Materialism

Today in a very interesting NYTimes article, David Brooks discusses an article called, "“C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem,” by Michael Ward. Brooks comments that he has often looked longingly at this article on his desk as he has incessantly written concerning the presidential campaigns. He has felt thus because for him, the article offered an escape from the tunnel-like atmosphere of incessant campaign coverage into the mystical world of medieval thought. He says, "There’s something about obsessing about a campaign — or probably a legal case or a business deal — that doesn’t exactly arouse the imaginative faculties." "We tend to see economics and politics as the source of human motives, and then explain spirituality as their byproduct — as Barack Obama tried artlessly to do in San Francisco the other week. But in the Middle Ages, faith came first. The symbols, processions and services were vividly alive."

Brooks goes on to point out that in a world of business, politics, blackberries, and high speed internet, it's nice to stop for a moment and imagine that the our modern empty, black, and unfeeling universe is actually filled with, "creatures, symbols, and tales."

Though he finishes a bit weak with a kind of plea for more imagination in our technological and scientific world, his journey to the conclusion is well worth a second look. I agree that with the expansion of science, both in the areas of physics and biology, and in the area of economics and politics, we have tried to explain everything in terms of science. This is the legacy of materialism and the industrial revolution, and I will say with Schopenhauer that, "materialism is the philosophy of the subject who forgets to take into account himself."

Brooks writes, "The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it “all fact and no meaning.”" Materialism attempts to do just that, make everything fact. Lewis made no attempt to discredit the developments in the world of science, but what he did try and do was point out that if materialism is true and everything is just fact, life has no meaning.

In that case I believe we will all find ourselves in the position of Mr. Ramsey from Virgina Woolf's To The Lighthouse:
"It was his fate, his peculiarity, whether he wished it or not, to come out thus on a spit of land which the sea is slowly eating away, and there to stand, like a desolate sea bird, alone....and so to stand on his little ledge facing the dark of human ignorance, how we know nothing and the sea eats away the ground we stand on."

We all search for significance, for meaning beyond mere facts. Might that be because we were all imbued from the beginning with a desire that nothing on this earth can satisfy?