It's Not That Simple and Why it Shouldn't Be

The voice of German historian and Islam scholar Thomas Bauer is a voice we need to hear. After his fresh look at Islamic civilization, translated into English by Columbia University Press in 2021 as A Culture of Ambiguity: An Alternative History of Islam, Bauer has written a short readable and powerful essay on “The simplification of the world: The loss of ambiguity and diversity” (Vereindeutigung der Welt. Uber den Verlust an Mehrdeutigkeit und Vielfalt, our translation), which has been translated into several languages (French: Vers un Monde Univoque: Sur la perte d'ambiguité et de diversité), and likely soon into English where it should meet the same acclaim as it has in Europe. A Culture of Ambiguity won Germany's top book award, the Leipziger Buchpreis, and this followup book the Tractatus Prize for philosophical essays. 

For the author, the chief characteristic of modernity is search for black-and-white simplistic and definitive answers (and, for that matter, questions) for all aspects of life and knowledge. Everywhere Bauer looks in contemporary society he sees signs of increasing intolerance to ambiguity, that is, the existence of several layers of meaning and nuance simultaneously. A cultural historian, he finds that religion traditionally is the home of ambiguity, where mortals are at ease with levels of meaning in divine utterances. Its opposite, and negation, is fundamentalism, a modern and at first mostly first-world derivative developed mainly for reasons of uniformity and control.

Fundamentalism under the author's analysis has three components: a single truth valid at all times everywhere (from moral rigidity to exact money value as the standard measure); a rejection of historical context (think of “original intent”); and purity, or unequivocal-ness. The three prove useful in this impressively rich but short book for dissecting a number of contemporary phenomena in economics, culture, aesthetics, and politics. To cite one example: the current “obsession with authenticity” is for Bauer a thinly-disguised version of consumerism whereby cultural context and dialog is brushed away in favor of the individual's “true and authentic nature”, unfiltered, and the resulting consumerist “needs”. For the author it is a short step to the potential intolerance of identity when raised to the group level, and political movements adroit at exploiting intolerance. (Voters for nationalistic movements often – as Bauer points out – cite “authenticity” as the reason for their vote.)

Bauer's text brings forcefully to mind many strands of social criticism, from critiques of liberalism's tendency to technocracy, or Bayart's “illusion of identity”, to David Graber's work on the modern straitjacket that is the State, oft-heard analyses of global consumerist culture, or even “elite capture”, to name a few. A testimony to the fecundity of this book.

Finally, if the loss of ambiguity, and intolerance of others' “authenticity”, is responsible for the malaise of a corseted and divided society, what better remedy than the fresh air of... inter-cultural education?