The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life invited Peter Berger, an eminent sociologist of religion and a lifelong Lutheran, and author of two books about finding a middle way between relativism and fundamentalism, “to share his insights on the topic with an audience of journalists and academics.” New York Times columnist David Brooks and professor of religion Seyyed Hossein Nasr were invited to respond to Berger’s “assertion that doubt is ultimately a key element of religious faith in liberal democracies.”

Berger started off by saying that although “[r]elativism and fundamentalism seem, at first sight, to be direct opposites,” he thinks that they are, in fact, “two sides of the same coin.” “Both are rooted in the same distinctly modern phenomenon,” he said. “Modernization progressively undermines the closed communities in which human beings lived through most of history, communities in which there was a very high degree of consensus about the basic cognitive and normative definitions of reality. Such consensus brings about a situation in which these definitions have the status of taken-for-granted, self-evident truth.”

In modern societies, “diversity has taken the place of consensus.” This means that “certainty is much more difficult to come by.”

There are basically two reactions to such a modern society. Some become relativists. With ‘relativism’ Berger means that people have a world view “that not only acknowledges but celebrates the absence of consensus.” There are no universal truths. No universal morals. When someone does something that’s historically considered to be immoral, relativists refuse to cast judgment; for each their own. An extreme example Berger gave is that of a cannibal who’s interviewed by a moral relativist (presentater). “You believe that people should be cooked and eaten. I certainly don’t want to be judgmental, but the audience will be interested. Tell us more,” he lets the TV anchor say.

Fundamentalists, on the other hand, oppose all disagreement. They give the same basic answers to each and every question and problem. There’s no room for doubt.

About both fundamentalism and relativism Berger said: “Both relativism and fundamentalism threaten the basic moral order without which no society, least of all a liberal democracy, can exist: relativism because it makes morality a capricious game, fundamentalism because it balkanizes society into mutually hostile camps that cannot communicate with each other.”

So, what society needs isn’t to be post-modernist, nor to be fundamentalist. It has to find a middle way. This means that people have to be certain about certain things, while leaving room for doubt with regards to other subjects. “There are a number of moral judgments I am certain about, even if it can be shown I would not make them if I lived in a different period or even today in a different society. Example: Slavery is totally unacceptable,” Berger said.

Slavery is ‘unacceptable’ not because of religious considerations as such, Berger says, because it doesn’t require a lapse of faith, but simply by using one’s rationality. “[U]nlike the propositions of religion, which are not empirically accessible, this moral judgment does not require an act of faith. It only requires an act of attention: “Look at this. It must not be.”’

Berger also gives the example of “Helen Susmen, who was, for many years, the only anti-apartheid member of the South African parliament – definitely no relativist.” Yet, she wasn’t a fundamentalist either. She believed that people were equal, whether they are black or white, and that they should be treated equally. A moral conviction, a certainty even, yet without being a fundamentalist.

Berger then went on to explain his point by explaining Max Weber’s view on ethics. “He distinguishes between two types of ethics. The first is best translated as an ethic of principle. The second is an ethic of responsibility,” Berger said. “The first type of ethic dictates actions based on absolute principles, regardless of consequences. Invariably, fanatics follow this type of ethic. But it is not only fanatics who do so. Absolute pacifists also do so.”

An ethics of responsibility, on the other hand, “may have absolute principles in the background, such as the core value I discussed earlier, but what guides actions is a sober assessment of probable consequences.”

David Brooks then responded to Berger’s comments, noting that: “Instead of just having a void or a reasonable center there, how actually do you explain what that center is, and what it actually consists of, so you’re not Osama bin Laden on one hand and the Happy Hooker on the other.”

He proceeded to explain what his view on the question is. Interestingly enough, he believes that Edmund Burke’s view on it is quite accurate. Morals, ethics, etc. develop in certain cultures, over time. “Truths” survive over time. Long held traditions and views, therefore, are probably pretty OK. “Slowly, we come to value things more and more without ever seizing upon them abstractly and absolutely. Both of these streams, it seems to me, teach us to discount pure reason, teach us to be intuitively aware of the world around us, teach us we should only be loyal to truths that have stood the test of time and built up cumulatively over the ages, and that we should be highly skeptical of things that seem new and break with the moral order which, as Peter said, is the thing that both relativism and fundamentalism do,” Brooks concluded.

After Brooks, Professor Seyyed Hossein Nasr shared his views on the subject. Professor Nasr is a Muslim, so he focused a little bit more on Islam. He started off by saying that “secularism as fundamentalism – and much of what we call religious fundamentalism today is really the result of modernist fundamentalism, which is the most absolute form of fundamentalism that human history has ever known.” According to the Professor, this “is especially true of the Islamic world. Without modernist fundamentalism, there would have been no Islamic fundamentalism.”

With regards to relativism Nasr explained that even relativism is, ironically, absolute. When you say “all things are relative,” you’re making a statement that “itself is absolute.” Furthermore, he said, relativism too “cannot evade the question of truth.”

This means that “to distinguish completely between one and the other is not quite right. It’s a bit like the yin/yang: something of one is in the other, something of the other is in the first. We must soberly look upon relativism as being based on a particular view of the nature of reality, which is then absolutized in a certain way in the minds of those who consider themselves to be relativists.”

He went on to say that he doesn’t believe in a ‘evolutionary’ view on morals and ethics… as such. There is “always a philosophical underpinning for human nature, human dignity, human person – all of things that are written about. If you do not accept that, and accept instead the purely materialistic and evolutionary idea of the human being, I think the whole question of human dignity is nothing but pure sentimentality.”

Furthermore, Nasr said, he disagrees with Berger about the following: “First of all, I think all moral judgments require an act of faith. Secondly, they consider themselves to be certain because they are functioning within a certain world view.”

Nass then focused completely on Islam. For those interested in the situation in the Muslim world, and the development of Islam, it’s quite important to read this entire part of the transcript.

“I want to say the assault of secularism, the aggressive assault, has been the most important factor in the destruction of a middle ground – I’m not a specialist on the West – but at least in the Islamic world, about which I know something,” Nasr said. “[M]odernist fundamentalism is the main reason for the rise of Muslim fundamentalism. It has taken place only within a couple of generations.”

He explained that when he was a small boy living Iran, the word “fundamentalism” didn’t even exist in the Muslim world. Furthermore, Muslims, Christians and Jews got along just fine. However, “[t]he young people have gradually become modernized. They were not becoming fundamentalist at that time; they were becoming modernized.”

This process of modernization “led to an attitude very different from that of the generation before. That attitude was of exclusivism, of rejection of any other points of view, and then that began to work within the Islamic universe, itself because the Islamic world is not, of course, a monolith. It began to destroy, as much as possible, the middle positions, ending up with the Wahabism,” Nasr said.

So how about the middle ground? Is there still a middle ground in the Muslim world or has it disappeared? No, says Nasr. “The majority of Muslims still stand on the middle ground. They don’t get heard because you only get heard if you throw a bomb. If you don’t throw a bomb, of course, nobody is interested in what you’re doing. So this is a very important point to understand. But it’s the fact that [this middle ground] has diminished somewhat in comparison to the traditional Islamic worldview.”

Extremists have always existed, by Muslim society as a whole was tolerant and peaceful. People believed, basically, that there was Islam and “such thing as Islam with a small “i,” which is surrender to God. And that had been there from the beginning of human existence, from Adam, the prototypical human being Islam shares with Judaism and Christianity. God had given to each person a path to surrender to Him. The Koran has many, many statements explicitly mentioning this point,” he said.

Yes, there are verses in the Koran which can be interpreted as exclusive, but the long tradition of Islam is inclusive, Nasr said. Many Muslims still live in this Middle Ground. Extremists have become stronger, but the majority of Muslims still adhere to the traditions of their ancestors: one of tolerance, and one of a middle ground between relativism and fundamentalism.