The Decline of Materialism

Posted by Thomas Scarborough

Materialism is the theory that matter alone exists – however this is too simple. Let us assume, rather, that materialism is the arranging of our world in our minds – and since we are speaking of materialism, we do this on the basis of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. 

That is, in speaking of materialism, we are speaking of all that we learn about a material world through our senses – either directly, or through the instruments which we use. And so defined, materialism may seem to promise us a complete understanding of our world. We have certainly made enormous strides. We are able to tease apart the sub-atomic world, see billions of years back in time, and map and manipulate the complex genetic code – among many other things. However, there are at least four limiting and complicating factors to a materialistic outlook, each of which vastly reduces its scope and its power:

• It is one thing to discover the laws of nature, yet quite another to predict their outcomes. We see an analogy in the game of chess. While the rules of the game are simple – a pawn advances like this, and a king like that – the outcome of these rules is another matter altogether. A chess board, which is simplicity itself in the scheme of things – a mere sixty-four squares and thirty-two pieces – taxes the human mind to the very limits of its powers. It is the easy part, one might say, to design a supercomputer, or to plot a trajectory to Pluto. The impossible part is to predict the ripples on a pond, or to anticipate the path of a snail on a wall. Worse than this, we too often fail to foresee the negative outcomes of laws we imagined we had mastered.

• If materialism is the arranging of a material world in our minds on the basis of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch, consider then that others, too, arrange the world in their minds – and these others enter my world and my considerations. It is not I alone now, who seek to arrange the world in my mind. As soon as I factor another human being into my thinking – let alone a few, even hundreds, not to speak of a million more – the complexity of knowing my world becomes unthinkable. It is beyond imagination on the graph of intrinsic complexity.  We therefore separate out such situations from the ‘natural sciences’, and call them ‘human sciences’. It happens wherever others enter the picture.

• The natural sciences are, in a sense, an open book. Yet in order to understand the human sciences, we need to understand how others arrange their worlds in their minds. In order to accomplish this, we now find that we need to understand how they communicate this – and we must infer it from semiotic codes.  A plethora of views, an ocean of feelings, vast beyond our comprehension, is expressed with facial expressions, nuances of speech, gestures, postures, behavioural codes, ideological codes, and so much more – all of them full of variation and caprice.  This takes us another quantum leap away from that materialism which advances through the senses.

• But the way that we use these semiotic codes, noted Jacques Derrida, we are continually deferring meaning.  Francis Bacon put it like this: words beget words (which beget words).  It is much like having money in a bank, which has its money in another bank, which has its money in another bank, and so on. It is easy to see that one will never access one's money. Which is to say that, while the things of sense seem concrete, our words merely hover over the surface of reality.  If mind and matter were to correspond in a one-to-one relationship, we would have to be mere ‘machines’. Yet suppose now that all living forms have such ‘hovering’ minds.  We may in fact be living in a vast, teeming world which is wakeful in every part.

Materialism, we said, is the arranging of our world in our minds, on the basis of what we see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. On the surface of it, this promises us a complete understanding of our world.  Yet then we come up against the problem of outcomes. Further, we come up against the problem of others – through which we separate out the human sciences. Then we discover that we need to engage with complex and subtle semiotic codes. And finally, we might need to account for a world which is populated not merely with seven billion human beings, but with living agents beyond number or knowing. One by one, each of these four steps, in quantum leaps, diminishes the usefulness of materialism. By and large, our advancing understanding of the world would seem to be taking us further and further away from the materialism the philosophers once knew.

Pseudo Ethics

Posted by Thomas Scarbrough

Jean-François Lyotard proposed that efficiency, above all, provides us with legitimation for human action today. If we can only do something more efficiently – or more profitably – then we have found a reason to do it. In fact society in its entirety, Lyotard considered, has become a system which must aim for efficient functioning, to the exclusion of its less efficient elements.

This is the way in which, subtly, as if by stealth – we have come fill a great value vacuum in our world with pseudo values, borrowed from the realm of fact. Philosophically, this cannot be done – yet it is done – and it happens like this:

The human sphere is exceedingly complex – and inscrutable. It is one thing for us to trace relations in our world, as by nature we all do – quite another to know how others trace relations in this world.  While our physical world is more or less open to view, this is not the case with worlds which exist inside other people's minds – people who further hide behind semiotic codes: the raising of an eyebrow, for instance, or a laugh, or an utterance.

A million examples could not speak as loudly as the fact that we have a problem in principle. Like the chess novice who randomly inserts a move into the grand master's game, as soon as we introduce others into the picture, there is a quantum leap in complexity.  Small wonder that we find it easier to speak about our world in 'factual' terms than in human terms.

Further, in the human sphere we experience frequent reversals and uncertainties – war, famine, and disease, among many other things – while through the natural sciences we are presented with continual novelty and advance. In comparison with the 'factual' sphere, the human sphere is a quagmire. This leads to a spontaneous privileging of the natural sciences.

We come to see the natural sciences as indicating values, where strictly they do not – and cannot. That is, we consider that they give us direction as to how we should behave. And so, economic indicators determine our responses to the economy, clinical indicators determine our responses to a 'clinical situation' (that is, to a patient), environmental indicators determine our responses to the state of our environment, and so on.

Yet philosophers know that we are unable, through facts, to arrive at any values. We call it the fact-value distinction, and it leaves us with only two logical extremes: logical positivism on the one hand, or ethical intuitionism on the other. That is, either we cannot speak about values at all, or we must speak about them in the face of our severance from the facts. 

We automatically, impulsively, instinctively react to graphs, charts, statistics, imagining that they give us reason to act. Yet this is illusory. While the natural sciences might seem to point us somewhere, in terms of value, strictly they do not, and cannot. It is fact seeking to show us value.

Thus we calculate, tabulate, and assess things, writes sociologist James Aho, on the basis of 'accounting calculations', the value of which has no true basis. Such calculations have under the banner of efficiency come to colonise themselves in virtually every institutional realm of modern society – while it is and has to be a philosophical mistake.

Of course, efficiency has positive aspects. We receive efficient service, we design an efficient machine, or we have an efficient economy. This alone raises the status of efficiency in our thinking. However, in the context of this discussion, where efficiency represents legitimation for human action, it has no proper place.

The idea of such efficiency has introduced us to a life which many of us would not have imagined as children: we are both processed and we process others, on the basis of data sets – while organic fields of interest such as farming, building, nursing, even sports, have been reduced to something increasingly resembling paint-by-numbers. It is called 'increased objectification'.

With the advance of efficiency as a motive for action, we have come to experience, too, widespread alienation today: feelings of powerlessness, normlessness, meaninglessness, and social isolation, which did not exist in former times. Karl Marx considered that we have been overtaken by commodity fetishism, where the devaluation of the human sphere is proportional to the over-valuation of things.

Theologian Samuel Henry Goodwin summed it up: 'We are just a number.' Through pseudo values, borrowed from the realm of fact, we are dehumanised. In fact, this must be the case as long as we take numerate approaches to human affairs on the basis that they are 'indicated' by facts. Cold fact encroaches on the complex and subtle relations which are represented by the human sciences – in fact, by life as it is lived.