Covering reality with gold leaf.(society and Islamic fundamentalism)

THERE'S SOMETHING QUAINT about the earliest paintings in Florence's Uffizi Gallery. In these religious paintings, you know who is important because of their relative size. The big people are the important ones. The little ones are less important. That seems like a nice simple way to organise the world.

Or rather, there's almost no sense of the world as a real place in these early paintings. That's partly because the background is gold leaf. At most the figures exist in some very sketchy religious architecture, or they're assigned little frames, like fragments of a comic strip. They don't actually have a right to exist in the world, outside of a religious narrative. There's very little expression on their faces. The narrative has drained them even of their interior life. They're not even entitled to a psychology. The pictures show a world that is totally defined by ideology (or rather religion, in this case, as a version of ideology). Nothing beyond the ideology is even visible.

Then, in the pictures painted around 1300, things begin to change. People start to have expressions. They inhabit a world that is more recognisably physical; there are landscapes, and there's less of the implausibility of having important individuals painted as giants. These are still religious pictures, but the universe is no longer completely ecclesiastical.

A century or so later things start to get out of control. Some pictures seem frankly whimsical; Botticelli paints pagan nymphs cavorting about. The ideological monolith of the earlier pictures has been shattered and competing values and ideologies can be visually represented.

When you get to Leonardo da Vinci's Adoration of the Magi, the painter seems to be so aware of complexity that he can't even finish the painting. Leonardo is struggling to represent an important religious event in real space. He's painting the secular powers (represented by the Magi) paying homage to religious power. However, he can't represent the event with the cut-and-dried simplicity of earlier painters. He has a busy canvas packed with many narrative elements that he can't quite knit together. Even for a universal genius like Leonardo, the universe has become too complex a place to package neatly. Uncertainty rules.

IT'S THIS RECOGNITION of complexity and uncertainty that has been the key to the success of the West. An inductive, pragmatic mindset underpinned the economic expansion that led the West out of the long stagnation of the Middle Ages. It underpinned the development of science and technology (after a millennium where technology had essentially stagnated at Roman levels).

The West has sometimes backslid from this engagement with uncertainty. Europe made two great contributions to social and political thought last century: communism and fascism. These movements were both backward even by Renaissance standards. Ethically they were backward: nobody has ever conducted genocide in the name of humanism, and both movements used mass murder as a prime political tool.