SAMPLING REALITY

I call myself a materialist, because I believe that the universe contains only matter and energy, though in more forms than we have yet discovered (as hinted by Dark Matter and Dark Energy) — I don't believe in supernatural forces or a divine maker. I find it a sufficient source of wonder that life could arise from matter/energy, and even more wonderful that some living things have acquired consciousness. For me this wonder occupies the place that faith in God serves for many other people. (I wouldn't be too offended to be accused of pantheism in Spinoza's sense — but that really amounts to just calling matter/energy "God" as a sop to supernaturalists). I was brought up during that period of optimism following WWII when people briefly believed we were heading towards a more rational, humanistic and secular world, as epitomised by the founding of the United Nations. This turned out to be an illusion.

My materialism is quite clear about the distinction between those things that actually exist in the world of matter/energy and those things that are products of our collective imagination. God, as conceived in almost all religions, belongs in the latter category. Even so the current debates between so-called "New Atheists" and those with religious convictions leave me quite cold (and somewhat despairing) because of the mutual incomprehension and dogmatism of both sides, and the lack of any conclusion or progress in the argument. It seems to me that very few atheists really understand the need to believe in a God, while still fewer religious believers can accept that he is redundant.

There are various degrees of superstition among religious believers, the least bad deploying ancient myths as metaphorical explanations for the actual forces of nature and the contingencies of life. If you just cringed at the mention of myth, it's as well to remember that science too only works through metaphor: the "electron" is just a name for an entity we cannot see or touch, whose ultimate nature still lies beyond us. The difference is that science constantly submits its metaphors to improvement in the light of experimental evidence, so that we continually learn more about the nature of the electron.

The worst sorts of religion — precisely those on the increase today — invest a superstitious faith in the literal and unchangeable truth of certain ancient texts. Worse still the term "materialism" has been hijacked by the religious, as well as by New Age "spiritual" types, as a term of abuse, meaning a crass, shallow, consumerism.This travesty of its meaning has passed into popular usage.

The Left has little reason for complacency in this respect, because the tragic experiences of Soviet and Chinese communism and their attempts to impose a vulgar materialism as state philosophy made matters (pun intended) very much worse, and as a result ever since the 1960s many Left theoreticians lapsed into various forms of frank idealism, disguised behind sophisticated arguments that claim descent from Marx and Freud.

Deconstructionist schools that dominate academic criticism in many disciplines believe they are uncovering the historical and economic roots that shape our ideas, but have actually lost contact with matter almost entirely in favour of "knowledge", inadvertently elevated to the status of a substance. This vanishing trick is not more apparent thanks to an obscurantist and cacophonous jargon which, to quote the late Tony Judt, results from badly translating the terminology of German Idealism into French and then badly translating the result back into English.

Any truly progressive politics must take an unshakeable interest in understanding the world of matter — which includes the human mind. This doesn’t mean worshipping science, but does mean keeping abreast of science's latest findings in a critical spirit, rather than dismissing science (and sometimes even the possibility of truth) as socially-constructed ideology.

We need an invigorated and expanded materialism which understands that we only have access to the world of matter through our senses and consciousness, so that all our experience is manufactured (and some of it distorted) by imagination. Imagined objects like "God", once passed into other minds may exert as much force on the world as material objects. We have to re-build the old, dogmatic materialism by resolving the centuries-old philosophical clash between realism and idealism, and that’s now possible by incorporating new knowledge that the 20th century bequeathed to us about the workings of the human brain, mind and emotional system — and most of all about the nature of information.

Information is a separate ontological category missing from the old materialism, the ‘stuff’ that perception and mind operate on. It doesn't ‘exist’ in the way a table or chair exists, but is the missing layer for want of which idealists and materialists endlessly argue to no avail. A new synthesis of information theory and neuroscience is what I mean by a New Materialism, and it’s only possible by adopting a new ontology, the outlines of which I briefly sketch in my book Sampling Reality.,,