Confessions of A Materialist | Foundations, Part 5
A confession indeed
This is part 5 of the Foundations series of Earthly Fortunes. Here I share a broader view of how I make sense of the world, as foundations of specific topics and stories that we will start diving into next week.
See Part 4 for the fundamental physical model of our world, Part 3 for the Vegas-Eden spectrum, Part 2 for negative knowledge, and Part 1 on three types of knowledge.
“So you still believe in God?” I asked my artist friend Pedro, after he stated that Las Vegas is the most uncomely creation in a world that God never made.
“I believe in the world God created. It’s a world of matters! Beautiful matters!” He said, arms flailing at the garden nearby and the forest afar. “You gotta believe in it too. You do engineering. You handle all the atoms and molecules from God’s world. ”
Indeed, I believe in the world of matters, of physical beings, atoms and molecules and all. They are the foundations of our world. They make up not only items we can touch like plastic laptops, but also seemingly intangible concepts like information and the internet. As my fingers tapped the keys, mechanical pressures commanded a torrent of electrons and protons to silicon transistors, which translated my keyboard actions into 0s and 1s, that are piped into transmission cables underground and underwater.
Sounds terribly unromantic, right? It’s like staying up way past midnight, only to find out that mysterious Santa is actually our parents: when inner workings of black boxes are exposed, the aura of mystery is lost, especially for black boxes that we interact with everyday like laptops and the internet.
We don’t need to, nor have to understand what goes on inside those black boxes. We want to keep their romantic mysteries intact.
But romantic mysteries are like dreams: they make good stories, but everything important happens when we’re awake and dealing with matters and underlying physical processes. Such is my belief as a capital M Materialist. Sounds simple enough.
Yet woe to us Materialists. In today’s language, we are that awkward kid in the back whose name nobody remembers. Speaking of a “materialist”, the top spot often yields to some Kardashian flaunting their mermaid dress with diamond threads. We the actual Materialists have to live on the 2nd page of Google. And we have many faces:
An engineer who labors over and cares for what she makes, where the raw materials come from, where they end up, by how much and for how long.
A chef who appreciates the fact that tomatoes don’t grow on grocery store shelves.
A crop researcher who develops salt-tolerant plants to help farmers grow crops on hostile soil.
A gamer who realizes that virtual reality farmlands can’t grow food to feed even one person, and screen pixels don’t fill water cups.
In short, Materialists harbor heightened awareness. Because we know where things come from and go, we pay more attention to, and take greater care of the environments around us. Between the matters’ coming and going, we are more attuned to how they change and transform — because we’ve taken apart black boxes where the changes and transformations happen:
You turn on the electric stove, I hear an accelerated Ode to Joy, as turbine blades clink in sync to produce power.
You cut tomatoes for the soup, I see green vines, metal clips, and sunshine dropping into boiling water.
You wax numbers about the economy, I say “Hold on a moment, please!” QE can be infinite, leverage ratios can always lever up, NASDAQ and bitcoin can hit a new high every day — but there are only 4.6 billion years of matters (plus recycling and ongoing solar radiation) for economic production and circulation. Yet all products and services in our economy rely on obtaining and transforming matters. Yet all mainstream economics somehow assume that matters are either infinite in amount, or could come on-demand easy-peasy like pizza on UberEats. Here, my Materialist awareness brings me more concern and puzzles than joy and poetry, but I still gained insights and unusual perspectives into what we take for granted in our lives.
I hereby confess: I am a Materialist. Through the lens of matters and physical beings, I have found elevated insight, awareness, and joy in our current and past worlds. Maybe even a glimpse into the future too.
As a Materialist, I heed and cherish matters and physical beings, in all their raw, present, refined, transformed, changed, or derivative forms.
I believe that if things are falling apart, the centre that can still hold is the world of matters: beautiful and useful matters and physical materials, that don’t bear false witness to our existence.
“Do you believe in God?” Pedro asked. We had agreed that the Garden of Eden was God’s last recorded creation.
“Could you pass the salmon, please? I mean, water-borne protein,” I said. “It’s a long story for another day.”
Thank you for reading Earthly Fortunes. If you like this, please share with your friends. Subscribe for free to join me on the inside of The Materialist Club!
When you think of a “Materialist”, what’s the first thing popping into your mind? Reply to the email, comment, or DM me on Twitter!
My deep gratitude to the friendship of Pedro and Roselyne. Without our conversations, these writings would not have been possible.
Another way in which I relate to the word materialist - someone who's concerned with the material reality of our lives. The material ways in which we are set back by exclusion, disadvantage, oppression. The material reality of colonisation. The material reality of later industrialisation. The more I go down that path, the more I see that the material reality of what we *have* can alienate us from the material reality of the bodies we have to *be* in. So the last frontier of the material for me is our bodies -- and harnessing a particular attention to our first material homes, rather than being taken along for the ride by the body's material impulses. Does that sound like something you might relate to?
Super interesting series -- so glad I chanced upon these essays tonight Helen.