Are You Dense?

You may be living in a material world

I wrote Madonna off after her bizarre COVID video in which she lay in her bathtub, her modesty protected by pearly water and a two handfuls of rose petals, gibbering, from her Hollywood mansion, about how COVID was “the great equaliser”. Yet, recently I’ve found myself repeating the mantra of one of her earlier songs as if it were gospel: “We are living in a material world and I am a material girl.”

Language is funny. Not three years ago I berated materialism: “materialistic” was something of a slur, a judgemental curse which reviled someone as lacking in spirit, concerned with possession, even a bit dense. Similarly, “thick” is thrown around in Scotland to describe someone as stupid. Religious teachings often suggest the eternal human soul is trapped in the material body, debased by desires of the flesh, corrupted by mortal sin. The Madonna in religious iconography, contrary to her contemporary counterpart, represented virginity, purity and royalty; values of the spirit and character, values of godliness, and, of course, hierarchy. Today, in even the most atheist circles dense-ness and thick-ness is associated with a lack in mental and spiritual faculties.

This thickness in question is most often used to describe someone’s mental acuity—or lack of—but even in today’s world of hyper riches and luxury, those living lean lives are exalted for their virtues. Take Elon Musk and how the exploitative businessman is celebrated for his lack of material interests. It is sold as proof of his genius, of his higher calling, implying he spends his days in mental realms inaccessible to us mere mortals, the little people who fund his humanity-progressing schemes by buying the cars of the companies who then buy Tesla’s carbon credits. 

Now that I think about it, “materialist”, laced in Judeo-Christian patriarchy, was the wrong term. I was angry about consumption, not materialism. Materialism, a celebration and interest in the material realm, is critical, ever more so at this juncture in history. Yet, the very coopting of the word “materialist” reveals just how divorced that celebration is from our habits. We consider buying ever-more things to be materialist rather than consumptive, yet this pattern of behaviour is not an interest in what is material but in what we can possess. People I would define as materialist deserved the labels of “possessive” or “consumers”. And Elon Musk would fit the bill: he may not be interested in owning things (which makes sense, given how desperate he is to exit our material realm and inhabit space) but he consumes a vast amount of energy in order to enact his proprietorial vision of the future of humankind. 

These people aren’t materialist. They’re de-materialist, interested in converting matter into power.

Olivia Lazard and I discussed this at length last week, tracing de-materiality from the agricultural revolution through religious profanity and ending with the drive to digitise and virtualise our economy, which tech-evangelists believe will decouple our economy from our material and energy footprint. Governments are all for it; it’s the energy blind leading the material blind.

But, as Olivia points out, the world is built on legacy systems of violence and extraction. We cannot narrativise our way out of a material problem, and the attempts to do so are yet another example of how confused Western thought has become having enjoyed an unprecedented energy boost over the past few hundred years. We didn’t prioritise memory in a world always seeking to go beyond itself towards eternity, and forgot how the world has been for the vast majority of human history: limited, and beautifully so. Only words and art and song and dance could transport us to other realms for tens of thousands of years. Now, fuel can. And we’ve gotten so used to it we’ve assumed the source is inherent to our intellectual capacity for problem-solving, not inherent to the biology of millions of years of history.

Which brings us, inevitably, in so many ways, to A.I., the ultimate conception of “de-material” in a material world, its “de-materiality” hungry for fuel, rare earth metals and minerals. It is an intelligence made in the image of linear Western thought: minded—not embodied—and individualised, as if knowledge comes from an internal source, and not the environment around us; as if reality is static and fixed, not dynamic and relational. It is yet another genocide, plundering life on earth to create something beyond even death: eternal and omniscient godliness (until someone pulls the plug). 

Can someone explain to me how a thing without senses will make sense of the mess we made? How it can offer an embodied solution to the senseless violence we perpetrate? How, if senseless-ness is synonymous with meaningless-ness, it will ever be able to truly talk with us? 

And it could only ever just talk; what a terrible cost to pay for something so cheap. I don’t want to just talk. I want to laugh until my belly aches and squeeze the ones I love close to me and lick the sweat from my lover’s neck and wake up to the birds’ appeal for this day to be as magical as the last. I want intelligence to be felt, our decisions warming our stomachs and settling in our marrow; sustenance for the next generation. I want us to embody our values, not de-materialise them.

Spirit is bred in soil, and toiled in sweat; it is elemental, just like our material world. I am so glad to be a material girl in this material world, the only virgin birth we will ever know. Miracles abound right here on this mortal plane. Stop cleaving it in two.

---