Materialism is one of the main pillars of the modern mentality. This fact has real consequences. The materialist foundation of our science, our technology and our politics leads us to treat other people, other societies, other species and the ecological order itself as complex objects to be controlled, manipulated and exploited rather than conscious purposeful beings that must be respected and with whom we must negotiate.

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"When I was very young, I ran and played on the slopes and in the meadows, carefree and without many duties or responsibilities. On these wonderful days, when it was warm enough in our valley, I sometime ran around naked with the other children just for the joy of it."

Tashi Tsering, The Struggle for Modern Tibet -- pg. 6

Shepherd
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Tradition

In his autobiography, "The Struggle for Modern Tibet", Tashi Tsering describes his experiences as Tibet developed from a traditional, hierarchical society under a Buddhist theocracy to a country that was committed to becoming a modern industrialized society under the rule of Maoist and then post-Maoist China. As an advocate of universal education and the modernization of his homeland, he was not entirely unhappy with the occupation of his country by China. He felt that Tibet needed the jolt that China provided to move from a traditional, pre-literate society that was not much interested in change, to a modern industrialized nation. Despite some ugly experiences along the way, he came to see the net outcome as gain.

Is it possible that he was wrong? Perhaps there is a fatal flaw in the project that dominates all nations at this point in history: the struggle to become modern, technologically driven, industrialized powers.

Although he was a believer in education, science, technology, and the modern project, Tashi was not oblivious to the joys that were provided by the traditional society into which he was born. Here is his description of his childhood:

My family was relatively well off by local standards, and I had a carefree youth with little or no work until about the age of seven, when I started doing odd jobs around the house. My first major responsibility came when I was eight years old and my father told me I was to work as a shepherd in the summers like the older boys. I was thrilled. My job really was not hard, but I felt great pride. I had to help drive the animals (about three hundred sheep and goats) into the mountains each day, stay with them while they grazed, and bring them back in the evening. In summer the days were long, the skies were immense, and the mountain valleys were beautiful. I loved the feeling that I was doing something that mattered to my family. But I have to admit that it was mainly just fun, because I met many other young herders like myself, and there was always something to do while watching the herd graze. When the weather was hot, we shepherds played in the icy streams. And despite the dominance of Buddhism in our society, with its strong emphasis on the sanctity of life, we often hurled stones at birds and rabbits with our slingshots, and sometimes we even caught fish in the streams with our hands. When we spotted a fish hiding we reached out with cupped hands, careful that no sudden movement frightened it. Then, holding our breath, we would grab as fast as we could. Usually we missed, but occasionally we got lucky and were able to fling a fish onto the bank. We boys thought that was a great feat and would immediately set up a makeshift hearth of stones and dung, which we lit with the flint strikers we all wore. I can still recall the glorious taste of the freshly cooked fish. On quieter days we spun wool on simple handmade spindles or sewed boots for the winter. We ran, occasionally fought, and mostly played and enjoyed the delicious feeling that we were on the way to becoming men while our charges grazed on the mountain meadows! Herding was serious work since our animals represented the major portion of our family's wealth, but for us kids, it was mostly fun.

Tashi, The Struggle for Modern Tibet, pp. 8 and 9

It would be hard to improve on such a childhood.

Despite the happiness of his early years, Tashi felt a discontent, a restlessness that he identified with the desire to become literate. His father had attained some degree of literacy. Tashi was not sure what level of competence he had achieved, but he recalled watching him make letters, and was fascinated. He wanted to have this skill himself, but he wasn't sure why. In his traditional Tibetan society, literacy did not give a person any great advantage.

From as early as I can remember I wanted to learn to read and write. This desire was not common in our village or in the rest of Tibet. There were no newspapers or radios, and although most people were illiterate, that was not a problem for them or for the village as far as anybody could see. In our tradition-bound world there was no need for literacy in the modern sense. The community and the culture told you who you were and what to do. There were clear and prescribed roles for persons of every age and gender ...

Tashi, The Struggle for Modern Tibet, pg. 9

Tashi felt that the skills of reading and writing would open new horizons for him. And he was not mistaken. Language skills -- specifically reading and writing -- did serve as a doorway to new worlds for him as it has done for countless people. But this expansion of one's world does not always lead to greater happiness. Indeed, it can be argued that greater language skills open us to ideologies, and that ideologies, of all kinds, place a layer between us and reality, and that any such layer between us and reality dulls the vividness and intensity of our experience. (By ideologies I mean theories about reality, ideas about how it is all put together, and what, if anything, it means.)

Is the taste of freshly cooked fish ever as wonder-filled as when we are children? Is a sort of ideological alienation, accompanied by a dulling of our experience, the inevitable price we have to pay to gain the benefits of education and modern life?

Modernity

The dominant thought-forms of modern life derive from technological language. Technological language is based on the findings of science, and is used to predict and control reality. The curious thing is that it does not always take a great deal of scientific knowledge to facilitate a great deal of control of reality. Those who ran concentration camps, like those who now run prisons, knew almost nothing about the inmates, but they could predict and control their behavior, and manipulate it totally, on the basis of observations that any child might make: people like to eat, and they fear pain. Little more than that. Guards in a modern prison need not know the people they imprison. Technology is like that. It can predict and control on the basis of carefully measured regularities, and a little planning, but it does not need to understand what it measures. Physicists who tell us about quantum reality are quite clear about this.

Modern western science and technology are based on a materialist metaphysics. Up until recently, the fact that science was grounded in materialism has not been a problem, at least when it dealt with reality on the level of physics and astronomy. The commitment of science to observation and reason, in conjunction with its use of mathematics, was a winning combination that allowed it to define with precision the regularities of reality on that level. Its accomplishments were impressive -- at times even astonishing. But when it was applied to living entities, the modern understanding alienated us from reality. In psychology and sociology, and to a lesser extent in biology, serious debates arose as to the possibility, or even the desirability, of imitating the practices of the physical sciences. Could we do justice to living entities if we excluded mental reality from our data, and reduced our concept of knowledge to mathematical formulas based on solely the external observations of organisms? If consciousness, goal seeking, and agency were fundamental facts of reality, such an approach would be profoundly alienating.

Science is concerned with trying to understand reality. In this endeavour it commits itself to relying exclusively on experience and reason. This seems to me to be the right path, but only insofar as we include the full range of experience. Western science does not do that. It has committed itself to materialism, which limits itself to knowledge based on observations from the outside of entities. Knowledge from inside entities is labelled "only subjective" and is discarded as a reliable source of knowledge. In this way our science started out on the wrong foot by beginning with only half the data.

If we exclude the subjectivity of the entities we study -- whether they be biological organisms, or societies, or the whole of reality -- we fail to perceive the consciousness, purposes and agency of the entities. We see them only as complex objects driven solely by mechanical forces. From this perspective the entities that we encounter have no inner nature that should be respected. Viewing ourselves as the only entities that have purposes that need to be taken into account, we do not see the arrogance and violence of treating the rest of the entities in the world with no regard for who and what they are. The world of "nature", after all, is only a random assortment of accidents. Nature, in effect, has no nature. Therefore we see no problem with the primary project that defines modernity: to replace the natural world with one engineered by our technology.

It appears likely at this point that the modern project will destroy us. Indeed, the evidence is that it is destroying us already. Every day we are assured that more of our technology will save us, and every day we see our technology continuing to destroy every aspect of our world. To be ultimately successful, a technology must negotiate with a world that it respects. Only if it does that can it enhance our relationship with the natural order.

For some scientists, doing science may intensify their lives. Undoubtedly, if a scientist is studying dolphins by swimming around with them out in the ocean, or an anthropologist spends time living in an unfamiliar culture, they will experience those aspects of reality they are studying with greater intensity than the rest of us do. But biological science is much more often pursued injecting rats with pathogens, or reading hundreds of papers on some detail of nature. In any case, the overall impact of the current practice of science based as it is on a reductionist and materialist world view is to disenchant the world. It takes the magic out of life. It teaches us to encounter the natural world not as a living entity, but at a complex thing. An "it."

Here, for example, is an experiment I read about in the essay Evolution of Paternal Investment by the evolutionary psychologist, David C. Geary. The researchers wanted to study whether a two-parent family among birds provided the babies with a greater probability for survival. So they "removed" the male (I presume they must have killed it) from a selection of nests and compared the survival rates in those nests that retained the male parent:

"The former benefit of paternal investment has been demonstrated by removing fathers from nests, which results in lower offspring survival rates. In an analysis across 31 bird species, M????ller (2000) determined that 34% of the variability in offspring survival was due to paternal investment. In some species, removal of the male results the death of all nestlings (obligate investment) and in other species male removal has lesser effects, as females compensate for lost provisions (facultative investment)."

I don't mean to pick on evolutionary psychology. Its approach to things seems pretty typical of what modern biological science looks like. Generally speaking something has to die, and we end up with numbers -- not with an improved understanding of what the entity that is being studied is. The march of civilization is the march of science, technology and industrialization. It is a march that has left a terrible swath of suffering and exploitation in its wake, always promising a better life, but never quite providing it for any but a few.

The Impact of Modernity on the Natural World

Modern technological civilization has never been more accurately described than in Melville's Moby Dick. I have in mind a chapter called "Stubb Kills a Whale," and I quote from this chapter at some length:

The next day was exceedingly still and sultry, and with nothing special to engage them, the Pequod's crew could hardly resist the spell of sleep induced by such a vacant sea. For this part of the Indian Ocean through which we then were voyaging is not what whalemen call a lively ground; that is, it affords fewer glimpses of porpoises, dolphins, flying-fish, and other vivacious denizens of more stirring waters, than those off the Rio de la Plata, or the in-shore ground off Peru.

It was my turn to stand at the foremast-head; and with my shoulders leaning against the slackened royal shrouds, to and fro I idly swayed in what seemed an enchanted air. No resolution could withstand it; in that dreamy mood losing all consciousness, at last my soul went out of my body; though my body still continued to sway as a pendulum will, long after the power which first moved it is withdrawn.

Ere forgetfulness altogether came over me, I had noticed that the seamen at the main and mizzen-mast-heads were already drowsy. So that at last all three of us lifelessly swung from the spars, and for every swing that we made there was a nod from below from the slumbering helmsman. The waves, too, nodded their indolent crests; and across the wide trance of the sea, east nodded to west, and the sun over all.

Suddenly bubbles seemed bursting beneath my closed eyes; like vices my hands grasped the shrouds; some invisible, gracious agency preserved me; with a shock I came back to life. And lo! close under our lee, not forty fathoms off, a gigantic Sperm Whale lay rolling in the water like the capsized hull of a frigate, his broad, glossy back, of an Ethiopian hue, glistening in the sun's rays like a mirror. But lazily undulating in the trough of the sea, and ever and anon tranquilly spouting his vapory jet, the whale looked like a portly burgher smoking his pipe of a warm afternoon. But that pipe, poor whale, was thy last. As if struck by some enchanter's wand, the sleepy ship and every sleeper in it all at once started into wakefulness; and more than a score of voices from all parts of the vessel, simultaneously with the three notes from aloft, shouted forth the accustomed cry, as the great fish slowly and regularly spouted the sparkling brine into the air.

The chase is on, and it is not long before the whale is overtaken and then captured with a well-aimed harpoon hurled by Tashtego, the harpooner. But it is Stubb, the second mate, who actually kills the whale. Melville's description of the death of the whale is vivid and in sharp contrast with the tranquility of the opening scene. There can be little doubt that, with a few elaborations to fit it into his novel, he is describing an event that he had actually seen while he was whaling.

"Haul in, haul in!" cried Stubb to the bowsman and, facing round towards the whale, all hands began pulling the boat up to him, while yet the boat was being towed on. Soon ranging up by his flank, Stubb, firmly planting his knee in the clumsy cleat, darted dart after dart into the flying fish; at the word of command, the boat alternately sterning out of the way of the whale's horrible wallow, and then ranging up for another fling.

The red tide now poured from all sides of the monster like brooks down a hill. His tormented body rolled not in brine but in blood, which bubbled and seethed for furlongs behind in their wake. The slanting sun playing upon this crimson pond in the sea, sent back its reflection into every face, so that they all glowed to each other like red men. And all the while, jet after jet of white smoke was agonizingly shot from the spiracle of the whale, and vehement puff after puff from the mouth of the excited headsman; as at every dart, hauling in upon his crooked lance (by the line attached to it), Stubb straightened it again and again, by a few rapid blows against the gunwale, then again and again sent it into the whale.

"Pull up, pull up!" he now cried to the bowsman, as the waning whale relaxed in his wrath. "Pull up! close to!" and the boat ranged along the fish's flank. When reaching far over the bow, Stubb slowly churned his long sharp lance into the fish, and kept it there, carefully churning and churning, as if cautiously seeking to feel after some gold watch that the whale might have swallowed, and which he was fearful of breaking ere he could hook it out. But that gold watch he sought was the innermost life of the fish. And now it is struck; for, starting from his trance into that unspeakable thing called his "flurry," the monster horribly wallowed in his blood, overwrapped himself in impenetrable, mad, boiling spray, so that the imperiled craft, instantly dropping astern, had much ado blindly to struggle out from that phrensied twilight into the clear air of the day.

And now abating in his flurry, the whale once more rolled out into view; surging from side to side; spasmodically dilating and contracting his spout-hole, with sharp, cracking, agonized respirations. At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frighted air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea. His heart had burst!

"He's dead, Mr. Stubb," said Daggoo.

"Yes; both pipes smoked out!" and withdrawing his own from his mouth, Stubb scattered the dead ashes over the water; and, for a moment, stood thoughtfully eyeing the vast corpse he had made.

In this scene with the whale, Melville shows us how our modern civilization approaches a living system. It could just as well be a cow in a meat factory, or a less powerful culture, or a pristine ecological system. Modern technological civilization approaches every living system with an eye to what it can exploit from that system, and with a blind eye to that system as a living entity with its own feelings and wishes and needs. The moderns arrive with their analytical tools and their harpoons and knives, and, with a few "primitives" that are brought along to carry out some of the more menial or grisly tasks, they turn the living whale, or whatever other living system they encounter, into useful, marketable products. But the living whale that enormous bundle of experiences is no more. It can be argued, of course, that we harvest knowledge along with our meat and oil. We do learn what is inside the whale -- its digestive system, the size of its brain, the chemicals that somehow facilitate its life process. But again, it must be noted: the living whale is no more. Through chopping whales into chunks and carefully examining and measuring each piece we learn only about dead whales.

Materialism

Science did not have to start with materialism. That decision was not forced on it by reason or evidence. It was a political decision. Humanity was weary of the repressions, inequities and holy wars of God, and rightly so. Humanity was also unhappy with the church authorities hiding knowledge in a tangle of Latin that was beyond the reach of ordinary people. It was good that the corner that the church had on the God-market was broken up, but then they replaced God with Matter, Latin with Math, and Purpose with Accident. In excluding any hint of "mind" as a fundamental category of reality, the door was closed to the possibility of God sneaking back in under a different name.

To live in a world without God was either a gain or a loss, depending on one's perspective. But a materialist perspective clearly left modern people with a problem. How was one chunk of matter going to communicate with another? Material bodies are experientially impenetrable. If my experience is a product of, and contained in, my brain, then there is no way of directly sharing it with any other brain. So solipsism raised its ugly head. (By solipsism I mean the idea that the mind is so wrapped up in itself that it cannot communicate directly with another mind. This does not necessarily entail doubting the actual existence of the other mind.) On the most basic level we are totally alone. As Jean James, the renowned physicist and mathematician, described our dilemma, "We each live in a prison-house from which there is no escape. It is our body: and its only communication with the outer world is through our sense organs--eyes, ears etc. These form the windows through which we can look out into the world and gain knowledge of it." Although he tried to open our minds to the possibility of a broader view of reality than was provided by the materialist view of things of his day -- one grounded in an idealist view of things -- the view of the body as a prison house from which we cannot escape seems to me to be a very materialist one. Also James believed that what knowledge we could glean from thinking logically about our sense data was limited to mathematical equations that actually provided us with no clear picture or understanding of reality. As he said about four-dimensional space, "the highly trained mathematician may visualize it partially and vaguely, others not at all." Once again, despite James' good intentions, ordinary people are barred from true knowledge. In the middle ages Latin was the barrier. Today it is math. It's an unfortunate situation. Most of us are too busy feeding our kids to learn math on a graduate-school level. So according to this view, we are doomed to a life of almost compete ignorance that is alleviated only to a limited extent as the mathematically trained physicists drop a few crumbs to the floor. It's a spiritual cul-de-sac for us ordinary people.

So is there something wrong with this picture that Jean James paints?

Two things, really. Materialism, and an impoverished way of opening oneself to reality.

We have all noticed that there are two ways of experiencing things, which are most frequently call "mind" and "matter." I prefer the term "experience" to "mind." Materialism is the view that somehow our material brain cranks out experience, sort of like a liver cranks out bile. It's too silly for words. We can assume, as materialism does, that there is only one basic substance. But it makes more sense to affirm that, seen from the outside, it is "matter," but from the inside it is experience. From a philosophical point of view, it is far easier to understand how matter might arise from mind, rather than the reverse. As mind becomes more and more rigid in its habits as on the levels described by physics and astronomy it takes on the attributes that one associates with "matter."

It might be noted in passing that a pan-experiential view of reality delivers us from the kind of almost total ignorance James talks about. If experience is the basic stuff of reality, then knowing my experience of myself and of my relationships is a more profound knowledge about myself than any set of formula about physical brain waves could provide.

This is a very brief essay so I would refer the reader to the Wikipedia articles on idealism and panpsychism, which are the two main ways of understanding the universe as basically mind-like rather than thing-like: yurl.com/y6qy8lhm and yurl.com/a5lvmx2. Idealism and panpsychism are overlapping concepts, and there are a variety of flavors for each.

A Different Way of being open to reality.

Perhaps we need to set aside technological language and turn to poetry and theology in order to gain at least an initial intuition of what an alternative to the modern project might be.

In his poem, There Was a Child Went Forth Every Day, Walt Whitman suggests that there is a different way of knowing reality, a way that is not alienating. It is a way, he believes, that is natural to children. In this way of knowing we become the other. His poem begins with these verses:

There was a child went forth every day; And the first object he look'd upon, that object he became;
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of
the day, or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

The early lilacs became part of this child,
And grass, and white and red morning-glories, and white and red
clover, and the song of the phoebe-bird ...

Something very similar is suggested by the the Jewish philosopher and theologian Martin Buber. He wrote a book entitled "I and Thou." In it he suggested that there are two distinct ways of relating to an entity, which he called "I-It" and "I-Thou." In an I-It relationship we relate to an entity other than ourselves as an object. In an I-Thou relationship we relate to the entity as a subject. In the I-Thou relationship the other is recognized as having its own goals, wishes, modes of experience and agency. In an I-Thou relationship empathy takes us literally beyond the boundaries between us and another entity. We are in that paradoxical relationship upon which all mystic experience is based--that of being simultaneously one-with and separate-from the other. This enables us to see the other from the inside, because of our oneness. In an I-It relationship, we are completely other than the other. We know it only from the outside, and our relationship with it is generally instrumental. If we have any interest at all in it; it is only to use it.

An I-Thou relationship is not limited to people. Nor is an I-It relationship limited to what we would normally calls "things." I can have an I-Thou relationship with my back yard and and I-It relationship with my neighbor. It's a matter of how I open myself to the encounter.

Perhaps a few examples will both clarify what I mean by the concept, and show that it is much more common than one might first suspect. It turns up in the most unlikely places:

• Entanglement. Physicists describe a situation in which two or more particles become very much like one particle while remaining distinct.

• The Birth of the Self. The birth of the self as a process that begins with the symbiotic oneness of the infant with its mother, and proceeds through the first year of life to separation and individuation.

• Sheldrake's Dog-and-Master Experiment. https://youtu.be/9QsPWitQovM This experiment is virtual proof of telepathy. But how do we understand telepathy, except as the two entities (dog and master in this case) being entangled, being both the same and separate.

• Grief Work. Throughout life we grow through a process of taking others into ourselves. Once again we see that the boundaries of the self are semi-permeable. People interpenetrate each other, are a part of each other. This process of taking the other into the self has a special significance in the process of grief when becoming one with the lost entity takes on a special significance.

• The Nicene Creed. During the first five centuries of the Church, the movers and shakers of early Christianity engaged in a great debate about the identity of Jesus. It went from, " He was a great man and and a prophet" to "He was God walking in the earth." Both were declared heresies, and the orthodox position became the paradoxical position that he was "Fully Man and Fully God."

• The Upanishads. The well-known metaphor of the drop returning to the ocean can best be understood not as a process in time (though it may be manifest that way) but as a paradox: Atman is Brahmin. The drop is both drop and ocean at the same time.

We find the idea cropping up from physics to theology. From two sub-atomic particles to a person and the absolute. It seems to be a both/and sort-of world: we are both the same and separate. We could call this the "I-thou effect."

Modern physics tells us that all of reality is wave-like. If we accept the panpsychic view that all of reality is also experiential, we are brought to a somewhat astonishing realization. Wave-like forms of experience are music. Thus it would appear that the universe exists to make music out of itself, and that we are its songs. I offer this not as a poetic metaphor but as a literal description of reality. Mathematics, mechanics and technology tell us something about how an orchestra is made. They may even help us make the instruments. But when we can no longer hear the music we have lost the whole point of it.

In our modern understanding of reality not even our fellow humans are seen as Thou. The whole point of behaviourism, for example, is to turn human beings into complex objects that can be predicted and controlled without reference to mental events.

If we encounter all of reality as an I-Thou, we will set aside the kind of exploitative and Machiavellian ethic that dominates the world today. Also we will reject a legalistic approach to ethics that is centrally a list of do's and don'ts. Rather, a different kind of ethic is the natural outcome. It's simply that once we experience an other as a Thou, he or she becomes a person with whom we communicate and negotiate -- not a complex object we are free to exploit. Under this ethic, there are things that we simply could not do. For example we could not plunge a harpoon into the living flesh of a whale again and again and again.

Authors Website: http://www.politicsofhealth.org/

Authors Bio:
Write for Politics of Health and work with David Werner on issues of health. Worked in the field of "Mental Health" all my life. Am now retired.

Jim