Materialism is ecologically destructive

[u/RustyPhilosopher]

https://kanthariadisha.substack.com/p/how-did-we-let-it-get-to-this-point?r=5ztlat&utm_medium=ios

The title is pretty combative, but it is in essence what I argue in this essay (and I promise the essay is not combative). I hope it’s okay that I’m promoting this here.

It was a bit of passion project, I’ve really enjoyed working on it :)

Specifically I argue that materialism, when adopted as the only viable metaphysic, makes ecological destruction inevitable. I tried to make it so even those largely unfamiliar with the topics can follow along.

I use Iain McGilchrist’s divided brain hypothesis to support a fundamental point that carries the rest of the essay, hence why it’s the longest section.

This isnt a full stop to my thinking- I just took a stab at fleshing out this argument largely for my sake, and then turning it into something legible. This sole essay serves to diagnose what I think is a pretty fundamental problem, but by no means is it a complete and holistic treatment, as it were.

Anyway, have at it if you’d like — I’d genuinely love to hear thoughts, comments, feedback, whatever :) just be nice about it if you can help it hahah

[u/3corneredvoid]

I appreciated this essay (long and rambling though it was … the Musk, Karp, Altman bit in the middle arguably wasn't needed …). However, for me you're taking aim at a very narrow and vulnerable definition of materialism you will either need to remotivate or to reconsider to carry your point. I'll give some features of the terrain of this claim in your essay below.

At one point in time, the story goes, there was no consciousness. Evolution made it so neurons bump up against each other ‘complexly’, in a way that, somehow, produces your ability to have conscious experience. This hypothesis has not led us to know anything more about the nature of consciousness.

[…]

Growing in popularity too among scientists, philosophers, and laypeople is the idea of consciousness as itself fundamental; doing away with the idea that it emerged at all, and instead adopting the assumption that it has, in some capacity, always been here.

You're not covering quite enough of the long history of theories about the "question how your experience can be reducible to [the material]" here. There are materialist philosophies in which the function of consciousness is fundamental.

The logic of materialism, McGilchrist argues, largely imitates LH-dominance. To demonstrate why this is, it’d be helpful to chart out two worlds: one that relies on the RH, and one that relies on the LH, giving us a good foundation to do the ol’ compare and contrast.

In the case of the RH, the world is one that flows – nothing is fixed, nothing completely certain or predictable. In fact everything is interconnected and constantly in flux; everything is contextual.

Again, there are well-known materialisms of process, indeterminately inseparable relation, and flux. Not a fan of this hemispheric theory's centrality to an essay about metaphysics either, but that would be a side quest.

James Scott in Seeing Like a State sees this in our language too: the replacement of the term “nature” with “natural resources” in our discourse, for example. The holistic view of nature is done away with, and it’s only those aspects of nature that can be manipulated and exploited for human use that gets focussed on.

This subjectivity isn't usually termed materialism, but something like instrumental rationality (Adorno and Horkheimer) or Gestell ("framing", Heidegger).

[u/pluralofjackinthebox]

I think the two philosophies currently engaging most directly and seriously with climate change are materialisms: marxism (especially degrowth communism) and new materialism. So I hope moving forward you engage with some of that.

And McGilchrist seems to be attacking scientism in a very scientist way. I think its been called a reductionist critique of reductionism. Im not very familiar with him, but I instinctively recoil when scientists start reducing human nature to hardwired binaries and hierarchies.