Guest post: Against the spiritual turn
Guest post by Josh Spokes.
Material analysis is the only political analysis that produces results. Religion, spirituality, the ever-proliferating variety of “identities” and “kinds of souls” and all the rest—-it’s vapor.
None of that will get you equal pay as a woman. None of it will make men stop raping and beating women, and raping and beating men they perceive to be feminine. None of it will give you a reliable roadmap on how to extricate yourself from exploitative situations.
The material world is the real world. It’s the only world that exists. We ignore the material world, and we deny our embodied, wholly material human existence, at our own cost and peril.
Thank you, Josh, for this statement of clear thinking. What a relief.
There is a long history of despising the material world, and valuing the spiritual world. It’s one of the driving forces behind most religious thought. Somehow the material world is corrupt or mean or low or degraded. This is also one of the driving forces behind the destruction of the environment. The world itself is a low, sinful place, and not worthy of being protected. Some people try to get past this by imbuing the environment and the other living entities with spirituality, souls, and the like, but the real answer is to get past despising the only world we can be certain we will ever know.
Stop looking to stars or gods or souls or “identities” to save us, and realize that we are made of flesh, spinning on a rock around a star, and that is what it’s about. Making it the best we can.
There may be another way to say it but none better.
Absolutely.