[tmbchr]™

Earthly Materialism



Via Schumacher College, I found an article by John Seed on ecopsychology, which offers an excellent connection point of ideas:

We feel intense dis-ease and longing, yet everything we do to try to assuage these feelings only makes things worse. Unconscious that it is reconnection with the Earth that we yearn for, a host of displacement activities arise. We feel a pervasive emptiness and spend our lives trying to fill the gaping wound with all manner of “stuff”. We have to dig up and chop down the Earth to make and power all the hair-driers and microwave ovens and electric toothbrushes with which we try, unsuccessfully, to fill the void.

It’s not really all these material “goods” that we want however, but a certain psychological state that we imagine will follow. It never does of course, and no amount of “stuff” brings us peace.

I love this idea that what we are trying to do when we are materialistic is that we are trying to be in contact with the earth, with the physical realm which spawned and sustains us. It adds a wonderful element of optimism into materialism and consumerism, two areas which just seem like an unsolvable blight - and it also suggests a way out of those traps.

Thinking more about this, it also makes me think a little about refined versus natural drugs. Cocaine, for instance, comes from the coca plant, heroin from opium, and THC from marijuana. The industrially refined products made from plants tend to be more powerful on the one hand (because of their concentration), but also far more destructive and addictive (although I’m not sure about THC, as I’ve not heard much about that drug’s addictive qualities. By the same thinking, it would only make sense then that when we take other things out of the earth and refine them, that we make them both more potent but also more addictive as well.

, , , , , , , ,





5 Reader Responses

  1. Gyrus Says:
    October 9th, 2006 at 2:49 pm

    There’s the interesting counter-example of Wasson taking Sandoz psilocybin pills to Maria Sabina, the curandera in Mexico who first gave him mushrooms. She reportedly said, “The spirit of the mushroom is in the little pills.”

    But then, we’re talking addiction here, and while some people get tangled up with psychedelics, they’re just not in the same category for this argument as coke and heroin (THC is different again, I think). Stories like the one about Sabina and the psilocybin pills are useful to counter any dogma or knee-jerk dismissals of modern life; but the evidence for many of our problems being to do with our forgetting of traditional knowledge about nature, and our accelerating development of artifice to fill the gaps, it just keeps mounting up.

    Optimism about materialism? I don’t think what our culture calls materialism is actually all about matter. Alan Watts said, “No modern city looks as if it were made by people who love material.” Our materialism is a curious application of abstract mental models to the material world.

    I think I get your point, though - consumerism does have elements of a kind of blind groping, a peripheral awareness we’re reaching for something we’ve lost. Hopefully we can bring this fully into awareness and solve the actual problem before we trash the material world!

  2. David Says:
    October 9th, 2006 at 4:16 pm

    I like my electric toothbrush.

    A lot.

    And my cell phone.

    But no, I do feel that when I am obsessional about getting my latest “Most Fabulous Object In The Universe” ™ that I am probably way off in my consciousness.

    Life should be appreciated for what it is, which is perversely made difficult by the way we are.

  3. Tim Boucher Says:
    October 9th, 2006 at 10:35 pm

    Yeah, that Alan Watts quote is great. I think it is in The Wisdom of Insecurity - which is an awesome book.

    Here’s also a fairly relevant piece I wrote a while back on over-turning the negative side of consumerism using itself:

    http://www.timboucher.com/journal/2005/05/29/radical-consumerism/

  4. alistair Says:
    October 10th, 2006 at 10:07 pm

    i love technology as a way of becoming reconnected with the tribe………….and my earth-toned walls in my new apartment/offices……..
    and my new guitar amp. a vintage `70s ampeg tube amp. this thing is so organic and living that it virtually breathes.
    some do materialism beautifully and some externalise thier retentive fears exquisitely.
    gaudi vs. mondrian?

  5. Dan Says:
    October 13th, 2006 at 1:11 am

    I don’t know if you guys have read The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, but she argues a similar point, but puts all our strange habits down to our unsatisfied need for maternal Oneness & support that wasn’t fulfilled in our civilised upbringings.

    It’s maybe my favourite book around at the moment, and the only book that brought me to tears.



SURROUND YOURSELF WITH STRENGTH.