The last number of years, I’ve been really diving deep into why the world is what it is. What makes it tick? Us tock?
Now, friends of mine will tell you’ve, I’ve always been doing this, “over-thinking” as it is kindly referred to. And that’s true. I remember an assignment in Teachers’ College, writing journal entries during our practice teaching. When I got mine returned from the professor, there was a message in big, bold letters - “YOU ARE QUITE THE PHILOSOPHER”.
But of late, it has been a deeper, more thorough form of examining the world we/I exist in. Perhaps it was the pandemic that got me truly questioning things, how culture makes us goosestep into the future, unquestioningly.
Of late, I’ve been digging into that part of culture that can be termed “mindset”. Culture has many great and useful features - the arts, language, symbols, rituals etc … but it also comes with baggage, namely beliefs and values. And most of us are blissfully unaware of this. We think we control our beliefs but that’s far from the case, our beliefs are quite invisibly acquired and steer us into becoming who we are.
Part of my journey of late has been digging into the works of people who have shed light into this process of silent cultural indoctrination. Rupert Sheldrake in the video above, is one such fellow. I hope to speak about the others in the coming weeks.
Sheldrake sees our silent mindset as one of materialism. It allows us to devour the planet and turn everything into money and for our own pleasure because we are all just “matter”, purposeless time spenders adrift in an indifferent universe.
He traces this cultural belief system from the time of the enlightenment and in particular Descartes. But it has got progressively worse as science has become our holy grail and prevailing authority.
Essentially, materialism believes that:
All that exists is made of matter. Protons, neutrons, electrons and such …
The brain is the mind. All our interaction with the world is through the brain, command central. When the brain stops working, we stop existing.
All living things are genetic machines. They operate by giving primacy to their own survival. Each, separate from any other.
There are laws of nature. These laws are immutable, timeless, unmoving. These laws never change nor develop. It is the job of science to uncover these laws and in doing so, discover how the machine functions.
I detailed the machine metaphor previously, here.
Materialism is the cultural belief system governing our actions in so many fields, not just science. Education, economics, agriculture, business, technology, and even philosophy - now just a rational spouting of logic and algorithms.
It rejects consciousness though admits it might exist (the hard problem Sheldrake alludes to). In rejecting consciousness, materialism empties the world of meaning, purpose, value. Only the underlying laws of the universe count, we are all machines, obeying the heat and movement of our atomic structure.
It’s kind of ironic, the word “materialism” because as Roger Penrose ( a man I admire so much and a colossal, humble scientist but still a true blue materialist) professes - we don’t even know what material is, so the term is somewhat indeterminate and wrong.
Materialism is the mother of “scientism” - the view that science is the one truth and judge, jury, arbiter of all questions of life. Science and data (or what we could call “dataism” - as Yuval Noah Harari labels it). Only numbers, measurement can determine and define truth (because everything is soulless, almost inanimate).
The approach of scientism is, as the philosopher Edward Feser puts it, like “the drunk who insists on looking for his lost car keys under the lamp post, on the grounds that that is the only place where there is enough light by which to see them.”
Materialists don’t read Dostoevsky. They are “Speissburgers” - crying at the opera but then going home to call for war to their deserving enemies. Conformists. Following orders. For them, there are no miracles. There is no mystery.
For me, the only possible cure for a materialist would be a spiritual conversion, perhaps reading Dostoevsky’s - Notes From Underground. He lays out the arguments against materialism strongly, as a man “too conscious” even proto-conscious would. See an excerpt on this point, at the bottom of this piece.
And ultimately, as Sheldrake relates, materialism as a worldview will breed anxiety, alienation, depression. Divorced from nature, our selves, we will end in tragedy, as a suicide, like the monster Frankenstein separated from his/its creator.
I’m a small “l” liberal. A world view that was too, like materialism, born from the 17th century enlightenment. A view that all men are created equal and the source of truth is inside us, for us to find. It is a mindset of questioning everything, Voltaire’s “Ecrasez l’infame” - doubt everything. The ultimate authority isn’t hygienic, know it all science but man - me and you. Why? Because science is a product of man, me and you.
I’d even take this humanism a step further and take the human out of it. All life is authority of itself, sovereign, precious, involatile and each life form determines and finds truth in its own way and light.
But liberalism has been under attack, the pandemic response made it quite clear how individual rights no longer matter much. It showed how much “science” as a regulatory label and religion has become the norm and calling card of a materialistically set culture.
Now, with the ascent of technology, liberalism is very much in peril as a worldview. We don’t need to ask the people what they want - ask science. It will inform us what decisions to make. Ask data. Run studies. Look at the algorithms and what they tell us. Don’t ask man, weak, infallible man. He, she is just flotsam in a universe of bits and bytes and determining molecules.
I am concluding we are in danger of forsaking the world, the magnificence and magic of creation, for one of hygienic, shiny metallic false truth. We are in danger of a world where one man is not of importance, not sacred. A world where false, hubristic scientific truths become the music we step to.
I reject this … I will not step that way. I will drop it all and set out on my own path. Like Breton. Lachez tout.
Lâchez tout. Lâchez Dada. Lâchez votre femme, lâchez votre maîtresse. Lâchez vos espérances et vos craintes. Semez vos enfants au coin d'un bois. Lâchez la proie pour l'ombre. Lâchez au besoin une vie aisée, ce qu'on vous donne pour une situation d'avenir. Partez sur les routes. - Andre Breton
'Anyone who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. Men are equal; it is not birth, it is virtue alone that makes them differ.' - Voltaire
“but all the same you are quite sure that he will inevitably acquire the habit, (of acting logically, rationally, scientifically - my italics) when certain bad old habits have altogether passed away, and common sense and science have completely re-educated and normally direct human nature. You are convinced that then men will of their own accord cease to make mistakes and refuse, in spite of themselves, as it were, to make a difference between their volition and their normal interests. Furthermore, you say, science will teach men (although in my opinion a superfluity) that they have not, in fact, and never have had, either will or fancy, and are no more than a sort of piano keyboard or barrel-organ cylinder; and that the laws of nature still exist on the earth, so that whatever man does he does not of his own volition but, as really goes without saying, by the laws of nature. Consequently, these laws of nature have only to be discovered, and man will no longer be responsible for his actions, and it will become extremely easy for him to live his life. All human actions, of course, will then have to be worked out by those laws, mathematically, like a table of logarithms, and entered in the almanac; or better still, there will appear orthodox publications, something like our encyclopedic dictionaries, in which everything will be so accurately calculated and plotted that there will no longer be any individual deeds or adventures left in the world.
‘Then,’ (this is all of you speaking, ‘a new political economy will come into existence, all complete, and also calculated with mathematical accuracy, so that all problems will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because all possible answers to them will have been supplied. Then the Palace of Crystal will arise. Then…’ Well, in short, the golden age will come again. of course it is quite impossible (here I am speaking myself) to guarantee that it won’t be terribly boring then (because what can one do if everything has been plotted out and tabulated?), but on the other hand everything will be eminently sensible. Of course, boredom leads to every possible kind of ingenuity. After all, it is out of boredom that golden pins get stuck into people, but all this would not matter. What is bad (again this is me speaking) is that for all I know people may then find pleasure even in golden pins. Man, after all, is stupid, phenomenally stupid. That is to say, although he is not in the least stupid, he is so ungrateful that it is useless to expect anything else from him. Really I shall not be in the least surprised if, for example, in the midst of the future universal good sense, some gentleman with an ignoble, or rather a derisive and reactionary air, springs up suddenly out of nowhere, puts his arms akimbo and says to all of us, ‘Come on, gentlemen, why shouldn’t we get rid of all this calm reasonableness with one kick, just so as to send all these logarithms to the devil and be able to live our own lives at our own sweet will?’ That wouldn’t matter either, but what is really mortifying is that he would certainly find followers: that’s the way men are made. And all this for the most frivolous of reasons, hardly worth mentioning, one would think: namely that a man, whoever he is, always and everywhere likes to act as he chooses, and not at all according to the dictates of reason and self-interest; it is indeed possible, and sometimes positively imperative (in my view), to act directly contrary to one’s own best interests. One’s own free and unfettered volition, one’s own caprice, however wild, one’s own fancy, inflamed sometimes to the point of madness–that is the one best and greatest good, which is never taken into consideration because it will not fit into any classification, and the omission of which always sends all systems and theories to the devil. Where did all the sages get the idea that a man’s desires must be normal and virtuous? Why did they imagine that he must inevitably will what is reasonable and profitable? What a man needs is simply and solely independent volition, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. Well, but the devil only knows what volition.
- Fydor Dostoevsky - Notes From Underground.
The Myths Science Rests Upon