Hollow Materialism

Image source: Peace at Last (blog)

The sword did not beat itself into the plowshare, nor did it then smelt itself down into the boiler of the steam engine. People thought of doing that, and then decided to do it. It’s the people’s motivations that are the puzzle, not the plowshare’s.

I have been doing a relative deep dive into Marx of late, reading some primary works (On the Jewish Question and The German Ideology) as well as a good secondary work (Giddens, 1995; Morrison, 2006) that translates him for present-day reader. As always, my efforts are to attempt an integrated understanding of the things I am reading in the context my developing understanding of how social science attempts to make sense of the world. Essentially, what I have been trying to figure out with these readings is what is meant by ‘materialism’, since there are a number of different takes on it. This interest is spurred by the notion of ‘materialism vs. idealism’ as one of the fundamental divisions within social science.

I am coming to the conclusion that this divide cannot be one of the most fundamental divisions in social science, despite the pedigree of the debate. Both terms – materialism and idealism – are much too amorphous to be made sense of. Each side to this debate can either win or lose by virtue of how broadly or narrowly the concepts of ‘idea’ and ‘matter’ are defined. The tendency for definitional gerrymandering makes this debate fruitless. Furthermore, ‘materialism’ is in essence just a stalking-horse for other concepts, such as rationalism, objectivity, and the stable preference for wealth and security.

Below the fold, I explore the various materialisms and materialism’s alleged conceptual opposite, idealism – which in international relations theory is often called ‘Constructivism’. I argue that materialism, as an approach to understanding human developments, basically exists to provide a simple objective means of deducing people’s and states’ interests. However, that relatively useful notion of materialism is also made up of separate assumptions, each of which is a better guide to understanding what is really at stake in the materialism vs. idealism debate. The materialism-idealism debate is really about the contradiction between objectivity and subjectivity, and the degree to which people pursue goals or behave as they are supposed to behave. Finally, the question of materialism vs. idealism is wrapped up in the question of how society is mutable.

Black Lives or Blue Collars

Image source: 4plebs.org

The American Left was driven to choose: Do we support the Black Lives or the Blue Collars? I do not mean the blue collars of the police, but those of working people and of those who are desperate for work. Do we attempt to reduce the founding sin of slavery, which resulted in Jim Crow and persistent racism and police brutality, or do we build a more equitable nation for all of the 99%? This is, essentially, the battle that was fought in the Democratic primaries of 2016 and 2020. For better or worse (and I think for the better), that battle has been decided in favor of the Black Lives. Any attempt to undermine that decision at this point is a historic mistake.

Progressives will doubtlessly make the case that it was the white collars that really won. Maybe so, but progressives failed to convince the Black community of their case. Joe Biden was carried to the nomination by the Black vote. The same was true of Hillary Clinton in 2016. Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton also won their nominations, in part, because of women’s votes. So too, Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton won with older voters. Though a discussion about the Hispanic vote may be interesting (Sanders did well with the Hispanic vote), the image of the Sanders supporter is largely White, male, and young. Furthermore, though this is not from the data but from personal experience, the image of the Sanders supporters was young, white men who were combatively sure of their correctness.

Below the fold, I discuss why progressives are getting the short end of the political stick, and why - for now - they deserve what they get. Essentially, racism is not what they think it is. Beyond that, however, I discuss what progressives can do about changing their behavior to be more politically and socially effective. In short, it is about doing more community and fewer polemics.

Hate in Time of Corona

Image source: The Jewish Star

We are living through the summer of our discontent. Plague and prejudice. They may be the worst of times, perhaps in some future it’ll be seen as the best of times – the time when history is made, hopefully for the better. In this disease-ridden election year, there seems to be more than a little hate to go around, and it seems like the time to think about the dynamics of that hatred.

Portland, until recently my beloved home, is ablaze. Or, at least, there is a downtown park that I used to ride my bicycle through on my way to the university, where there have been standoffs between the federales and protestors. What is striking is that the protestors are ostensibly engaging with the police on behalf of the Black Lives Matter movement. That the federales in question are supposed to be US Border Patrol agents detached from their mission of hunting illegal immigrants, puts the matter of immigration as part of this flareup. However, Portland is an odd place for a ‘race riot’, given that Portland is not particularly well endowed with a vibrant black community as I had the pleasure to experience in San Antonio.

That, I think, is the point. The people of Portland, as I know and love them, stand on the side of Black Lives as well as undocumented immigrants, not at all out of a direct connection with them – out of sameness with them - but out of solidarity with them. They are being their brother’s (and sister’s) keeper. Bless them for that.

My more cynical sociological side, however, suggests that it is mostly out of the identification of their common enemy, the Trump Administration and the nationalist/rural/conservative population that provides the administration with its political foundation. My reading of conflict theory is best described by the ancient adage, the enemy of my enemy is my friend. What is animating the solidarity of Portland is not a mechanical solidarity of sameness. Nor is it what we emotionally would like it to be, an organic solidarity of people embracing their differences.

Below the fold I explore the dynamics of a non-materialist conflict theory. I look at the question of ‘why they hate us’, Russia, and the propaganda of the golden shower. The point of it is to consider how these identities live in our minds, but have real-world consequences. The particular labels attached to the identities may shift and be renamed, but the conflicts that underwrite them are much more structural. The point is, by opposing one another, we strengthen the solidity and solidarity of those we oppose. Each material victory of one party is a ‘moral victory’ of the losing party, and so it goes on.

Pedagogy of the Oppressor?

These past few days I have been reading (listening by way of audiobook) to Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Paulo Freire (1968). It is a Marxist work aimed at revolution through co-education. The idea is that there are people who oppress and other people who are oppressed. The oppressed, together with a teacher or on their own, must come to realize their state of oppression. They must have their consciousness raised. They need to gain critical consciousness – conscientização – in order to become aware of their state of being oppressed. That is the intellectual precondition of revolution.

The book is essentially aimed at the potential teacher or the oppressed person who is self-taught and happens upon this book. The strong caution is that any teacher or revolutionary leader must not forget to collaborate with the oppressed people and make them agents in their own liberation. While it warns the teacher or the revolutionary leader not to become oppressors themselves by short-cutting the process of including 'the people' in the intellectual and planning processes, it is a bit short on recognizing that most oppressed people are also, themselves oppressors of a lower-still class.

As with much Marxist literature, it simplifies social structure into just that: a class of oppressors and a class of oppressed. Reality, of course, is more complex. An effort to approach reality is to view a situation from as many sides as we can, or at least as many sides as it practicable. Also, as with much Marxist literature, the work is steeped in Marxist jargon, which makes it difficult for the non-Marxist to wade through. It is aimed narrowly at the professional Marxist revolutionary-intellectual, and thus seems to partially defeat its own purpose of educating the lay reader.

Below the fold, I hope to look at the book from multiple angles without falling into the trap of using my own jargon as too much of a shorthand, thus oppressing you as the reader in the way that Freire oppresses the non-Marxist reader. The point of doing so is to exercise the analytical muscle – using the four perspectives of political science, economics, sociology, and cultural anthropology – in order to strengthen that muscle. Furthermore, those who want to put such a pedagogy into 'praxis' can be helped by having a more targeted understanding of the barriers to liberation. Employing the four different perspectives help with acquiring the right target.

From Many Cultures to Much Culture

Over the last months, I have been devouring audiobooks, given their easy accessibility through my formerly-local public library. Since I am still working on the 'culture' section of my research, these books mostly deal with what I think of culture and notions of its contours – or, rather, the lack of such contours. In particular, I have been reading/listening to books about the histories of Islam and Muslims, largely focused on the Middle East.

A departure from that is the book that I am currently reading: Gods of the Upper Air (Charles King, 2019). It dovetails perfectly with the idea of culture's contested contours. Essentially, the point that I raised in the previous post – Indiscrete Culture – can be illustrated by the work of Franz Boas, one of the central figures of early cultural anthropology. It is, however, illustrated by doing to his discipline's subject what he did to physical anthropology and eugenics in his day.

Below the fold I take ideas from my current reading – about Boas, from Ruth Benedict (whose Patterns of Culture I read last November), and drawing on my readings about the history of Islam – to continue building the case against cultures on behalf of culture. In short, I argue that culture is too multi-faceted, and those facets are too poorly aligned with one another, to make any typological sense. It should therefore not be used as a concept that can be divided into particular groups. Doing so is only a latter-day reification of physical anthropology's race theories. That's not to say that making distinctions cannot be useful, but it should be done carefully.

Indiscrete Culture

I am in the process of preparing a course on intercultural communication. This will not be an academic course, but more of a how-to, mostly aimed at relatively new arrivals in Sweden (like myself). I will be aided by a friend who has been in Sweden somewhat longer than me, with more hands-on experience navigating the divide between newcomers and the Swedish authorities. As a result of this project, as well as my continuing research, I’m taking a dive into the great rainbow of cultural diversity.

As I recently wrote, culture and identity are not the same thing. One of the ways in which they are different is that culture is not quite as discrete as nationalist perspectives make it seem. Nationalism separates ‘us’ from ‘them’, accentuating differences between people: frequently exaggerating those differences. Ontological nationalism (about which I will write more at some point), induces people to think about ‘cultures’ in a nationalist framework. Regrettably, people already think in nationalist stereotypes, and the concepts and methodologies employed by those who write about intercultural communication further underwrite those.

My point, here, is that culture should generally be thought of as a more continuous concept, in which many different cultural traits generally shift gradually over the space between people and geographic distance. Migration and long-distance interaction put people with more striking differences in contact with one another, but patterns of migration and such interaction do not happen along country borders; they tend to happen in cosmopolitan cities. As a result, those cosmopolitan cities themselves change culturally in order to accommodate the cultural differences. This creates striking cultural differences between cities and rural and suburban areas. Because cities and countrysides are closer proximity to one another than culturally distinct countries are, the differences between city and country are much more relevant to understanding cultural difference, than national ‘cultures’ are.

Below the fold I critique the common conceptualization of national cultures, provide a more continuous way of thinking about cultural diversity, and provide an outline of why this matters. One of the main ideas that I hope a reader comes away with is that most people are average, and the things that shape them to be very different by coming from a certain society, can frequently be mitigated by other factors that also shape their values system.

Culture and Identity: Not the Same Thing

People talk about their ‘cultural identity’. It is a very powerful concept and people are prideful about those so-called cultural identities. That pride, however, creates alienation and gets in the way of a deeper understanding of human dynamics. It exacerbates our current problems in the world.

Unfortunately, talk of ‘cultural identity’ creates nationalist narratives, even among those who look at culture in an attempt to understand and sympathize with others. In so doing, it can make ‘others’ of people who on many other levels are similar – thereby alienating those people from ourselves. It also blends together two very different concepts – culture and identity – that operate by different dynamics, at different rates of change.