As always, the terminology is tricky. For instance, since Ryle and Geertz, "When anthropologists use the phrase ‘thick description’ to refer to the ethnographic method, they mean to imply that the anthropologist does serious, engaged fieldwork; that he really grasps the social process of the world being studied; and that he writes an ethnography so detailed and so observant that it is utterly persuasive." ("Thick Description, sciencedirect.com)
And "materialist", like "idealist" and "liberal", has gone through a lot of Platonist, Neoplatonist, Christian, rationalist and spiritualist twists and wringers since early Greek metaphysics to become the derogatory ethical notion we have today.
Going through similar socio-linguistic rigors, the ancient notions of "spirit" and "soul" have been dematerialized from corporeal and immanent physical existents to fuzzy conceptualizations of disembodied something-or-others conceived of in transcendent, eschatological or otherwise supernatural (or preternatural) terms.
In contemporary political reality, the outcome in both cases, is very often some version of the James Watt promotion of extractive environmental mayhem justified on grounds that the Rapture is soon coming when this material vale of tears will be left behind.
Those who fantasize endless growth in a world of limited resources, or salvation in a natural or supernatural extraterrestrial paradise, are deluded at best, malevolent at least, in any case seriously obstructionist to any realistic effort at effectively addressing climate collapse.
We heard some of these assertions from the Safina interview a few weeks back. This is what I said back then.
One bit he got absolutely right is that a form of “Dualism” shows up in the modern American church about the tension between working for the good now - and waiting for Paradise / the New World to be Resurrected and upgraded.
Apparently modern American Christians never got the memo that John wrote Revelation to the Christians about to suffer persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire. But the average American evangelical is a bit dim these days - and a bit narcissistic - and just WANTS Revelation to be some code to the next 7 years SO BAD they forget everyone that’s tried to read it that way and made predictions has failed.
She is the Katharine Hayhoe who fights climate deniers on Twitter all the time. The one who wrote “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World”
“An optimistic view on why collective action is still possible—and how it can be realized.” — T*he New York Times*
“As far as heroic characters go, I’m not sure you could do better than Katharine Hayhoe.” — *Scientific American*
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that *Saving Us* is one of the more important books about climate change to have been written.” — *The Guardian*
“United Nations Champion of the Earth, climate scientist, and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe changes the debate on how we can save our future.”
She says there are solid biblical reasons to GET STUCK INTO climate activism even as a Christian longs for the new world. One day. We don’t know when. So we have a responsibility to hand over the world to our kids better than the way we inherited it.
I feel like the modern world still accepts Lyn White’s essay on Christianity and the environment - and has not done the scholarship to truly understand what the bible actually says on it - whether or not today’s Trump-voting American Christians have the brains to comprehend it. Just don’t measure Christianity by anything those people say or do - Lord have mercy MAGA types rile me up! https://undeceptions.com/audio/5-minute-jesus-the-importance-of-creation/
They say that we are materialist but we are not. We hate material and want to turn it into junk and poisonous gases as fast as possible. (I give credit for this thought and for these words to Allan Watts)
This is the work of 'in the moment, in the body' awareness practice; to find out who we'd be if we hadn't been conditioned by Judeo- Christian/ Islamic/patriarchy etc to be and to think in a certain way.
With the decline of the West, both economically and politically and the removal of the privileges and rights that we've been taught are owed to us; this is really going to assist the process.
I understand where you’re coming from here, although I’ve just written a book which is part a critique of a particular sort of materialism, so I suppose I’d better comment!
1. ‘Materialism, a celebration and interest in the material realm, is critical, ever more so at this juncture in history.” This definition of materialism is a new one on me. The kind of materialism that I think is a real problem in our culture is that which says things like consciousness, intention and agency are secondary products of a reality that is made up of impersonal ‘fields and forces.’ This reduces things like purpose, agency and meaning to illusions. Ancillary assumptions include the idea that reality is basically mechanical and even ‘pointless.’ One big problem is that strictly materialistic worldviews seem to have a tendency to slide into nihilism. Another problem is that this sort of materialism tends to reduce the world to a heap of inert, exploitable resources.
2. What you are describing with your Madonna and AI examples are essentially modern versions of Gnosticism, with a side order of Plato. From these sources come the idea that the material world is seriously flawed, or even evil, and that it would be better off to retreat into a non-material realm, which in modern times is often interpreted as a sort of virtual reality. I agree that an extreme version of Gnosticism is not a useful philosophy for the current moment. (See Wertheim, 1999, for an insightful discussion of why the idea of a virtual ‘otherworld’ has become so prevalent today).
3. I would however suggest that the kind of modern day Gnosticism pushed by the purveyors of AI actually springs directly from the kind of materialism described in (1). Douglas Rushkoff, in his book ‘Survival of the Richest,’ claims that the kind of hard-line materialism that’s taken for granted in Silicon Valley actually leads directly to escapist fantasies.
Rushkoff further suggests that the Silicon Valley billionaires have adopted what he calls a ‘mindset.’ This mindset is exploitative, extractive and also very materialistic. Rushkoff;
“based in a staunchly atheistic and materialistic scientism, a faith in technology to solve problems, an adherence to biases of digital code, an understanding of human relationships as market phenomena, a fear of nature and women, and an urge to neutralise the unknown by dominating and deanimating it…." Such views are “entirely compatible with business models that [depend] upon manipulating human beings instead of empowering them exploiting them for profit rather than giving them opportunities for collective creativity.” (Rushkoff, 2022, p. 114.)
So, to gently differ with you, I think that this sort of materialism is a huge problem and needs challenging.
3. In addition; many indigenous cultures do not have what could be called a materialistic worldview. The term ‘animist’ is not without problems but it does describe a family of worldviews that exist as a counterpoint to ‘the mindset.’ Broadly animist worldviews see the world as populated by persons. Persons here include humans, animals, plants, mountains, rocks and stars. These worldviews can also include non-material spirits and things like psi and reincarnation, which absolutely do not fit with hard-line materialism. (And so are often unthinkingly dismissed by many in the Global North).
Seeing the world as personified seems to me an essential part of loving it. It seems to me hard to love a heap of inert resources that is ‘pointless’ or even hostile. And this sense of hostility is an integral part of the kind of materialism described above. According to the cosmologist Steven Weinberg, we live in an “overwhelmingly hostile universe.” (Weinberg, p. 155).
In conclusion; it is a world rejecting neo-Gnosticism, associated with a particular kind of materialism and scientism that is the problem. I think a successor worldview needs to go beyond both creeds.
References/Further reading
Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s error. Rider. —Why materialism omitted primary properties from the universe, why it’s a problem and a panpsychist solution.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva. — Why the hard-line materialistic vision of a pointless, mechanical universe of resources is a problem. Explained through the lens of McGilchrist’s brain-hemisphere theory. A long but very worthwhile read.
Rushkoff, D. (2022) Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Scribe.
Weinberg, S. (1977) The First Three Minutes. André Deusch.
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press. — the divine origins of cyberspace, with a discussion of modern information Platonism and Gnosticism.
Some very interesting thoughts here, Matt, even more so in the light of just finishing reading Ruskhoff. Your point no. 3 is personal to me, and I'll just say that regarding your point no. 1, this is precisely why I disagree with "de-materialism" as a word of choice and think that "materialism" is exactly what Rachel is describing in this newsletter. In my eyes, materialism necessarily implies a reduction of our world to nothing but the means of exploitation and extraction; gaining power being the end goal of it.
Not often do I come across an article where I completely agree with everything written, but disagree with the choice of term for it. It's curious, but it's sort of disagreement I can happily live with given everything Rachel has said here. Like you, I'm probably just splitting hairs.
Thanks for listing some resources as well, just based on the titles, I'm particularly looking forward to reading Goff and McGilchrist!
A rather confusing mixture of modern redefinition of a term that has a long and complex history in philosophy.
It is all very well to set up a straw person of patriarchal Judaism/Christianity but it hardly does justice to two long religious traditions. The alternative to any religious tradition is to subscribe to a philosophy/moral world that is aligned with evolution. The trouble philosophically with the position is that it is value free or value neutral and although people may use words that have meaning in a framework of Judaism or Christianity, there is no philosophical grounding for ethics in the immanent framework offered by evolution. Perhaps Prof Tom Murphy is right when he says that humans represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
MATERIALISTIC: Maybe it's a generational thing? I still use the term 'materialistic' for someone in the context of wanting to own too much stuff. Yet I can use the word in a different sense when speaking about worldviews. Which you seem to blur here - yet again.
DE-MATERIALIITY: Sorry but I haven't listened to the episode yet. Did Olivia repeat the myth of your previous guest speaking on religious matters? Basically - a trite summary that the Christian bible thinks of the 'soul' and spiritual as good, and the material flesh as bad? I've already explained how wrong that notion is. It seems to spit on the very core concepts of Christianity - that God became flesh and dwelt among us. That God celebrates his world and this material existence. That the Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, and means breath in the throat. Your celebration of being embodied creatures that can kiss and hug and have romantic partners is closer to the bible than any 'De-materiality' being attributed to it by your guest - IF that was what was being claimed. The whole idea of an immaterial 'heaven' is more a product of the Simpsons than the embodied Christian hope of the resurrection.
Even if you don't believe any of this stuff - it goes to your journalistic integrity on how you report it. Gnosticism kept trying to creep into the church - and it may have influenced it in brief periods here and there. But this 'spirit good' / 'flesh bad' dichotomy is simply not in Christianity. It might be in other religions. But it isn't in the bible.
ELON & MARS: You have repeatedly and tritely written off the adventure into space on your podcast. But I see it as an enormous tribute to human curiosity and adventure. It also may have just saved the lives of 10 billion human beings (by 2050) and the biosphere on this planet? How? Reinventing food. In the 1960's NASA brainstormed how to feed their astronauts on deep space missions. CO2 would accumulate in the spacecraft. How to turn that into food? This is what they invented. https://youtu.be/c8WMM_PUOj0?si=3rSQdcYGipYPqysM
As I have said before - you can think of it as "Electric food". We currenlty use nearly half the land on earth to feed ourselves. But if this Solein gets cheap enough - we could feed the world from solar panels on rooftops, or floating on water reservoirs, or even in deserts - and not from our best arable land. We could replace livestock grazing across 30% of the land on earth and just in that - regrow 3 trillion trees and solve climate change! George Monbiot - 6 minutes. https://youtu.be/6eaTIe_TBZA Let alone how much of the 12% of cropland this precision fermentation might replace. It's protein and carbohydrate and fat from solar power and water and a few minerals. That's it!
Oh - and ALL the world's historical emissions of CO2 turned into trees over the next century or so as the grazing lands return to forests.
Isn't that something we should thank the space race for?
Am I just gullible? Believing their hype? Not really. We've been using Precision Fermenation for different products for decades. Like insulin.
But now? We've beaten photosynthesis! It's only 6% efficient with sunlight. Solar panels are 22%. Even counting the solar panels that run this process - it's 10 TIMES more efficient than soy bean protein. (Because even when we grow the soy beans - we cannot eat the whole plant!)
And the solar panels can be on rooftops or floating on water or from deserts. This means all the protein and fat and carbohydrates we could want - from renewable energy and water and a few minerals. The age of "Electric food" has begun. Here is a tour of their first factory which opens soon. Just over a minute.
What's the alternative you promote? Doing away with 'false divisions between nature and us?' Um, an eco-village? Going back to subsistence farming is the very thing that would CURSE the world and ensure the extinction of countless species. Why? Because subsistence farming would reverse the demographic transition. When you're an independent farmer without a 'state' (that you so desperately despise because of 'state violence') - you cannot rely on an old aged pension. (No state, remember? We threw that in the bin with your revolution!) An old aged pension is one of the 2 main ingredients in helping people decide not to have as many children. Without it, peasant farmers have large families. Their children are their superannuation. Someone has to work the farm when you're too old and infirm to do so.
Without realising it, many Degrowthers emphasising an entirely ungrounded romance of "back to the landism" are actually promoting population growth. And they are the ones that accuse ME of being into "Infinite growth on a finite planet!" Um, excuse me - that's why I excitedly did the math on how many trees we could regrow, and how much habitat we could reclaim in our best arable land if we just stopped running cattle over it! 3 TRILLION trees. Thanks to eco-villages? Throwing off the state?
No. Thanks to NASA - and 1960's dreams of deep space.
I won't abandon Madonna, no matter how crazy she seems! She's living an incredibly dense and embodied life. Even if she lives mostly on camera, she is the one behind it, in the body, refusing to do what's expected of her. I think her bath video is sticking a finger up at the 'covid is a great equaliser' nonsense; as it clearly isn't, neither for her nor the corporates making money out of it.
The Judeo Christian Western patriarchy indeed has a lot to answer for. I've found much more resonance in the Zen Buddhist and yoga traditions. Asanas and Kundalini - arse and cunt-the East isn't hung up nor obsessed with sex.
History has been described as 'women following behind with a bucket'. Picking up the blood and guts and doing the heavy lifting of caring; the patriarchy seem unaware that these are consequences of disembodiment.
Where does such an expanse end? Sooner or later, the same pattern of greed and overconsumption that is now wrecking the Earth will endanger the resources and life on humankind's next (still imaginary) planet. Only it will be horrendously exacerbated by the fact that this other planet, be it Mars or something else, will completely and utterly depend on artificially created resources, confined inside high-tech domes/buildings. In other words, it will have far less resources than what we currently have on Earth.
It's not like we have a turnkey second planet, a replica of the Earth, a lush green h(e)aven ready to move to in large numbers. Our options are environmentally hostile planets incompatible with the biology of Earth's lifeforms. Any sort of expanse into space assumes immeasurable amounts of money and also time. Any sort of terraforming that would allow breathable atmosphere and agricultural conditions similar to what we have on Earth would take many hundreds, if not thousands of years. With the technology we have, the first several hundreds of years of our expanse would be nothing but a handful of people living an ascetic life of a researcher and pioneer on a barren rock that would kill you if you step out of the artificial atmosphere of your artificial dome. What you're talking about is not an immediate solution, not an option that allows large number of people to move, and it does nothing to address and remedy our notions of endless growth, disconnection from the natural world and the supremacist attitude of everything in the universe existing to serve us and bow to us.
So, where does this expanse end if the only trajectory we have is one that will replicate the destruction of Earth over and over again? Are we going to terraform and then completely ruin two, dozens or maybe hundreds of planets because we're unable to accept that our consumption has limits and that our ways must change?
The simple fact is that the Earth and its population don't have this sort of timeframe at their disposal - hundreds or thousands of years that would allow us to grow favourable conditions and replicate the Earth somewhere in space. Within that timeframe, while pumping endless trillions (probably a gross understatement; chances are it's really numbers so big we can't even fathom and name them) into desperately and artificially bending other planets to our will, human life and all other life on Earth is going to suffer more than ever before through poverty, famine, diseases, wars for resources and extinctions.
We need solutions NOW and HERE. We're already at 5 minutes to midnight and we don't have the time to concentrate and invest in "solutions" that are hundreds or thousands of years in the making. Our only solution, the only shot we have is DEGROWTH: fostering a complete shift of consciousness that leads to lessening our consumption and a different distribution of our natural resources. This requires dismantling our power structures of capitalism and colonialism that are directly related to overconsumption and supremacy over the natural world that leads to unbridled exploitation and extraction. We will achieve absolutely nothing unless we change the entire worldview we currently have (and by "we" I mean predominantly the West, as there are still plenty of indigenous communities around the planet who don't subscribe to human supremacy over the natural world). This is the only sustainable direction in which we can expand the scope and scale of human consciousness.
Working on venturing into space? Yes, absolutely, one day when the time is right, probably many hundreds of years into the future - after we've sorted out the rot from the inside out and learned that we are one with our planet, not its master and overlord, ready to move on to rule over another one after we've depleted the current and only one we have.
As always, the terminology is tricky. For instance, since Ryle and Geertz, "When anthropologists use the phrase ‘thick description’ to refer to the ethnographic method, they mean to imply that the anthropologist does serious, engaged fieldwork; that he really grasps the social process of the world being studied; and that he writes an ethnography so detailed and so observant that it is utterly persuasive." ("Thick Description, sciencedirect.com)
And "materialist", like "idealist" and "liberal", has gone through a lot of Platonist, Neoplatonist, Christian, rationalist and spiritualist twists and wringers since early Greek metaphysics to become the derogatory ethical notion we have today.
Going through similar socio-linguistic rigors, the ancient notions of "spirit" and "soul" have been dematerialized from corporeal and immanent physical existents to fuzzy conceptualizations of disembodied something-or-others conceived of in transcendent, eschatological or otherwise supernatural (or preternatural) terms.
In contemporary political reality, the outcome in both cases, is very often some version of the James Watt promotion of extractive environmental mayhem justified on grounds that the Rapture is soon coming when this material vale of tears will be left behind.
Those who fantasize endless growth in a world of limited resources, or salvation in a natural or supernatural extraterrestrial paradise, are deluded at best, malevolent at least, in any case seriously obstructionist to any realistic effort at effectively addressing climate collapse.
We heard some of these assertions from the Safina interview a few weeks back. This is what I said back then.
One bit he got absolutely right is that a form of “Dualism” shows up in the modern American church about the tension between working for the good now - and waiting for Paradise / the New World to be Resurrected and upgraded.
Apparently modern American Christians never got the memo that John wrote Revelation to the Christians about to suffer persecution at the hands of the Roman Empire. But the average American evangelical is a bit dim these days - and a bit narcissistic - and just WANTS Revelation to be some code to the next 7 years SO BAD they forget everyone that’s tried to read it that way and made predictions has failed.
Rather, a truer study of “Last Things” is summed up by a famous climatologist. Catherine Hayhoe - who did the TED talk on how to talk about Climate Change (with over 4 million views) - is an evangelical herself - and married to a Pastor. TED talk here. https://www.ted.com/talks/katharine_hayhoe_the_most_important_thing_you_can_do_to_fight_climate_change_talk_about_it
She is the Katharine Hayhoe who fights climate deniers on Twitter all the time. The one who wrote “Saving Us: A Climate Scientist's Case for Hope and Healing in a Divided World”
https://www.amazon.com.au/Saving-Us-Climate-Scientists-Healing/dp/1982143835
With reviews like:
“An optimistic view on why collective action is still possible—and how it can be realized.” — T*he New York Times*
“As far as heroic characters go, I’m not sure you could do better than Katharine Hayhoe.” — *Scientific American*
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that *Saving Us* is one of the more important books about climate change to have been written.” — *The Guardian*
“United Nations Champion of the Earth, climate scientist, and evangelical Christian Katharine Hayhoe changes the debate on how we can save our future.”
She says there are solid biblical reasons to GET STUCK INTO climate activism even as a Christian longs for the new world. One day. We don’t know when. So we have a responsibility to hand over the world to our kids better than the way we inherited it.
https://undeceptions.com/podcast/good-earth/
I feel like the modern world still accepts Lyn White’s essay on Christianity and the environment - and has not done the scholarship to truly understand what the bible actually says on it - whether or not today’s Trump-voting American Christians have the brains to comprehend it. Just don’t measure Christianity by anything those people say or do - Lord have mercy MAGA types rile me up! https://undeceptions.com/audio/5-minute-jesus-the-importance-of-creation/
They say that we are materialist but we are not. We hate material and want to turn it into junk and poisonous gases as fast as possible. (I give credit for this thought and for these words to Allan Watts)
This is the work of 'in the moment, in the body' awareness practice; to find out who we'd be if we hadn't been conditioned by Judeo- Christian/ Islamic/patriarchy etc to be and to think in a certain way.
With the decline of the West, both economically and politically and the removal of the privileges and rights that we've been taught are owed to us; this is really going to assist the process.
I'm in!
This is very good writing about a very important thing. Thankyou. Enjoying Planet Critical very much
“Keep it dense” - Nathan Barley
Well said Rachel. I also love the phrase 'meeting in the flesh'.
Excellent write up. Do you know Melanie Challenger's work? Similar underlying analysis...
I've heard the name!
Hi Rachel —
(This is long, sorry).
I understand where you’re coming from here, although I’ve just written a book which is part a critique of a particular sort of materialism, so I suppose I’d better comment!
1. ‘Materialism, a celebration and interest in the material realm, is critical, ever more so at this juncture in history.” This definition of materialism is a new one on me. The kind of materialism that I think is a real problem in our culture is that which says things like consciousness, intention and agency are secondary products of a reality that is made up of impersonal ‘fields and forces.’ This reduces things like purpose, agency and meaning to illusions. Ancillary assumptions include the idea that reality is basically mechanical and even ‘pointless.’ One big problem is that strictly materialistic worldviews seem to have a tendency to slide into nihilism. Another problem is that this sort of materialism tends to reduce the world to a heap of inert, exploitable resources.
2. What you are describing with your Madonna and AI examples are essentially modern versions of Gnosticism, with a side order of Plato. From these sources come the idea that the material world is seriously flawed, or even evil, and that it would be better off to retreat into a non-material realm, which in modern times is often interpreted as a sort of virtual reality. I agree that an extreme version of Gnosticism is not a useful philosophy for the current moment. (See Wertheim, 1999, for an insightful discussion of why the idea of a virtual ‘otherworld’ has become so prevalent today).
3. I would however suggest that the kind of modern day Gnosticism pushed by the purveyors of AI actually springs directly from the kind of materialism described in (1). Douglas Rushkoff, in his book ‘Survival of the Richest,’ claims that the kind of hard-line materialism that’s taken for granted in Silicon Valley actually leads directly to escapist fantasies.
Rushkoff further suggests that the Silicon Valley billionaires have adopted what he calls a ‘mindset.’ This mindset is exploitative, extractive and also very materialistic. Rushkoff;
“based in a staunchly atheistic and materialistic scientism, a faith in technology to solve problems, an adherence to biases of digital code, an understanding of human relationships as market phenomena, a fear of nature and women, and an urge to neutralise the unknown by dominating and deanimating it…." Such views are “entirely compatible with business models that [depend] upon manipulating human beings instead of empowering them exploiting them for profit rather than giving them opportunities for collective creativity.” (Rushkoff, 2022, p. 114.)
So, to gently differ with you, I think that this sort of materialism is a huge problem and needs challenging.
3. In addition; many indigenous cultures do not have what could be called a materialistic worldview. The term ‘animist’ is not without problems but it does describe a family of worldviews that exist as a counterpoint to ‘the mindset.’ Broadly animist worldviews see the world as populated by persons. Persons here include humans, animals, plants, mountains, rocks and stars. These worldviews can also include non-material spirits and things like psi and reincarnation, which absolutely do not fit with hard-line materialism. (And so are often unthinkingly dismissed by many in the Global North).
Seeing the world as personified seems to me an essential part of loving it. It seems to me hard to love a heap of inert resources that is ‘pointless’ or even hostile. And this sense of hostility is an integral part of the kind of materialism described above. According to the cosmologist Steven Weinberg, we live in an “overwhelmingly hostile universe.” (Weinberg, p. 155).
In conclusion; it is a world rejecting neo-Gnosticism, associated with a particular kind of materialism and scientism that is the problem. I think a successor worldview needs to go beyond both creeds.
References/Further reading
Goff, P. (2019). Galileo’s error. Rider. —Why materialism omitted primary properties from the universe, why it’s a problem and a panpsychist solution.
McGilchrist, I. (2021). The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva. — Why the hard-line materialistic vision of a pointless, mechanical universe of resources is a problem. Explained through the lens of McGilchrist’s brain-hemisphere theory. A long but very worthwhile read.
Rushkoff, D. (2022) Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires. Scribe.
Weinberg, S. (1977) The First Three Minutes. André Deusch.
Wertheim, M. (1999). The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace: A History of Space from Dante to the Internet. Virago Press. — the divine origins of cyberspace, with a discussion of modern information Platonism and Gnosticism.
Hey Matt, I don't see where we differ but thanks for the extra resources, that Rushkoff quote in particular is excellent.
Hi Rachel --
I'm probably splitting hairs! Been immersed in these debates for too long probably!
Some very interesting thoughts here, Matt, even more so in the light of just finishing reading Ruskhoff. Your point no. 3 is personal to me, and I'll just say that regarding your point no. 1, this is precisely why I disagree with "de-materialism" as a word of choice and think that "materialism" is exactly what Rachel is describing in this newsletter. In my eyes, materialism necessarily implies a reduction of our world to nothing but the means of exploitation and extraction; gaining power being the end goal of it.
Not often do I come across an article where I completely agree with everything written, but disagree with the choice of term for it. It's curious, but it's sort of disagreement I can happily live with given everything Rachel has said here. Like you, I'm probably just splitting hairs.
Thanks for listing some resources as well, just based on the titles, I'm particularly looking forward to reading Goff and McGilchrist!
A rather confusing mixture of modern redefinition of a term that has a long and complex history in philosophy.
It is all very well to set up a straw person of patriarchal Judaism/Christianity but it hardly does justice to two long religious traditions. The alternative to any religious tradition is to subscribe to a philosophy/moral world that is aligned with evolution. The trouble philosophically with the position is that it is value free or value neutral and although people may use words that have meaning in a framework of Judaism or Christianity, there is no philosophical grounding for ethics in the immanent framework offered by evolution. Perhaps Prof Tom Murphy is right when he says that humans represent an evolutionary cul-de-sac.
MATERIALISTIC: Maybe it's a generational thing? I still use the term 'materialistic' for someone in the context of wanting to own too much stuff. Yet I can use the word in a different sense when speaking about worldviews. Which you seem to blur here - yet again.
DE-MATERIALIITY: Sorry but I haven't listened to the episode yet. Did Olivia repeat the myth of your previous guest speaking on religious matters? Basically - a trite summary that the Christian bible thinks of the 'soul' and spiritual as good, and the material flesh as bad? I've already explained how wrong that notion is. It seems to spit on the very core concepts of Christianity - that God became flesh and dwelt among us. That God celebrates his world and this material existence. That the Hebrew word for soul is nephesh, and means breath in the throat. Your celebration of being embodied creatures that can kiss and hug and have romantic partners is closer to the bible than any 'De-materiality' being attributed to it by your guest - IF that was what was being claimed. The whole idea of an immaterial 'heaven' is more a product of the Simpsons than the embodied Christian hope of the resurrection.
Even if you don't believe any of this stuff - it goes to your journalistic integrity on how you report it. Gnosticism kept trying to creep into the church - and it may have influenced it in brief periods here and there. But this 'spirit good' / 'flesh bad' dichotomy is simply not in Christianity. It might be in other religions. But it isn't in the bible.
ELON & MARS: You have repeatedly and tritely written off the adventure into space on your podcast. But I see it as an enormous tribute to human curiosity and adventure. It also may have just saved the lives of 10 billion human beings (by 2050) and the biosphere on this planet? How? Reinventing food. In the 1960's NASA brainstormed how to feed their astronauts on deep space missions. CO2 would accumulate in the spacecraft. How to turn that into food? This is what they invented. https://youtu.be/c8WMM_PUOj0?si=3rSQdcYGipYPqysM
As I have said before - you can think of it as "Electric food". We currenlty use nearly half the land on earth to feed ourselves. But if this Solein gets cheap enough - we could feed the world from solar panels on rooftops, or floating on water reservoirs, or even in deserts - and not from our best arable land. We could replace livestock grazing across 30% of the land on earth and just in that - regrow 3 trillion trees and solve climate change! George Monbiot - 6 minutes. https://youtu.be/6eaTIe_TBZA Let alone how much of the 12% of cropland this precision fermentation might replace. It's protein and carbohydrate and fat from solar power and water and a few minerals. That's it!
Oh - and ALL the world's historical emissions of CO2 turned into trees over the next century or so as the grazing lands return to forests.
Isn't that something we should thank the space race for?
Am I just gullible? Believing their hype? Not really. We've been using Precision Fermenation for different products for decades. Like insulin.
But now? We've beaten photosynthesis! It's only 6% efficient with sunlight. Solar panels are 22%. Even counting the solar panels that run this process - it's 10 TIMES more efficient than soy bean protein. (Because even when we grow the soy beans - we cannot eat the whole plant!)
And the solar panels can be on rooftops or floating on water or from deserts. This means all the protein and fat and carbohydrates we could want - from renewable energy and water and a few minerals. The age of "Electric food" has begun. Here is a tour of their first factory which opens soon. Just over a minute.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Bw8Zx1GtLE
https://www.newprotein.net/news/the-world39s-first-factory-growing-food-out-of-thin-air-launches
What's the alternative you promote? Doing away with 'false divisions between nature and us?' Um, an eco-village? Going back to subsistence farming is the very thing that would CURSE the world and ensure the extinction of countless species. Why? Because subsistence farming would reverse the demographic transition. When you're an independent farmer without a 'state' (that you so desperately despise because of 'state violence') - you cannot rely on an old aged pension. (No state, remember? We threw that in the bin with your revolution!) An old aged pension is one of the 2 main ingredients in helping people decide not to have as many children. Without it, peasant farmers have large families. Their children are their superannuation. Someone has to work the farm when you're too old and infirm to do so.
Without realising it, many Degrowthers emphasising an entirely ungrounded romance of "back to the landism" are actually promoting population growth. And they are the ones that accuse ME of being into "Infinite growth on a finite planet!" Um, excuse me - that's why I excitedly did the math on how many trees we could regrow, and how much habitat we could reclaim in our best arable land if we just stopped running cattle over it! 3 TRILLION trees. Thanks to eco-villages? Throwing off the state?
No. Thanks to NASA - and 1960's dreams of deep space.
Materials are the ideology of postmodernism and techno modern humans.
I won't abandon Madonna, no matter how crazy she seems! She's living an incredibly dense and embodied life. Even if she lives mostly on camera, she is the one behind it, in the body, refusing to do what's expected of her. I think her bath video is sticking a finger up at the 'covid is a great equaliser' nonsense; as it clearly isn't, neither for her nor the corporates making money out of it.
The Judeo Christian Western patriarchy indeed has a lot to answer for. I've found much more resonance in the Zen Buddhist and yoga traditions. Asanas and Kundalini - arse and cunt-the East isn't hung up nor obsessed with sex.
History has been described as 'women following behind with a bucket'. Picking up the blood and guts and doing the heavy lifting of caring; the patriarchy seem unaware that these are consequences of disembodiment.
Where does such an expanse end? Sooner or later, the same pattern of greed and overconsumption that is now wrecking the Earth will endanger the resources and life on humankind's next (still imaginary) planet. Only it will be horrendously exacerbated by the fact that this other planet, be it Mars or something else, will completely and utterly depend on artificially created resources, confined inside high-tech domes/buildings. In other words, it will have far less resources than what we currently have on Earth.
It's not like we have a turnkey second planet, a replica of the Earth, a lush green h(e)aven ready to move to in large numbers. Our options are environmentally hostile planets incompatible with the biology of Earth's lifeforms. Any sort of expanse into space assumes immeasurable amounts of money and also time. Any sort of terraforming that would allow breathable atmosphere and agricultural conditions similar to what we have on Earth would take many hundreds, if not thousands of years. With the technology we have, the first several hundreds of years of our expanse would be nothing but a handful of people living an ascetic life of a researcher and pioneer on a barren rock that would kill you if you step out of the artificial atmosphere of your artificial dome. What you're talking about is not an immediate solution, not an option that allows large number of people to move, and it does nothing to address and remedy our notions of endless growth, disconnection from the natural world and the supremacist attitude of everything in the universe existing to serve us and bow to us.
So, where does this expanse end if the only trajectory we have is one that will replicate the destruction of Earth over and over again? Are we going to terraform and then completely ruin two, dozens or maybe hundreds of planets because we're unable to accept that our consumption has limits and that our ways must change?
The simple fact is that the Earth and its population don't have this sort of timeframe at their disposal - hundreds or thousands of years that would allow us to grow favourable conditions and replicate the Earth somewhere in space. Within that timeframe, while pumping endless trillions (probably a gross understatement; chances are it's really numbers so big we can't even fathom and name them) into desperately and artificially bending other planets to our will, human life and all other life on Earth is going to suffer more than ever before through poverty, famine, diseases, wars for resources and extinctions.
We need solutions NOW and HERE. We're already at 5 minutes to midnight and we don't have the time to concentrate and invest in "solutions" that are hundreds or thousands of years in the making. Our only solution, the only shot we have is DEGROWTH: fostering a complete shift of consciousness that leads to lessening our consumption and a different distribution of our natural resources. This requires dismantling our power structures of capitalism and colonialism that are directly related to overconsumption and supremacy over the natural world that leads to unbridled exploitation and extraction. We will achieve absolutely nothing unless we change the entire worldview we currently have (and by "we" I mean predominantly the West, as there are still plenty of indigenous communities around the planet who don't subscribe to human supremacy over the natural world). This is the only sustainable direction in which we can expand the scope and scale of human consciousness.
Working on venturing into space? Yes, absolutely, one day when the time is right, probably many hundreds of years into the future - after we've sorted out the rot from the inside out and learned that we are one with our planet, not its master and overlord, ready to move on to rule over another one after we've depleted the current and only one we have.