsolver feels about the US response to the 9/11 attacks.
When her daughter explains that their school is asking children to wear red, white, and blue to acknowledge the attacks, Kingsolver replies: “I said quietly, ‘Why not wear black, then? Why the colors of the flag, what does that mean?'”
Later in the revised essay from the collection, Kingsolver confronts the issues around 9/11 that I think remain inadequately examined in the US:
In one stunning statement uttered by a fundamentalist religious leader, this brand of patriotism specifically blamed homosexuals, feminists, and the American Civil Liberties Union for the horrors of September 11. In other words, these hoodlum-Americans were asking me to believe that their flag stood for intimidation, censorship, violence, bigotry, sexism, homophobia, and shoving the Constitution through a paper shredder?”
More than two decades after Kingsolver wrote those words, as we once again faced September 11, I noticed that our fervor for the anniversary has both waned and remained mostly deeply inadequate.
In the wake of the attacks, the US retreated into a patriotism, a nationalism, that we have failed to examine because we committed to a self-righteous quest for retribution.
Although we are more apt now than then to name it, Kingsolver was confronting the paradoxical Christian nationalist response to an attack by Fundamentalists Muslims. And as a result, too many Americans, then and now, have failed to recognize that the core problem is fundamentalism.
From fiction, such as The Handmaid’s Tale, to a current reality, such as the documentary Shiny Happy People, there is ample evidence to warn us of the dangers of those people trapped in fundamentalism, people who believe they know the Mind of God and thus feel righteous in their behavior to fulfill God’s Will.
I share Kingsolver’s anger at the Christian fundamentalist response to 9/11, but I also regret that so few in the US—again trapped in a state of nationalism—are able to see that the fundamentalist response to a fundamentalist act of terror is self-defeating: An eye for and eye makes the whole world blind.
The core failure of fundamentalism is a combination of over-simplification and authoritarianism.
In religious fundamentalism, God’s Will is a veneer for the interests of a few in power, almost always entirely men, to control the rest.
While the US continues to drift further and further from our founding ideals of a secular democracy, a people committed to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness shielded by a solid wall between church and state, I think we would be making another mistake by simply waving a fist at the religious part of “religious fundamentalism.”
We are equally susceptible to the dangers of scientific fundamentalism as well.
One of the most powerful and harmful examples of scientific fundamentalism is scientific racism, the long history of using science to entrench racial stereotypes in the US (primarily in terms of measuring intelligence, such as IQ).
Similar to the US response to 9/11, the public and political responses to Covid—during the pandemic and since—expose the dangers of fundamentalism. Too often the promises of science (medicine) have been and are squandered because scientific fundamentalism creates unhealthy and equally overly simplistic resistance (such as the Joe Rogan phenomenon).
Overstating and misrepresenting, for example, masking or cleaning surfaces during the pandemic created a platform for anti-scientific beliefs.
“Science proves” and “research shows” are often misused clauses that are followed by a fundamentalist reduction, not the nuanced and complex reality that science tends to offer.
In education the pursuit of science to inform practice has a long history, but increasingly, the use of “science” over the last forty years of reform has drifted toward scientific fundamentalism—represented by the National Reading Panel (NRP) as central to NCLB and then the current “science of reading” (SOR) movement.
The NRP report was an incomplete overview of research on reading, never peer-reviewed, and essentially a political document, not “science.”
Yet current advocates of a very narrow use of “scientific” in reading instruction and legislation not only cite the NRP report, but misrepresent it and cling to anything that supports their ideology regardless of its scientific validity.
That is scientific fundamentalism; it is reductive and used as a shield from genuine inquiry or, ironically, a scientific approach to how students learn and how to best teach.
In all aspects of society and government, we need healthier aspects of belief and science, not an erasure of either, that recognizes that fundamentalism can exist and be corrosive in any context.
Simplistic uncritical faith in religion or science fails both, in fact.
Education above all else is no place for fundamentalism of any kind.
dr. p.l. (paul) thomas 