Cartesian anxiety

I WISH James Carroll had mentioned that closely connected to religious fundamentalism is scientific fundamentalism ("The many forms of fundamentalism," Op-ed, March 19). One of its key features is what philosophers know as Cartesian anxiety, or the belief that science must provide a certain foundation of knowledge lest society spiral into intellectual chaos.

It is rooted, of course, in the work of René Descartes, whose philosophy, far from being developed in a historical vacuum, was shaped by the religious and political conflicts of the Thirty Years' War. Add to that the earlier upheaval by Galileo of beliefs about the solar system, and you had what must have seemed to Descartes to be a world gone mad.

It is true, as Mr. Carroll writes, that the Enlightenment project is beginning to question itself. But the evidence of Cartesian anxiety is still rampant. It commonly comes in the form of belief in objective facts and in remarks such as "that's just reality." But facts are always interpreted and reality is always informed by values. If only we could accept that life cannot be made simple no matter how much we want it to be, fundamentalisms might finally disappear.

KARIN J. LAURIA, Marlborough

The writer is a graduate student of theology and ethics at Boston University School of Theology.