The Big Lie of Materialism
“Basically, according to Sri Aurobindo, materialistic thought is the gospel of death.”
Lately, within a couple of days, I came across a recent Scientific American opinion piece by Robert Jay Lifton and a new book by David Bentley Hart. Lifton is chiefly known for his studies of the psychological causes and effects of wars and political violence, and for his theory of thought reform. Hart is a prolific author, essayist, cultural commentator, philosopher, religious studies scholar, and theologian.
Lipton’s piece begins with these words:
Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.” That's a simple, profound and true statement.... Factual truth is distinct from ideology or bias or personal opinions of any kind. In contrast, when factual truth breaks down... there can be a rush of factual falsehoods inundating a whole society. That is because factual untruth requires continuous additional untruths to cover over and sustain the original one.
In his book All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life (Yale University Press, 2024), Hart addresses the “prejudice typical of our time—that matter governed by purely mechanistic and non-mental laws is the foundation of all reality, mind included.” He writes:
What we take to be the rational position on any topic is as often as not simply one of our historical moment’s prevailing prejudices; and our historical moment just happens to be late modernity. As a result we see the world very differently from the way it was seen by most of humanity throughout most of recorded time. The problem of mind as we struggle with it today is not really an ancient concern of philosophy; it is a specifically contemporary issue. That does not diminish its gravity or complexity, but it is as well to place things in proper perspective. Before the advent and eventual triumph of the mechanical philosophy in early modernity, and then the gradual but more or less total triumph of a materialist metaphysics of nature (even among those who believe in a realm beyond the merely physical), most developed philosophies, East and West alike, presumed that mind or something mindlike, transcendent or immanent or both, was the more original truth of things, pervading, sustaining, and giving existence to all that is. In such a vision of reality, material bodies and physical order and corporeal life seemed in many ways far more mysterious than either spirit or mental agency ever did.
To Hart, the materialist prejudice typical of our time “is far and away the most implausible position on offer.”
Still, materialism ... exercises so powerful a sway over the minds of many philosophers and scientists today that they continue to adhere to it even when evidence and reason alike would seem to urge its abandonment. In many cases, the entire project of the philosophy of mind today is simply an elaborate effort to arrive at that prejudice as though it were a rationally entailed conclusion, no matter what contortions of reasoning this might require.
Here, as in the seemingly broader social context considered by Lipton, factual untruth requires continuous additional untruths to cover over and sustain the original one.
No claim, however exorbitant or even seemingly perverse, is so extreme that some philosopher with a commitment to an entirely “physicalist” or “naturalist” or “materialist” account of mind has not proposed it—even the claim that all the mental phenomena that most of us take to be indubitable, like consciousness or intentionality or ratiocination, are in fact nonexistent. It would be difficult to exaggerate how fanatical this devotion to an essentially mechanistic materialism can prove at times. Otherwise seemingly sane and intelligent persons regularly advance arguments that, but for their deep and fervent faith in a materialist picture of nature, they would undoubtedly recognize as absurd and circular. Some are even willing to grant that the evident phenomena of conscious mental life are irreconcilable with a physicalist metaphysics; but, rather than conclude from this that physicalism should be rejected for having failed the test of the empirical evidence, they conclude that the evidence must be rejected for having failed the test of their metaphysics. This is the chief danger in any ideology: the power of determining our vision of the world before we have ever turned our eyes toward it. As a rule, in philosophy and the sciences, when a theory fails to explain a phenomenon, it is the theory that must be eliminated; only in modern philosophy of mind is it routinely the case that the phenomenon is eliminated in favor of the theory. This speaks of a problem far worse than mere intellectual indolence; it is the effect of a tragic captivity of reason to an arid dogmatism.
As a case in point Hart cites a particularly acrimonious screed by Alex Rosenberg (The Atheist’s Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life without Illusions, Norton, 2011). Materialism obviously implies atheism, but to some extent the converse holds true as well, for even among those who believe in a realm beyond the physical, a materialist metaphysics of nature is widely espoused. I can think of no better illustration of the difference between a truly spiritual worldview and a theistic religion espousing materialism with respect to nature than the contrast between the biblical saying “all comes from dust and to dust it returns” (Ecclesiastes 3:20) and the Vedantic saying “from Delight all these beings are born, by Delight they exist and grow, to Delight they return” (Taittiriya Upanishad III:6) — delight being one of the three essential aspects of Ultimate Reality as conceived by the original Vedanta of the Upanishads: sat (Being), chit (Consciousness), and ānanda (Delight).
While on the surface the community considered by Lipton (society as a whole) seems broader than that considered by Hart (scientific and philosophical academia), one must not discount the latter’s influence on the former, buttressing as it does the fundamental attitude of a broad swathe of society.
According to Lipton “the defense of continuous falsehoods relies on more than repetition; it relies on intimidation and can readily lead to violence.” Repetition is key to the defense of materialism, as is intimidation. The following longish quote is from a blog post I came across many moons ago. It charmingly illustrates the power of intimidation by the academic establishment.
I decided to study physics for the same reason as everyone else: nature, the ultimate knowledge and all that stuff. To get there you first have to do some sacrifices, overcome obstacles, prove yourself, travel a long way, etc. So I did all that, and finally here comes the big day. First day of class at this multimillion investment building opening for the first time, sitting in the brand new auditorium, fully packed with 180 first-year students of physics, the biggest generation in the history of the faculty. Mauricio, who was the Dean at that time, had the honour of giving the welcoming speech. Using an impressive minimalist surround audio system he starts by saying, in perfectly clear Spanish:
“You have not come here to dedicate your life to the study of nature and the laws of physics, a 2% of you may follow that road; the rest of you have come here to become something quite different. In a few years time you will be working in the IT industry or in Wall Street. Nowadays there are physicists working in banks all around the world, developing dynamical models, understanding complex economic systems, programming software…”
With hindsight, now I understand that had I had a minimum of criteria or integrity I should have walked away at that point and never looked back. But for one reason or another I decided to stay there and after five difficult years I was among the handful of guys that came through the exit door with a degree in theoretical physics… ready for the IT market!
It may be because of that that I was not at all surprised when ten years later I read that a group of mathematicians and physicists working with derivatives in Wall Street had been made partially responsible for the worst economic crisis in the last century, ruining the lives of a few million people...
Coming back to my senses, I realized that the profession of physics had become too narrow and specialized, I was missing the big picture, so I decided to study philosophy. After paying a considerable amount of money (which is what you have to do if you want to get into philosophy) I ended up studying Philosophy of Science....
The main incentive for me was that I was going to be able to learn, first-hand, from one of the top-notch professors in the area of philosophy of physics and quantum mechanics, which was my main interest at the time. Her name was Lady Marley and there was a lot of fuss in the department whenever she moved around. When she asked a question in the middle of a talk, the background murmur would die away all of a sudden. When she entered a room, people would turn around and start inadvertently clapping with their ears. So I had to figure out what was all this admiration about. It turned out that it had something to do with her “genius”, of which her extensive work and knowledge of the subject was an inextricable part....
When you would get into the half-light of her office, hardly being able to walk between piles of books that reached to the ceiling, she would lay down on a sofa and take off her shoes, resting her feet on a heap of dispersed books and listening to you very carefully, not saying much, just to be able to measure the scope of your stupidity.
I was very close to getting into that same flattery mood when by sheer luck I came to read about this guy, one of those German physicists that happen to be born from time to time, his name was Ulrich Mohrhoff. No one knew anything about him or had the least idea of the issues he was trying to highlight in quantum mechanics. To me, everything he said seemed TREMENDOUSLY important, so I studied his work quite a lot, I read everything he wrote about physics and the few critical notes on his work that were published at the time. It was something groundbreaking and exciting. Exciting is the right word, here is a guy who is saying something really new and meaningful about a very old problem, and he publishes it in Foundation of Physics, so he’s not a nut case. What can be more important?
I was wrong, food is more important.
Lady Marley was very conscious about the nature of her job, she would ring up the BBC to defend the argument that government cuts in areas like philosophy of science could damage future discoveries in unrelated fields....
So after listening very carefully to Lady Marley’s lectures, I came to her first seminar, knowing, after studying Mohrhoff, Mermin and others, that there were at least a few very worrying issues on what she had presented as objective “facts” of the microscopic world. She started talking again about the wave function and I took the first opportunity that presented to ask her where was she extracting the physical content of that function from, whether it was just a mathematical apparatus to calculate probabilities or an element of the real world. She looked at me in the same way as Hudig looked at Willems1 the day he fired the bastard from his post, and added with a pitiful laugh: “Oh, you are an anti-realist!”
That was the beginning and the end of it. From then onwards there was no chance to discuss anything other than the usual waffle and fancy stuff, which is a mixture of science fiction and wishful thinking, all the standard tricks and transpired formalities of main stream philosophy of science. The rest of the people there were as lively as the reflection of the light in the totem permitted them to be. They shared some of that warmth and lived by it.
Not much has changed since this was written.
What results from the situation considered by Lipton is, in his words, “malignant normality, society’s routinization of falsehood and destructive behavior. That can produce psychic numbing, the inability or disclination to feel, which can reach the point of immobilization.”
The terms “malignant normality” and “psychic numbing” fit the situation considered by Hart equally well. Normalize materialism — whether as wholesale denial of a realm beyond the physical or as a denigration of the material realm as mere launching pad into some non-physical Beyond — and you end up with that psychic numbing which leads to destructive behaviors such as rampant gun violence, record-numbers of overdose deaths from opioids, or an epidemic of suicides.
Lipton went on to quote Hannah Arendt, the renowned philosopher known for her study of totalitarianism, which relies on the organized lying of groups. She “pointed out that leaders like Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels promoted what they themselves called the ‘big lie,’ not only to suppress their people but to control their sense of reality.” Incidentally, I highly recommend the 2024 movie “Goebbels and the Führer” (Original title: “Führer und Verführer”), a brilliant portrayal of the synergy between Hitler and his propaganda minister. The English subtitles unfortunately do not do justice to the spoken German.
What Hitler and Goebbels called the “big lie” was a propaganda technique based on telling a lie so outrageous that people will believe it because they cannot imagine anyone would be brazen enough to lie so blatantly. Before the advent and eventual triumph of the mechanical philosophy in early modernity, it was materialism that qualified as the big lie — a lie so brazen that people did not believe it because they could not imagine anyone would lie so blatantly. Today, materialism is an even bigger lie because it has been internalized to such an extent that it no longer has to rely on the organized lying of groups or the deliberate suppression of a populace to control its sense of reality.
Unfortunately, the mere return to factual truth — if it were possible, or if the idea of such a return were even coherent — does not solve the problems we are facing. Science operates within a metaphysical framework that formulates questions and interprets answers. This framework itself is not testable by the methods of science. As long as a materialistic framework of thought is academically de rigueur and the superstition prevails that science alone has access to unbiased truth, little can be done. Nor would factual or unbiased scientific truth, if it were attainable, be all we need. We need a greater truth than science can provide, even a science liberated from the shackles of materialism. Yet the last thing we need it is another ideology, another system of beliefs. As Sri Aurobindo wrote,
All truth supraphysical or physical must be founded not on mental belief alone, but on experience,—but in each case experience must be of the kind, physical, subliminal or spiritual, which is appropriate to the order of the truths into which we are empowered to enter; their validity and significance must be scrutinised, but according to their own law and by a consciousness which can enter into them and not according to the law of another domain or by a consciousness which is capable only of truths of another order; so alone can we be sure of our steps and enlarge firmly our sphere of knowledge. [LD 804]
So, what do we do if we believe that there are truths yet inaccessible to our consciousness or experience, and if we are in need of such a truth? All we can do is trust someone we believe to be capable not only of knowing the truth we seek but also of rendering it intelligible to us, without dumbing it down further than required by our present ignorance (in the “technical” sense of avidya).
Lipton, too, emphasizes “how much we human beings are meaning-hungry creatures,” adding that this “is radically true for survivors of war, nuclear or conventional, or other extreme trauma. For any such meaning to be convincing it must be based in factual truth.” Indeed, yet this is but the necessary minimum required for the elimination of factual falsehoods. Nor will it help to claim that everything that happens is for the best. Sri Aurobindo again:
All that happens [to a person] is for the best is true only if we see with the cosmic view that takes in past and future development which is aided by ill fortune, as well as good fortune, by danger, death, suffering and calamity, as well as by happiness, success and victory. It is not true if it means that only things happen which are fortunate or obviously good for the person in the human sense. [LY4, 626]
For anyone lacking this cosmic view, the wanted therapeutic meaning can only spring from a faith that goes beyond mere belief, or from someone or something capable of inspiring such a faith. By its calm certainty, such a faith is readily distinguished from a purely mental belief, let alone the convictions of a fanatic.
Let’s talk some more about factual truth.
One of the most incontrovertible factual truths is that experience contains regularities. Since some materialists manage to deny it (or else use the terms “consciousness” and “experience” in ways that exclude what they really mean), this factual truth is not completely inconvertible. As Cicero remarked as long ago as 44 BCE, “it is impossible to say anything so absurd that it has not been said by some philosopher” (nihil tam absurde dici potest quod non dicatur ab aliquo philosophorum).
As far as physics is concerned, there are two kinds of regularity: deterministic correlations between events, which can be used to make exact predictions, and statistical correlations. The latter are themselves of two kinds. If information necessary for making exact predictions is in principle available but not used, the correlations are of the classical-statistical kind. If the totality of in principle available information is insufficient for making exact predictions, the correlations are of the quantum-mechanical kind.
In addition to regularities, experience contains objects. Differently put, full-fledged objects (rather than sense-impressions which somehow cohere) are internal to experience. Even though they are internal to experience, they are experienced as external. And apart from experiencing them as external, we spontaneously take them to be causally responsible for being experienced, as Peter Strawson has made clear (see this post).
Materialists — the classical variety, who believe in self-existent objects rather than in an independently existing wave function — need to explain how such objects come to be experienced. Here is the story as told by Hilary Putnam2:
The light strikes the object (say, a sweater), and is reflected to my eye. There is an image on the retina…. There are resultant nerve impulses…. There are events in the brain, some of which we understand thanks to the work of Hubel and Wiesel, David Marr, and others. And then—this is the mysterious part—there is somehow a “sense datum” or a “raw feel.”
Whereafter Putnam exclaims: “This is an explanation?” If the sweater, the eye, and the brain (despite being experienced as external and as causally responsible for being experienced) are internal to experience, no such “explanation” is required. The question no longer is: Here is a material world; how can some of the objects it contains be conscious of some of the objects it contains? Instead, the question is: Here is a Reality which is distinct both from us as subjects and from the objects we perceive; how is the world we experience and how are we (both as subjects and as objects in this world) related to that Reality?
The gulf which (to the classical materialist) yawns between patterns of electrochemical pulses in a brain and conscious experience, or between the firing of C-fibers and the experience of pain, is known as the “explanatory gap.” Nobody knows how it can be bridged. “Why pain emerges when c-fibers are excited will forever remain a mystery,” Jaewon Kim wrote.3 This explanatory gap is fictitious, an unsolvable mystery of our own making. The real explanatory gap exists between the aforesaid unknown Reality and the experiential reality which encompasses both perceiving subjects and perceived objects.
How can we know this unknown Reality exists? Apart from faith or supraphysical experience, there are many things that are impervious to explanation within the subjective-objective matrix of ordinary human experience. Just consider the fact that our actions are constrained by the intersubjectively verifiable regularities we observe. We cannot cause physical effects by mere acts of imagination. This largely accounts for the solidity and inertia of the physical world, which to the unsophisticated materialist “proves” the independent reality of matter. Samuel Johnson famously thought to have refuted the idealism of George Berkeley by kicking a stone. Be that as it may; what he did not establish was the truth of materialism.
In several previous posts I have discussed how, in an Aurobindonian or Vedantic framework of thought, the following can be understood: why the regularities we observe — in particular the laws of physics — have the form that they do (answer: in order to set the stage for the Adventure of Evolution); why our actions are constrained by these regularities to the extent they are (answer: for evolution to be a true adventure); and why an organ made up of a hundred billion neurons had to evolve (answer: because of said constraints).
While the laws of physics constrain our actions, we are at the same time empowered by them. Our ability to use them creatively is the driving force behind all technological achievements. In this sense, our acts of imagination do cause physical effects. One must imagine an airplane before one can set out to construct one.
But now another fictitious mystery looms up. Materialists routinely challenge dualists to explain how a physically irreducible mind can produce physical effects. A classical Greek myth tells of Daedalus, a skilled craftsman, who constructs for himself and his son Icarus a pair of wings made of feathers and wax. Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook contains numerous designs for flying machines, including the ornithopter and the aerial screw, a precursor to the modern helicopter. And on December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers flew the world's first successful motor-operated airplane. This is how mind acts on matter. For another example, I decide to raise my arm and up it goes. Duh!
Neither the mystery of conscious experience nor the mystery of conscious volition can be explained by something that happens in a brain, considered as an object belonging to an independently existing material world. Nor do these fictitious mysteries need explaining. The causal efficacy of volition is as much a fact of human experience as the deep-seated impression that experienced objects are responsible for being experienced. Here, too, the real mystery resides not within human experience but at the boundary between human experience and the unknown Reality that encompasses and transcends human experience. (For an Aurobindonian take on free will see this post.)
To the materialist, life is a complex interaction of physical and chemical processes, a state of being characterized by the ability to grow, reproduce, maintain homeostasis, respond to stimuli, and adapt to the environment. Consciousness, thoughts, and emotions are emergent properties of the physical brain. In other words, matter is never really alive or really conscious; it is forever really and truly dead and unconscious. This gospel of death is the very antithesis to what humanity needs to thrive or even to survive. It is the Lie that spawns a million lies. And what is death? It is itself a lie. As Savitri says to Death in Sri Aurobindo’s epic poem Savitri,
I bow not to thee, O huge mask of death,
Black lie of night to the cowed soul of man,
Unreal, inescapable end of things,
Thou grim jest played with the immortal spirit.
On August 19, 1966, while translating a passage from Savitri, the Mother halts after reading the following line spoken by Death —
Think not to plant on earth the living Truth
— and she says: “That’s just what I am doing, Sir.”
Turning to the disciple with a smile, she asks: “Do you think he hears me?”
After reading Death’s succeeding lines —
Or make of Matter’s world the home of God;
Truth comes not there but only the thought of Truth,
God is not there but only the name of God.
— she concludes: “Basically, according to Sri Aurobindo, materialistic thought is the gospel of death.”
Related:
Two characters in Joseph Conrad’s “An Outcast of the Islands.”
H. Putnam, The Many Faces of Realism (Open Court, 1987).
J. Kim, Philosophy of Mind, p. 229 (Westview Press, 1996).
You can see it only in flashes or small intuitions, because the entire world that surrounds us and fills us on the inside has been put together with the explicit intention of making you point in the opposite direction. But still brief and precious as they are, they will never leave you. They are real in a way nothing else is.
Ruskin and Mumford characterised raw materialism and their purveyors as the production of “illth”. Waste not your time, they will never be able to either extract or see Delight from it. Let’s give them an example instead, this they can understand.
Take for instance: “they didn’t have a written history”, which is an immediate absurdity, and of course false, causing among other things a physical effect. Correct statement: “they didn’t need a written history (i.e. they were Such)”, still false obviously, but shedding a bit of light on something relevant. Something we cannot see, even less understand, but it helps one get free of its shackles, and that’s the entire point. A standpoint is not an ideology nor a worldview, it’s a centre. From there all sorts of different worlds spin up, a different way to approach realty in its entirety. And this is from just one single sentence. The biggest lie of our era is “Everything is the same, there are no standpoints”, no, nothing is the same; different, incommensurable universes lie behind each and every possibility, behind every act. History is not so much the world of being as the world of what could have been. Every act of history is in its essence accidental. The further you go back in time, the further history develops, the more you advance the more it contracts. (The symbolic is just an attempt at the realisation of history in time, it is a way to capture its force un-mediated, in the act proper.)
Everything existed so we could exist. We, who are the absolute negation to Them. Modern corollary: We don’t exist.
We deny them being in order ourselves to be. This world exalts the major, is unaware of the minor, and obviously heads to the conclusion.
Thank you as always.
“Value, in the doctrine of progress, was reduced to a time-calculation: value was in fact movement in time. To be old-fashioned or to be ‘out of date’ was to lack value. Progress was the equivalent in history of mechanical motion through space: it was after beholding a thundering railroad train that Tennyson exclaimed, with exquisite aptness, ‘Let the great world spin forever down the ringing grooves of change.’ The machine was displacing every other source of value partly because the machine was by its nature the most progressive element in the new economy.
What remained valid in the notion of progress were two things that had no essential connection with human improvement. First: the fact of life, with its birth, development, renewal, decay, which one might generalize, in such a fashion as to include the whole universe, as the fact of change, motion, transformation of energy. [See yours and The Mother statement] Second: the social fact of accumulation: that is the tendency to augment and conserve those parts of the social heritage which lend themselves to transmission through time. [See SJ Gould on biological change]. No society can escape the fact of change or evade the duty of selective accumulation. Unfortunately change and accumulation work in both directions: energies may be dissipated, institutions may decay, and societies may pile up evils and burdens as well as goods and benefits. To assume that a later point in development necessarily brings a higher kind of society is merely to confuse the neutral quality of complexity or maturity with improvement. To assume that a later point in time necessarily carries a greater accumulation of values is to forget the recurrent facts of barbarism and degradation.
Unlike the organic patterns of movement through space and time, the cycle of growth and decay, the balanced motion of the dancer, the statement and return of the musical composition, progress was motion toward infinity, motion without completion or end, motion for motion's sake. One could not have too much progress; it could not come too rapidly; it could not spread too widely; and it could not destroy the ‘unprogressive’ elements in society too swiftly and ruthlessly: for progress was a good in itself independent of direction or end. In the name of progress, the limited but balanced economy of the Hindu village, with its local potter, its local spinners and weavers, its local smith, was overthrown for the sake of providing a market for the potteries of the Five Towns and the textiles of Manchester and the superfluous hardware of Birmingham. The result was impoverished villages in India, hideous and destitute towns in England, and a great wastage in tonnage and manpower in plying the oceans between: but at all events a victory for progress.
Life was judged by the extent to which it ministered to progress, progress was not judged by the extent to which it ministered to life. The last possibility would have been fatal to admit: it would have transported the problem from the cosmic plane to a human one. What paleotect dared ask himself whether labor-saving, money- grubbing, power-acquiring, space-annihilating, thing-producing devices were in fact producing an equivalent expansion and enrichment of life? That question would have been the ultimate heresy. The men who asked it, the Ruskins, the Nietzsches, the Melvilles, were in fact treated as heretics and cast out of this society: in more than one case, they were condemned to an exacerbating solitude that reached the limit of madness.
Other civilizations with a smaller output of power and a larger expenditure of time had equalled and possibly surpassed the paleotechnic period in real efficiency.
What did they seek? A few simple things not to be found between the railroad terminal and the factory: plain animal self-respect, color in the outer environment and emotional depth in the inner landscape, a life lived for its own values, instead of a life on the make.
[The alternative] can have no other end than an impotent victory: the extinction of both sides together, or the suicide of the successful nation at the very moment that it has finished slaughtering its victim.”
(Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization, 1934, IV. 9, p.184-211)
Yes. Scientism is now the dominant mythology of western civilization. It's a bankrupt worldview that eliminates any hope of genuine transcendence. But a society that turns away from a spiritual path of light - the very existence of such light even being denied and ridiculed - is one which by definition has turned to darkness. In this culture, Death and the Void of Eternal Oblivion are the sole ultimate reality. All is without purpose or meaning beyond that which can be grasped for transient gratification by soul-sick, isolated egos.
Like the Aztecs of old, Death assumes the form of a fearsome deity: an obsessive object of fascination and fear, a voracious monster gorging on conscious beings, a terrible god to be worshipped, appeased and vicariously kept at arms length via a constant stream of graphic depictions of violence, apocalyptic chaos and annihilation.