Article 65: Materialism as Gatekeeper
Preamble: Scientific materialism, which has spawned ‘scientism,’ is accurate in many respects but has limits; more importantly, by attributing to it a scope of understanding it does not actually possess, it is unwittingly used to prevent other modes of analysis and perception outside its purview which it therefore regards as invalid. When examined carefully, reductionist materialism ultimately takes refuge in concept for the notion of any self-existing ‘objective reality’ is unverifiable since all scientific enquiry is observed by and via subjective consciousness. This trust in abstraction bleeds over into many other areas including societal governance in generally unnoticed ways. For example, this led to the belief that one could replace living, breathing monarchs with a document whose words could replace dynamic human leadership and become the highest authority and Law of the Realm.
Materialism as an unverifiable belief:
The reality which most modern people, East and West, believe in is probably the default view of most people throughout post stone-age history, namely that the only things which are ‘real’ are those which are physical. They have clearly measurable existence and dimension in space and time. They have shape, size, location, duration. A book on the night table beside us; a tree in the garden; the mountain peak we can see in the distance through the window: when we go to sleep, we know that when we awake the next morning that all will still be there. Objects of the mind such as dreams, stories, emotions or other feelings, all come and go - from whence and to where we know not - and thus cannot be said to have any ‘real’ existence. They are fleeting, without shape, without definable location, so they are subjective experience, yes, but not ‘real’ in the sense that the book, the side-table, the tree and the mountain are real. I think nearly all of us would generally agree with this proposition.
Moreover, scientific methods developed world wide have afforded us the ability to make many nifty tools and machines, construct extraordinary buildings, build modern urban-based civilizations with eight billion and counting and so on. Recent mechanical advances, such as the microscope and radiography, have allowed us to see things which our senses cannot. From advances in chemistry and engineering we have learned to make new substances and machines thus transforming our world considerably in the past couple of centuries with extraordinary population growth still underway in as yet not fully developed parts of the world. Again, none of this is controversial and I think nearly everybody reading this today would accept it as basic common sense.
But.
There’s a little twist in there we slid over, probably without noticing, namely that ‘subjective experiences are not ‘real’ in the same way that physical objects like tables, trees and mountains are real. There is an assumption that the trees and mountains exist in their own right without our experience of them. This is an entirely reasonable assumption, of course, but it is important to recognize that an assumption is all it is for we are unable to verify the existence of a mountain without experiencing it via our ‘not real’ subjective consciousness. Yes, a camera can take a picture of it, or a sonar can map out its outlines based on feedback provided by echoing sound waves, but these can only be evaluated, again, by our minds. None of us can prove that anything exists outside the realm of Mind because none of us can experience anything without a mind. So the notion of a self-existing external ‘objective’ reality absent experiencing, though entirely reasonable, cannot be scientifically verified as being anything other than an abstract idea or theory.
So what? The theory works, you might say, because the mountain will be there in the morning when you awake day after day and will be there long after you die.
Because of this next twist: the problem is that the scientism/materialism view doesn’t know its own limitations. It has Empire tendencies, it colonizes where it does not belong and, more importantly, tries to prevent exploration into areas outside its command and control effectively incarcerating its adherents. That’s quite a far-ranging progression in so short a sentence so we have to consider this a little more; to do so, let me backtrack just a little.
If you were to ask a scientist to describe the movie you are watching on a screen, the scientist could talk about radio waves or internet EMF signals and various different pixels of light with different frequencies on a screen and soundwaves emanating from a speaker diaphragm and suchlike but that same scientist would also have to admit that his science cannot perceive the story being told on that screen. Science doesn’t understand stories, nor can it hear symphonies or any music as such. That means that science doesn’t see feelings, emotions or meaningful experience. Science cannot see love or hate, disappointment or triumph. Science, in other words, doesn’t perceive most of what matters to us as living beings leading what we call ‘our lives.’ So science can see and do many great things, but not everything, including many of the most important experiences involving that which is most important in our human life journeys. Put another way: science has no regard for many things which we regard as most meaningful because science doesn’t ‘do’ experience and since we inhabit what on this blog is often called an ‘experiential continuum,’ science only perceives a narrow band within a far larger spectrum moreover often in ways, as per the example above about watching a movie, that are somewhat outside, or alien, to that experiential continuum.
Moreover, when we discuss ‘science’ we are also really discussing the mindset it comes out of and which most of us share, namely that the realm of the experientially meaningful is not, scientifically speaking, ‘real.’ This attitude pervades modern life in many ways, too many to recount in a short article. But, briefly, this materialist mindset has created many aspects of our modern world we take for granted without noticing. For example, how we look at societies these days is mainly through the lens of ‘social science’ so we measure things like economic output, life expectancy, relative income levels, none of which is harmful but all of which is somewhat limited in scope and not all that human or humane sounding. It projects an objectivity which distances the observer from the observed and attempts to separate the experiential textures and flavours of what we generally call ‘culture’ from the subject matter called ‘society’ even though clearly what we call society is comprised of living, breathing, entirely subjective human beings. Our text books and public discourse tend to be more and more geared to this sort of mindset de-emphasizing imagination and majesty and emphasizing social programming so that students will fit into the job market and modern materialist society. In a way, we could say that objectifying and then categorizing the subject matter takes the life out of it similar to how a biologist dissects a corpse to study the workings of a living organism. Yes, you can learn much that way, but there is much that you cannot learn as well.
Our cities reflect a largely utilitarian approach dominated by roads (for moving around quickly in automobiles), telephone and electrical poles and cables, cell phone towers, cement-made high-rise apartment buildings, advertising signs to boost income and so on. It’s more practical and utilitarian than stylistic. Architecture from our pre-industrial past tended to have more emphasis on style which moreover changed steadily from generation to generation with occasional big shifts. Many of these styles, like Baroque, or Georgian, or Gothic or Imperial Chinese, theocratic Tibetan, transcendentally ancient Indian, Shinto-Buddhist Japanese etc. are beautiful, uplifting and elegant requiring considerable time and skill over many generations to bring into being, moreover deliberately reflecting philosophical and spiritual principals which permeated the societies of those times. But just as 'science doesn't do stories,' that sort of emphasis on style and beauty is not meaningful to the materialist mindset and so modern architecture in most places tends to be comparatively drab unless attempting to broadcast a sense of wealth and power. Let’s face it: most schools, hospitals and government buildings in most modern countries are decidedly ugly.
So the problem is that we have let the limitation inherent in the scientific or materialistic approach overly determine what matters in how we construct and evaluate our modern world, including governance, financial systems and overall cultures and values, and thus also sense perceptions – how we feel, how we see, how we live. So this materialism-scientism issue is a fairly big deal though rarely acknowledged as such except by philosophers like Iain McGilchrist whose magisterial 'The Matter with Things' might just be the most important intellectual contribution in the last century or more. Perhaps the most unfortunate element in the mix is simply that, just as with left brain dominance as McGilchrest has elucidated brilliantly, materialism doesn’t see its own limitations.
The main thrust of this Article is now done, so what now follows is simply further embellishment, a little fleshing-out as it were.
For a while I studied traditional daoist-Chinese medicine. I didn’t go all the way to becoming a licensed practitioner because where I lived at the time health insurance wouldn’t cover such treatments so I would never have been able to earn enough to pay back the exorbitant US tuition fees, but I did get a solid introduction to the overall theory behind it – which is fascinating and I believe comprises one of the world’s most sophisticated wisdom traditions. Importantly, it does not start from the scientism perspective which presupposes an external objective reality and discounts subjective reality as unreal and therefore both unreliable and irrelevant. Chinese medicine is based on subjective sense perceptions which can be consistently observed and catalogued – things like skin tone, tongue texture and colour, pulses, voice, movements and so forth. More importantly for the purposes of this article, they use a type of differential diagnosis, though in a different way from typical medical usage.
One of the definitions of differential is “Dependent on or making use of a specific difference or distinction.” That is the sense I am using here for their diagnostic method features using several different uncorrelated systems to reach an overall diagnosis. I can’t go into depth here but let me give a brief example with just two or three systems. Most doctors use more.
The most popular, almost universal, system is taking the pulse. The Chinese pulse method is surprisingly sophisticated: using the index, middle and fourth finger on the patient’s wrist in particular spots yields three separate readings on each wrist. Each point has three levels, surface, middle and bottom. So that makes twenty seven pulses being read by the three fingers on each wrist, so fifty four in all. A good doctor can learn a huge amount about a patient by feeling the pulse for only a minute. Of course it takes many years to master, but this is a sophisticated, precise method which can reveal pretty much any medical condition, moreover using subjective perception.
The second most popular diagnostic method, and entirely uncorrelated with the pulse reading method, involves inspecting the tongue about which volumes have been written over the millenia. Here’s a three hour Youtube; and here’s a search result. The zone of the tongue – front, middle, sides, back, surface, underneath – yields particular signals; the colours also – pink, pale, yellowish, black (yes, some people present with black tongues, I have seen this myself). All these many different things yield precise information regarding various core organs – lung, liver, spleen, heart, kidney, condition of the blood and more.
So if the pulse shows a weak heart and the tongue also, you are on the way to focusing on the heart and giving heart-related treatments with needles, massage or herbs. If the pulse shows something very different from the tongue, then either you are reading them wrong and need to reexamine more carefully, or you need another system or two’s input to determine a diagnosis.
Another system involves getting a verbal history whilst listening to the patient’s voice, examining their overall demeanor and body movements etc. and finding out various symptoms involving specific organs, syndromes or meridians based on the theory. For example, if you wake up regularly between 1 and 3 AM, this indicates a problem with the liver and gallbladder which are known to effect various other systems and organs.
Another system is to examine signs of excess and deficiency. This is harder to explain and quite intuitive but we all have both physical and mental-emotional areas where we are excessive or deficient. This could be the tone of voice, or zones in the tongue or pulse, or parts of the body that are hyper or hypo sensitive. The pattern revealed by what is excessive and what deficient provides more clues, for every area that exhibits excess will be linked with a corresponding area that is deficient just like a wave has a trough as well as a peak. For example, if the heart pulse is weak, the doctor looks for what is correspondingly excessive and depending upon what it is - the small intestine, the liver, the stomach - he gets an idea of what type of imbalance and dynamic is in play since the heart has a different relationship with each other organ system and the doctor, through his training and on his bookshelf, has access to over two thousand years of clinical observation of whatever pulse and other combination of symptoms the patient is presenting. And there are many other systems including nine zones of the body going from bottom to top, yin and yang, inside and outside, outer, in-between or deep levels of dis-ease and so forth.
The above systems can be used to determine a good differential diagnosis in a few minutes, though getting a life history and verbal report of symptoms takes a little longer though is usually only done once if at all. Barring that longer initial evaluation, most good doctors can get a fairly in-depth read in less than five minutes. If two or three of these uncorrelated systems point to the same type of problem, you can be confident that you are zeroing in on what needs helping.
The point here being that by not being limited to materialist science approach alone, one can broaden the spectrum of data used to come up with an overall diagnosis even if that data is derived from methods which most ‘scientists’ would reject as being too unreliably subjective. By not having a single objective reality limitation, the method comfortably includes multiple ways of viewing the same thing - tongue, pulse, history, excess-deficiency, body zones etc. This inherent flexibility is more in accord with how we experience things in our lives, but is also a result of not limiting our definition of what is or is not real and relevant from the get-go.
Put another way: this sort of approach is much easier to come up with if you have a more open view which values all sorts of experience modalities rather than trying to limit everything to objective physical measurement alone. It’s not that the latter is unhelpful or wrong, it’s just that it is a fairly narrow spectrum of what can be used to effect thorough diagnosis; it is incomplete, overly narrow.
Similarly, in the societal realm, we should be using far more than the scientific mindset to analyse how our societies are doing and how we might improve them. Better and more imaginative story telling as a way to explain societal dynamics for example, for as we have reflected above, science doesn’t do stories even though each of us leads our lives day by day within the context of individual and collective narrative cognition - perhaps the topic of a later Article. Put another way: ‘objective’ materialist political analysis blocks too much of the rich and vital overall spectrum of human experience and so often ends up doing more harm than good.
This goes back to something mentioned in the preamble: the notion of an objective reality which trumps subjective experience is an unverifiable abstraction. Physical materialism which posits a 'scientific' objective reality, is an idea, a concept, indeed a belief - even though they themselves believe and insist that it is everything but even though on some level, it’s no more real than fairy tale. More importantly, it provides only a limited spectrum because our experiential world has so many more experienced and important dimensions all of which come into play in our daily lives as individuals in families and societies in the overall dynamics of society at large, which in many ways is a complex living organism with heart, mind, body, feelings, neurosis, wisdom, sense of meaningful narrative and so much more.
For example, considering all this and about the thinking behind the US Constitution yesterday when reading The Political Theory of the American Founding; Natural Rights, Public Policy, and the Moral Conditions of Freedom by Thomas G. West, I noted that one of the over-arching principles behind it was to create a ‘more perfect Union’ by which they meant not only a Union of different States, but also a union of people with each other and their government, a sense of being one realm, a vibrant ‘We.’ And one of the main ways they proposed to do it was to eliminate tyranny in all forms including monarchy by establishing a republic, which is a state run by its citizens who by definition are sovereign themselves, not subjects of a monarch. I don’t have an axe to grind about this aspiration necessarily though suspect it has yet to be thought through sufficiently, but it did occur to me that it’s a little ironic that what they established as an alternative to Monarchy, which features a living, breathing human individual as Head of State, was a Document containing only lifeless abstractions, aka words. They put the Document and those conceptual abstractions as the highest Authority, and therefore Law, of the Land. The materialist mindset finds this normal because the whole notion of objective reality which they subscribe to is itself a conceptualized abstraction, moreover a belief sincerely held as being quintessentially ‘real.’ The irony is that they made Concept into a new King instead of a living, breathing human. I can’t help but wonder if this is really the step forward they intended ....