More Materialist Invasions
The Arts
The art of a people is a true mirror to their minds.
Jawaharlal Nehru
I think these two pictures sum up the influence of Materialism on the arts. Both are concerned with death. One profoundly moving. One vapid. One a work of brilliant craftsmanship. One involving sticking on sequins. One genuine. One cynical. One dignified. One vulgar. One priceless. One worth fifty million pounds. One Idealist. One Materialist. (Pictures thanks to ?)
Damien Hirst is a good example of what Materialism has meant for art. The skull is called For the Love of God. Does the title mean anything? If it carries the exasperated overtones of ‘Oh, for pity’s sake…’ then it makes some sense: a skull, the death of humanity, tarted up with thousands of diamonds, the very symbol of pointless material greed, to give it some sort of superficial glamour. Is this DH’s intention? Unlikely, I think. DH’s motivation (money apart) seems to be to shock, via ugliness and pseudo-philosophical and gooky sound-bite titles.
And the public has been so demoralised and brainwashed by the thumping background message of Materialism, via politics, economics, advertising, the media, and Science itself megaphoning our pointlessness and thus our inability to ever have an opinion worth anything… that we accept this junk as ‘Art’. Gook is king, in the Arts as much as Science.
Perhaps I’ll enter a completely blank canvas to an exhibition, entitled The Emperor’s New Clothes, but alas, it might be taken up as a masterpiece.
§ I once sent an empty shoe box tied up with baler twine to the Tate Gallery’s Director of Interpretation. I called it Is This an Empty Box? and wrote a long page of pretentious gook to go with it. It was returned to me, in a much nicer box, along with a letter praising it. They are bomb-proof. You might think that a gallery needing a Director of Interpretation is significant in itself.
Does all this matter? Yes, because Art has always been associated with truth and beauty, which has all been hacked out of it by the Materialists, so that all that remains is the shell of expectation but with no satisfying contents. We are all losers here, as the currency has been so debased by the charlatans and admen that nobody knows what art is any more.
Add to that the shtick that ‘interpretation lies in the eye of the beholder’ and you have the perfect con… you can’t even call the ‘artist’ a charlatan any more because it’s all your own fault you don’t find his pile of maggot-ridden sheeps’ heads with a plastic dildo jammed into one eye-socket, deeply meaningful on several levels.
Idealist art is uplifting; Materialist art is depressing. Not necessarily because of the contents (some C17 Spanish Idealist art is alarmingly gory) but because of its lack of any meaningful content, and its consequent assault upon the judgement of the individual.
§ The gory Idealist Spanish art was meant to engender sympathy for and thanks to Jesus for his suffering on our behalf. As a contrast, the ugliness of, say, Francis Bacon’s work does not engender any such thing. It is the nihilism of the bleak and the lost, begun in the early C20 by the dada movement, surrealism, and the theatre of the absurd: all movements reflecting the incoming Materialist wave of no-purpose, no-standards, and no sound rock to build anything upon. We’ve ended up with such observations as:
‘Violence is one of the most fun things to watch.’ Quentin Tarantino. ‘Fun’…..
We need to take a deep breath, regain confidence in our own judgements, and refuse to be manipulated by the dealers and galleries whose only interest is in making money from the gullible: if it looks like a grubby unmade bed, then that’s what it is. Hold your nose and move on.
Biology and Similar
The Materialist dead-end dogma has led biology, ethology, psychology, etc, into what might be called the ‘adaptionist trap’.
Thus every anomaly or curiosity in animal shape or behaviour is explained in terms of ‘Darwinian adaptation to environment’. No doubt this is often true. Galapagos finches are the obvious example, but I don’t see how it can apply to wildebeest and zebras which trot up and down Africa together. One is dull and dun, the other gaily striped in Op Art ticking. How can both be ‘adaptive’ to the identical environment? And I don’t see how the humble blue tit can have ‘adapted’ into his colourful livery as a matter of simple survival. Brown sparrows do that better, surely? Macaws? And then there is the peacock’s tail, which troubled Darwin so much as it clearly has nothing to do with adapting to its environment.
Biologists are obliged by the adaptionist trap, to say that this tail can only have come about as a sort of second order adaptation, being a survival strategy for the male to get himself selected to breed above his competitors in order to pass on his genes. The problem here is that it requires individual bird-brains to plan a long-term strategy. D+ would like to make other suggestions, the obvious one being that the lady likes a nicely turned out sort of chap (although it seems that females generally prefer nurturing males to show-offs… peacocks included).
§ But I guess the adaptionist version is saying the same thing in the end: that the female chooses (note: ‘chooses‘) on the basis of the display, and must thus have an aesthetic sense, and of quite a high and discriminatory order at that… but I’ve never heard a biologist say this out loud. Well.. a Materialist couldn’t, could he?
Why should animals not have aesthetic senses to go along with their demonstrations of love, altruism, intelligence, creativity etc?
§ Materialism has a real struggle with ‘altruism’. Self-sacrifice for the sake of another is inconceivable to The Dogma, although we can be sure that every card-carrying Materialist him/herself regularly behaves altruistically as a spouse, parent, teacher etc. To be a Materialist is to live a paradox.
We have all been struck by how altruism surfaces in a big way following a disaster. After the 9/11 outrage thousands of people put themselves out to help strangers. It happens all the time, across the world. The ghastliness of war also brings as a positive the opportunity for altruism, and its echo, heroism. Charity appeals regularly raise millions of pounds, again to help strangers: altruism. Ultimately, ‘altruism’ is just the Golden Rule of ‘doing unto others’ writ large.
Darwin does not mention altruism in Origins. His concern was with the mechanical aspect of evolution, and he kept quiet about matters of the Mind or ‘life itself’.
Meanwhile, one of our closest relatives, the bonobo, often shares food with others and generally prefers sharing to dining alone, according to Current Biology, March 2010.
D+ would have no trouble with that possibility, knowing that we are all One Life, as demonstrated by Darwin and Wallace, and we are all slightly different individuals, people as well as animals. It seems that we are all evolving along the line of Mind and awareness; and ‘awareness’ definitely includes ‘aesthetics’.
This insistence upon ‘adaptation’ is holding back evolutionary studies. It is also having a malign effect on biochemistry which doggedly pursues the Hypothesis of abiogenesis, or biopoesis, claiming, as The Dogma insists, that Life arose spontaneously from mud and lightning.
§ These new names are just a re-branding of the old ‘spontaneous generation’ theory which was disproved by Redi, Spallanzani and Pasteur. Best give it a new name. But by whatever name, some Top Scientists still accept it…
‘Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.’ Stephen Hawking.
There is still zero evidence for this and many scientists are puzzled by the consistent refusal of the rabbit to appear in the hat, but The Dogma shows no mercy. It has enslaved thousands of worthy chemists and biologists and is very tenacious. Most will battle on until retirement, and will play their final rounds of golf still baffled, but preferring bafflement to re-evaluating their basic premiss: the Dogma of the Absolute Truth of Materialism.
Language
Materialism has also distorted our language.
Words such as ‘rational’, ‘Darwinian’, and even ‘science’ itself have been gradually whitewashed over so that they all now mean ‘Materialist’, to the confusion of many, not least many scientists. Also, in Chapter 4 we saw how Prof Dawkins chose words to mean whatever he wanted them to mean (‘Words are our servants, not our masters’), so that eventually ‘design’ came to mean ‘no design’.
§ What of the ‘selfish’ gene? RD says that he means this as a metaphor:
‘If we allow ourselves the licence of talking about genes as if they had conscious aims, always reassuring ourselves that we could translate our sloppy language back into respectable terms if we wanted to, we can ask the question, what is a single selfish gene trying to do? It is trying to get more numerous in the gene pool.’
So are genes ‘selfish’ or not, in ‘respectable terms’? If they are, then we have the nonsense of a chemical having an agenda, which RD apparently agrees is nonsense, despite insisting that they are ‘trying to get more numerous’.
But if genes are not selfish… then what on earth does the phrase ‘selfish gene’ mean? And if ‘the selfish gene’ is ‘a sort of metaphor’ for something else that is selfish… then the whole ‘selfish gene’ notion is nonsense all over again, as the author really means ‘the selfish something-which-is-not-a-gene’. Humpty Dumpty gook… again. But millions of people still take it seriously. I am baffled….
RD really does insist that genes have agendas:
‘Let us understand what our own selfish genes are up to, because we may then at least have a chance to upset their designs.’ (from The Selfish Gene).
He definitely means that these chemicals are ‘up to’ something and have ‘designs’, meaning ‘plans’: which means he is proposing chemicals with mental attributes which are also teleological (purposeful).
He suggests that ‘we’ are separate from our genes, as we can challenge them, while also insisting that the genes are in charge: ‘They (genes) are the replicators and we are their survival machines. When we have served our purpose we are cast aside.’
So who is this ‘we’, and where did ‘we’ come from? ‘From genes’ or ‘not from genes’? And what of our mental capacities? Were our genes so careless as to develop them for us only to see us turn them against them? Such cruel and inept chemicals!
RD is by no means alone in accepting this non-sense, eg:
‘The body is a device constructed by the genes in order to produce more genes’, John Maynard Smith, Emeritus Professor of Biology, Sussex University.
You will find hundreds of similar quotes in science books and on television.
In 2006, thirty years after The Selfish Gene was published, Professor Dawkins declared that genes are cooperative rather than egotistic. Splendid! But so much damage to repair… And that word ‘cooperative’ still implies a mental component. Where does this mental component lie, as genes are still lifeless chemicals?
We also have to cope with many other slippery misuses of words, for example ‘survival strategy’, (see above). A ‘strategy’ is a mental plan, which is quite the opposite of a blind mechanical process of ‘survival by natural selection’, yet you will see this sort of phrase used all the time by Materialists. ‘It’s a sort of shorthand’, they will explain ‘..like a metaphor’. No… it is not a metaphor. It is misuse of language and can only lead to sloppy thinking (as Professor Dawkins admitted, above).
What about ‘in order to pass on his genes’? Again, you will find ‘in order to’, misused all the time in Scientific writings. It actually means ‘with the purpose of’.. a definite mental plan.. but not when a Materialist evolutionist uses the phrase, as for him there can be no such thing.
Sloppy stuff, leading to confusion in the mind of both writer and reader.
§ Similarly with the phrase ‘so as to’, or even just ‘to’, as in ‘the Arctic Squackling Tern adopts a yellow and blue chequered plumage to blend in with its surroundings.’ ‘To’ means ‘with the purpose of..’ To use it to mean something else is misleading and sloppy. Note also the word ‘adopts’ here. It means ‘chooses’, but not to a Materialist. For him it means ‘does not choose’.
Then there’s the paradoxical Materialist declaration that Life spontaneously ‘emerged‘ from non-life etc. Everyone knows what ’emerged’ means.. (To be clear: something can only ‘emerge’ from the medium it is currently ‘merged’ with) or we used to, until Materialism turned it into meaning ‘magically self-created itself’. We’ve been so battered by this Materialist onslaught that we no longer know what our words mean, never mind what Art is.
I think that’s probably enough on this subject, although I could fill ten pages with quotes from writers like RD and television scientists who consistently misuse language and thus fuddle the meanings and mislead the viewers. It’s not done deliberately. It’s just that they are so sure they are Right about everything that they think they can be more relaxed about the meaning of the words they choose. Sorry… no you can’t. Not if you’re concerned with looking for truth, anyway.
§ Examples from one BBC2 Horizon programme, of January 2010 (my italics):
‘.. rabies virus causes dogs to bite, so they can pass it on.’
‘..flu virus has engineered a way of transmission by causing you to sneeze..’
‘..the HIV virus attacks the cells, which are designed to fight invasion.’
‘HIV has a particular strategy of mutation….’
‘.. a quick and dirty strategy that the virus likes to use…’
From BBC News Aug 30 2010:
‘The Indonesian mimic octopus often uses a daredevil strategy of making itself more conspicuous to predators. Scientists believe the behaviour evolved to scare other animals.’
‘Uses‘? ‘Strategy‘? ‘Making itself’? And that innocent little ‘to‘, as in ‘to scare‘…
An extract from What Man Might Be, written by the once Dean of the School of Science, MIT:
‘Plants that learned to use energy from the sun to put themselves into states that attracted additional atoms got ahead faster. Long after the cell was invented, plant cells learned the advantages of mutual cooperation. Plant cells have learned the advantages of specialisation & cooperation, developing cells especially adapted for leaf and root and fibre.’
I counted eight inappropriate uses of language in these three sentences. Maybe nine.
Finally, from Francis Crick, Nobel Prize winner for determining the structure of DNA: ‘Evolution is cleverer than you are.’
Note: FC is a Materialist, so for him ‘evolution’ is a blind process of natural selection. In other words ‘evolution’ is a ‘process observed’, and not a force. However, FC is claiming above that this blind and random process is ‘cleverer than you are’.
Everyday Misery
After Natural Selection and the triumph of Materialism, philosophy took a nosedive into a mess of constructs like Logical Positivism and, wait for it, ‘Epiphenomenalism’. The first refused to accept the relevance of anything ‘metaphysical’ or subjective; the second declared that mind was made by brain. We also had Fallibilism, Functionalism, Logical Atomism, Realism, Eliminativism, Metamodernism and dozens more.
Two things struck me as I tried to make sense of some of these isms. One was that in my superficial examination I rarely saw the word ‘Materialist’ mentioned, although most (all?) seem to take Materialism as granted. And the second was the old Tibetan proverb I quoted earlier about how it is possible to be so clever that you miss the point entirely (ie, that Materialism is a false premiss).
The current mess of ‘Relativism’ in which we find ourselves, in which there are no agreed standards for anything, from quality in Art, to Truth itself, all stem from this mash of Materialist philosophies. We are philosophically rudderless, and all because Science has adopted dogmatic Materialism as ‘Truth’.
§ You might say that Relativism is Descartes’ ‘Cogito ergo sum’ writ large, meaning we can know nothing as true except that we can think. Someone has pointed out that the modern version might be ‘Tesco ergo sum’: ‘I shop therefore I am’. I’m desperately trying to raise a smile at this.
Once we adopt Idealism and something like DarwinPlus, the moral and intellectual mess that Materialism has generated will gradually fade away, along with all the other over-complex fabrications, and we will start to recognise a single rational and meaningful unity: ‘The Philosophy’.
§ As a metaphor: if you take a sponge and liquidise it into a slew of cells, it will eventually reform, as the individual cells detect and move back into the sponge ‘form’ (as posited by Plato, Sheldrake etc…). This does not work with a Victoria sponge.
If you find the above paragraphs over-provocative, please try it for yourself. Pick one or two of the isms above and test them against the simple and comprehensible requirements of Idealism/Yoga/DarwinPlus.
§ Existentialism is a curious hybrid, which stresses personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s acts, but in a pointless universe. Hence nothing you choose can have any ultimate point to it. Materialist paradox again, but at least the emphasis on personal choice and responsibility is there: a theme shared with Christian ‘pilgrimage’ and Islamic ‘jihad’, and with Nietzsche’s ‘superman’, and with the aimed-for conditions of ‘yoga’ of Yoga and the ‘enlightenment’ of Buddhism.
Fear Rules
These confusing and frequently depressing philosophies slowly leach out into society at large from the universities where they are concocted. Their inherent nihilism gradually becomes ‘official’ and ‘true’ since The Church has been side-lined and there is no other Idealist system to counter it. And once nihilism is at large many social ills ensue. I’ve already covered many of these ills, but there is a bit more to add. If you’ve already got the hang of all this, please skip to Chapter 28.
***
Everyone wants security, and just about everyone fears death. Idealism + the Yogic/Esoteric Philosophy + DarwinPlus offers security via:
*A rational Understanding of What (some of) It’s All About, plus
*The mechanism of justice moderated by the Law of Karma, plus
*The fact that you choose your own Heaven or Hell, plus
*The fact that you (as in the inner ‘I’) are actually immortal.
As somebody once put it: ‘We are the gods, and they are us’. As somebody else put it: ‘This is the other world’.
What sort of security can the social paradigm of Materialism offer? None: only confusion and pointlessness and nihilism. All it can offer is ‘stuff’ and distractions which don’t work.
People deep down know that ‘stuff’ and ‘money’ do not bring them security. Thus they remain fearful. And fear breeds need. Need breeds greed.. but for what? The only ‘security’ available: ‘stuff and money’. Hence the consumerist spiral and enormous personal debts run up in recent years, and hence also the rampant greed in all sectors of the commercial world, the obscene bonus culture, and the rapidly increasing ruination of the planet.
§ The whole idea of ‘Cryonics’: deep freezing ‘viable tissue’ (almost-dead people) until science has progressed enough to revive it/them is based upon this Materialist-induced fear of death, and the Materialist misunderstanding of the nature of Life.
So too are the weird cults that spring up. ‘We are here to be brainwashed’ said a member of the Heaven’s Gate cult which committed mass suicide in 1997. The despair and confusion in that sentence caused this woman and her friends to sign over their free will to a totalitarian system. The fact that they thought of themselves as a UFO ‘religion’ is irrelevant. They had retreated from their meaningless Materialist society into a fantasy: a self-willed psychosis. We must have ‘meaning and security’ at any cost.
At an apparently more trivial level we have body obsession: all a part of the Materialist stance: ‘no purpose; just physicality and selfish genes’. Shelves full of magazines encourage us to pursue the body beautiful. Sex appeal and activity is all that matters in a material world, and never mind the bulimia, anorexia and neuroses that this entails, along with botched operations and botox mutilation.
The commercial/advertising world works hard to keep you worried into buying lots of pills and glossy books and DVD’s and silly devices for only £19.95! Because in a society where we the citizens have been reduced to sheep-like ‘consumers’, what matters is not ‘Be Slim and Beautiful!’ by eating more veg and walking the kids to school, but ‘Feel Bad About Yourself Because You are So Fat and Disgusting!’, and of course ‘Buying More Stuff Will Solve This!’ The average woman’s magazine is something like 80% adverts and lightly-disguised adverts for stuff which will make you feel less disgusting and depressed simply by buying it. No it won’t. And everybody knows this, but they keep on buying it…’because they’re worth it’, and alas, know no better..
Children are being commercialised ever earlier by advertising, magazines, the pop world and television.
§ Particularly by promoting the desire for over-priced ‘labels’, thus appealing to children’s need to conform to their peer group’s snobby ‘values’, all generated by the commercial media and tolerated or even supported by parents whose capacity for independent judgement has been swamped by the enormous sub-woofer pressure of Materialism which constantly reinforces the message that there is no ultimate point to anything, so ‘Go buy stuff… NOW! Then you’ll feel better…’
They are being sucked ever earlier into the ‘I’m Fat and Inadequate’ industry, with neurosis just around the corner, rather than enjoying life as a child. They will also be weaned into ever more premature commercialised sexuality, and will later have a tough time distinguishing love from pornographic debasement.
This Materialist-Reductionist gutting of human complexity to body flash is reflected in the cult of the fake tan, and never mind the cancer risk; the spray tan; the botox trout-pout; ever more unlikely implants; the screeching Saturday nights in skirts that came from a Christmas cracker; the promotion of pole-dancing as a ‘keep-fit’ pastime; the rise of prostitution as an acceptable source of pin money; the enormous rise in drink problems. Much of this is a result of internet pornography and the squalid effect it has on young males’ minds and the women’s response in order to ‘compete’. I’m not advocating a return to Victorian prudery… but this current exaggeration is surely pathological, and a direct result of the mass adoption of Materialist physicalism-only and the rejection of what we might call Mind: intelligence and finer feelings.
What now matters is the form, not the content; the shadow, not the substance. It is truly desperate stuff, and ‘desperate’ is ‘misery in waiting’.
Kids cut school in increasing numbers. They mug each other for a pair of over-priced trainers, produced for pennies in an Indonesian sweat shop (‘Made by kids for kids’) and sold for £100 to mug punters here, who will pay anything to feel some sense of worth and purpose, even if it only achieved by buying stuff that relentless advertising has promoted to True Worth and Esteem (and there’s no other option anyway for an awful lot of kids whose ‘education’ has not even given them ‘a passport to higher earnings’, never mind a sense of worth and a purpose to their life). Not only has Materialism hijacked ‘science’, ‘rational’, etc and the notions of ‘happiness’ and ‘choice’, but even the concept of ‘self-worth’.
.. and nobody seems to have noticed….
Materialism has hijacked even the notion of ‘self-worth’.
‘Heroin chic’ is at the end of the long red line that starts with Materialism. So is obsessional pornography; the uglier heavy metal bands; video nasties; ‘shoot-em-up’ games….
Happy people do not need drugs or video nasties. Our obsession with celebrity-for-the-sake-of-it is a natural extension of the rejection of content in favour of flash. We all want to think that we matter, and are not just nuclear waste or a blob of plasm or a few kilos of chemicals as we are told by the Materialist cult, but ‘fame’ is not a reliable god, as many film stars, rock idols, and super-sportsmen know.
A few statistics from the American Dream (pop. ~340 million).
60 million people have been sexually abused.
75 million lives are seriously affected by alcoholism.
15 million families are violent. 60% of women, and 50% of men have eating disorders.
13 million people are gambling addicts.
The average boy will witness 26,000 murders on tv before the age of 18. These murders are largely committed by men.
Every year 17,000 people are killed and a million injured in drink drive incidents.
The UK, (pop. ~67 million), is little better: Every year, 250,000 people are reported missing. And these are only the ones that actually leave. How many more must be miserable without leaving? The vast majority return within 2-3 days. But what a lot of misery this represents in a ‘rich’ and therefore ‘happy’ Materialist society.
There are thirteen UK suicides every day, of which nine are men. (Annoyingly, this suicide rate is much the same in Happy-Oriented Bhutan. Nothing’s simple, is it?)
Cocaine generates more money than the sales of Microsoft, McDonald’s and Kellogg’s combined. That’s a lot of misery and dissatisfaction.
***
Obviously, it would be naïve to blame Materialism for every one of these tragedies. For a start, the Law of Karma must act out somehow, and for many this will mean tough times, even in Bhutan.
But the despair, the pandemic of hopelessness, the panomie… I think Materialism is to blame for an awful lot of the world’s misery, all the way from the murders of eugenics to the way it has scrambled the minds of millions of people who find themselves made ill or suicidal by the constant message that there is no hope or purpose in the universe and thus none in their own life, and their only saviour lies in drugs, prescribed or otherwise. Dreadful… but it is simply the logical extension of the illogical premiss of Materialism itself.
***
A final paradox: Materialism claims that everything that is comes from Matter/Energy. Thus, all evil must come from Matter/Energy, as there is nowhere else for it to have come from. Thus, all the aimlessness, nihilism, misery and cruelty in the world must come from chemicals and Matter/Energy. Naughty old chemicals.
***
One example of the grotesque environmental effects of unregulated materialism (the natural son of Materialism), is the North Pacific Gyre: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/5208645/Drowning–inplastic–The–Great–Pacific–Garbage–Patch–is–twice–the–size–of–France.html
***
When I read about how the Nazis reduced thousands of Jews to bars of soap, I was reminded, with a faint shudder, of my old biology teacher.
So Who’s to Blame?
A man receives only what he is ready to receive…
The phenomenon or fact that cannot be linked with the rest of what he has observed, he does not observe
Henry David Thoreau
The present generation will probably behave just as badly if another Darwin should arise, and inflict upon them that which the generality of mankind most hate – the necessity of revising their convictions
TH Huxley (‘Darwin’s bulldog’)
Or, as Max Planck so neatly put it:
‘Science advances one funeral at a time.’