At the present time, extremism of all kinds seems to grow by the day, whether right-wing political nationalism in Europe, newfound xenophobia in America, or religious fundamentalism in parts of the Islamic world. The geo-politics behind the rise of fundamentalist beliefs – even of Al Qaeda, ISIS and other horrifically violent groups – in countries in conflict, like Afghanistan and Iraq, is complex, but well known. And it’s no wonder that people living under extreme duress, turn to extreme beliefs and means of response.

But what are the reasons that in the richer Western world so many people, and in particular young people of many talents, choices and comforts, turn to fundamentalist ideologies? How in a digital, globalised world without the old-fashioned social control mechanisms inherent in small-scale geographically bound communities, do we halt this trend towards the perilously seductive blinding territory of one-and-only truisms?

The White Heart of Darkness

When many years ago, in 1988, I first moved to the Tanzanian capital Dar es Salaam, my shock of horrors as to this continent of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, had little to do with East Africa, her people or her nature. No, it had all to do with what happened within the white people coming here. Many, by far too many, of the European advisers, consultants and so-called experts – at the time mostly made up of men – could be easily placed in one of two categories: Those who quickly felt so uncomfortable at their meeting with a lifestyle and culture far from their own, that they left within the first few months; and then those, who as we said, ‘went local’. The latter was a derogative way of referring to men, often married, coming from normal Western middle-class backgrounds and social settings in their home country, suddenly starting to act like mini-emperors, descending into more or less continuous semi-drunken states, taking either prostitutes or very young African women to make up small harems, while treating the African men, or even any white man or woman not at their own social level, as secondary human beings. In short, displaying a despotic proprietary behaviour that they would never have dared display for five minutes in their own hometowns and countries. It was as if the moment they were out of their habitual social context, and handed the sudden immense powers of relative wealth, they had no compass whatsoever to guide rights from wrongs.

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"In an increasingly global, interconnected world there is no clear matrix of social order."
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