I think it is a mistake to focus on solely the material, for the human soul is something beyond what is concretely material. Here is where I delve into not an observation of contradiction – for contradictions hold their own inherent values, especially when examined during a process of dialectics – but an observation of hypocrisy. And hypocrisies cannot help but materialize when the way in which we conduct our lives, the way in which religion and the economy functions, are all based upon the material.
We live in an age in which human value can be quantified in the material. Statistics are utilized to determine successes and failures, to record changes in temperature or how many hours a day we allot to being economically productive. And for purposes of things such as physical human health, mathematical mediums such as statistics can be helpful. But they can also be reductive when they are all we have time to look at to make a decision as to whether or not a human life has value. A dip in the number of human casualties in times of war can signal a victory to some, or to see a higher casualty rate of Iraqis to Americans, soldiers to children – statistics can be used to reframe tragedies as small victories.
Who’s going to win the presidency? Let’s conduct a poll. A poll lists a number, that number makes the immaterial – a candidate’s popularity – material. The empirical “evidence” of a candidate’s popularity can then have the power to sway potential voters one way or another. Statistics. Facts.
Is that all that we are? Cells? An amalgamation of chemical compounds? Certainly these things are helpful in learning how to find ways to eradicate sickness and disease. But is it wise to reduce human beings to the sum of their concretely material parts?
This is not to say, “We’re humans. We’re special.”
What I am saying is that we are human beings and we are more than a fleshly sack of blood and bones – if we were just that, it would be so much easier to kill and maim our neighbors. We are a living dialectic, a constantly changing assemblage of material and abstract entities. And there is a relationship between the physical body, the soul, the intellect and the human consciousness.
The problem in trusting only the material is that we learn to value only the material.
There are times when I wonder if we amaze what we know as God(s) just as much as the scope and span of the universe as well as all its earthly affects and effects continue to surprise us.
On a more earthly note, as suspicious as I am of White people sometimes, there will be an occasion or two when I will happen upon one that I find transcends my standards for befriending someone who’s White. And it’s not just because they are politicized or have taken a class in ethnic studies. On the contrary, it is the way in which they choose to interact with me on a very human level – and I’m not talking in a “we all bleed blood” sense. I suppose the reason why it’s become this way, this suspicion is because so many of us are conditioned by the structures of White supremacy and capital consumption to INTERACT with each other on a very material basis.
What I’m talking about is the materiality of difference, bodily difference. Race is a social construction that is also a social fact that is governed by physical difference. And it’s when the interaction is more of a transaction of differences based upon the materiality of things, I tend to get cagey, suspicious. A mechanism of defense, I suppose. “Wow, your eyes are so chinky!” or “I’ve gone to China before” or “I love lumpia” – these are transactions/interactions based upon the material.
But I think that we are more than just material beings. Not to say we must transcend our material forms completely, but understand that there is a relationship between the two – but when such a large part of what makes up the human entity is ignored, neglected or reduced, something suffers. An illness of sorts that overtakes the spirit and can rewire the mind to think in terms of only the empirical. In only the material. Is it no wonder we are so materialistic?
This is why identity politics concerns me. It is resistant to the materiality of difference while it adheres to its very logic. Weird, isn’t it? That, and it can only take us so far. Especially when it is based upon the materiality of difference.
I suppose my concerns or questions at the moment center around the connections between the materiality of the body to the abstract power of the soul, intelligent processes and human consciousness.
Again, I don’t claim to know anything, these are just thoughts, lofty-yet-sincere as they are.
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