[ba-unrev-talk] version of a note to a conservative capitalist friend: On materialism
I was just thinking that the problem with capitalism is not materialism, but
rather not seeing there to be any real meaning in material. A "better" materialist,
truer to material nature, would love it more, treat it "royally," would
know that its meaning is all the warm, sweet, rich, "under the sun"
life ever to be known everlasting character of my--and our--lives together
(may maha-buddha protect and encourage us).
This view of material is of course nothing new. See, for example Alan Watts'
many discussions of this matter of matter in such works as Does it Matter? This is It, etc.)
This kind of thinking/feeling is clearly as old as the hills, older perhaps even than
authentic philosophy, art and religion. or the psychology that seeks to heal, etc.
The point is, we squander the riches. Would that we were better capitalists, truer
materialists, in love with matter, Mater, mother, mother earth--this one
"go round" that each of us has in eternity, this sexy wrestling with
the tripartite bodyofbeing. (It naturally helps to have faith in God and evolution:
see Peirce's "A Neglected Argument for the Reality of God" if you think science
in any way necessarily argues against the first of the just mentioned Realities]
Of course, another form of this is Peirce's evolutionary love where there
are, famously, two other Universes to love in quasi-continuity with the material one.
I mean, the possible, and the living/intelligible, yielding three Universes of
Experience.
[I say "quasi-continuity" as I entertain for a moment Kelly A. Parker's idea, expressed
in The Continuity of Peirce's Thought, that the material is a realm "extra-semiotic entities,"
"of dyadic existence," see Parker, 221.]
Gary
PS Incidentally, I would imagine that an authentic materialist would prefer
the "wages of peace," solutions promoting peace over those leading to war
Wage Peace. (Both war and peace are wagers; peaceful approaches to problems
just seem to me to be "better bets."]