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.

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.