It is easy enough to dismiss the response of Hamas’s political leader, Ismail Haniyeh to Israel’s assassination of his three sons as the words of a deranged fanatic. Upon being informed that Israeli missiles had killed them, Haniyeh thanked God that they had been martyred. Whatever one might think about Haniyeh at a personal level, philosophy has to try to understand the logic at work in any expressed position and not indulge in dismissive ad hominem. Haniyeh’s response is important because it lays bear the moral structure of fundamentalist thinking. Note that I say “fundamentalist” and not “religious fundamentalist.” I leave out that qualifier deliberately because I want to focus on the genus and not the species. While Haniyeh’s brand of religious fundamentalism situates human history as a minor drama in an unfolding divine narrative, the secret to understanding fundamentalism and its moral irrationality is to tease out the way in which it absolutizes the purposes that orient it.

All political struggles are contests over the way in which institutions organize and govern human social life, determine resource distributions, set the relationship between public and private spheres, legitimize the division of labour, and set general boundaries to the formation and pursuit of individual goals. Fundamentalists, whether religious or secular, abstract the end– their preferred configuration of social institutions– from the well-being of people living here and now. Hence fundamentalism always coincides with maximalist and perfectionist programs that value the purity of the goal over the actual well-being of the people that the goal is supposed to serve. To paraphrase Jesus’ critique of the rabbis, the fundamentalist forgets that principles are made for human beings, not human beings for principles.

Because the principle is everything for the fundamentalist, the loss of life in pursuit of the complete realization of the principle is not only a necessary sacrifice, it is a supreme value. Haniyeh gives us a particularly vivid example of this form of thinking, but its is only an example, not an archetype. The real problem is the absolutism of the goal, its elevation above the maintenance and improvement of life–the only ultimately coherent goal of political struggle because life is the material condition of all enjoyment.

The question of whether social institutions are or good or bad can only be answered by examining the quality of life of the people whose lives are shaped by the norms the institutions impose. One cannot abstract the institutions from the practical matter of how people govern or are governed, work, relate, reproduce, and shape their individual life-horizons. The fundamentalist does just that: they abstract the goal– national independence, socialism, the glory of the motherland, whatever– from the lives of the people whose existence is a material presupposition of that goal’s goodness. Lying at the root of fundamentalist thought therefore is not god but the abstraction of regulating values as ends in themselves from the lives of human beings that give those values material substance and meaning.

Dying for the cause is never good for the person who dies, because they can never experience the better state of affairs for which they struggled. If individuals have only instrumental value as objects of sacrifice for the cause, then loss of life not only does not equal loss of value, loss of life would be gain of value as the number of martyrs soars. Haniyeh implies as much when he thanked God for the honour of having his children martyred. But Haniyeh forgets the most important question: what good does their martyrdom do them? Their life-value is reduced to a mere instrument of the lives of future people who will enjoy what they can no longer experience. “Their pure blood is for the liberation of Jerusalem and Al-Aqsa, and we will continue to march on our road, and will not hesitate and will not falter. With their blood, we bring about hope, a future and freedom for our people and our cause.” But dead people have no future on earth, which is the stage on which political struggles play out. If real value exists only in the other world– in eternal life with the Divine– then struggle for something as comparatively ephemeral as a nation-state is pointless. Political values can only be realized in secular time frames.

Religious fundamentalist thought is always incoherent as a basis for social criticism and justification for political struggle because it locates true value in the eternal. Secular fundamentalist thought is incoherent as a basis for social criticism and justification for political struggle because it demands the perfect realization of ideals. The absolutization of the value of either version’s principles reduces people to tools of the ideals. For the fundamentalist, therefore, not the heavens, but everyone alive may perish unless justice is done. But unwillingness to compromise, refusal to consider the interests of the other side, and insistence on a struggle to death in pursuit of a perfectionist version of a maximalist agenda ensures only on-going sacrifice of life, not the concrete improvements in its lived reality which alone explain the purposes of political struggle. Conflicts between two fundamentalist movements such as we see between Israelis and Palestinians today cannot be resolved: either side’s maximalist agenda could only be realized through the complete defeat or destruction of the other sides, but the numbers are too evenly matched to allow total victory.

Even if Hamas in its present form is thoroughly routed (which I still think is the most likely scenario, especially now that Iran has undermined the baby steps that Biden had been taking to reign in Israel’s onslaught in Gaza) new movements will arise until some form of Palestinian nation state has been created. But that will not be a single secular state encompassing all the lands of historical Palestine, because Jewish Israelis are not going anywhere, international law recognizes the legitimacy of the pre-1967 borders, there is no serious movement within Israel in support of a one-state solution, and there is no scenario concretely politically and militarily imaginable in which such a solution could be forced on them. The only way forward is some sort of compromise.

Compromise is anathema to fundamentalists, tantamount to failure, and thus never willingly entertained. Thus Iran, after committing what seems to me to be a colossal tactical and strategic mistake in attacking Israel in response to Israel’s strike on its generals in Syria, warns of an even more “devastating” response if– as is almost certain, given the adolescent posturing that passes for foreign policy today– Israel responds to the response. Immediately after the attack Ben Gvir was arguing that Israel should “go crazy” (exactly what it has been doing in Gaza). A strategically rational reaction would be to use the political capital Iran handed back to an Israel that was politically weakened on the international stage by doing nothing. But such is the nature of the “leaders” of existing nation states that the current Israeli government will most likely mindlessly enact the typical schoolboy script and feel the need to punch back.

On and on and on it goes, people dying, infrastructure destroyed, intellect wasted in the production of weapons systems, everyone chanting death until victory– but no one can win, because winning means concrete improvement in life conditions, a goal which can only be achieved when the value of political principles and goals is interpreted in concrete, life-valuable terms. A principled goal is good to the extent that its realization improves the lives of the people who will live under it, by: a) increasing access to the resources, relationships, and institutions that satisfy fundamental natural and social needs, and b) thereby allowing individuals and self-organizing collectivities to more widely and deeply develop, express, and enjoy their life-capacities for experience, imagination, scientific understanding, productive and creative work, mutualistic relationship, meaningful connection to the wider world, and all-round enjoyment of our finite time on the planet.

Since we are all crowded together but still divided into nation-states and would-be nation states, the realization of these generic goals requires mutual understanding and accommodation between peoples not just people. Real leadership understands the need for mutual accommodation and compromise, both for the sake of solving immediate conflicts and as a step towards a future world in which, perhaps, the narrow horizons of national identity are transcended.

But in order to take that step we must not abstract our principles from lived time. Our feet must be anchored on the ground where our lives play out, not in a fantasy of eternal life or the unsullied perfection of a mere idea. Religion is the heart of a heartless world, true, and principle can expose the contradictions of practice but value, as Nietzsche knew, must be lived here and now or not at all.

“It gives me a melancholy happiness to live in the midst of this confusion of streets, of necessities, of voices: how much enjoyment, impatiences, and desire, how much thirsty life and drunkenness of life here every moment. And yet it will soon be so still for all these shouting, lively, life-loving people … How strange that this sole thing that is certain and common to all, exercises almost no influence on men, and that they are furthest from regarding themselves as the brotherhood of death! It makes me happy to see that men do not want to think at all about the idea of death! I would fain do something to make the idea of life even a hundred times more worthy of their attention.” (The Thought of Death, Book Four, Aphorism 278, The Gay Science)