The spirit material

Crystal and Benji are hitching beside the road. A smooth black sedan stops, and they get in. Nelt turns to them as they accelerate; the car is new-smelling and austere, broken only by a large feather placed on the dash.

Nelt: I'm glad to pick you up! It helps me quash some of my bad karma for driving! (Deprecating laugh, and a wave) Rental car, you know. Had to do it.

(pause, and then an interrupted conversation continues.)

Benji: Yeah, OK, so maybe the RCP was also like a cult. We've had this discussion, and I agree: the way we were forced to spit and polish every word Bob Avakian said, to include three quotes from the holy guru in every article, I mean that's one thing. But that doesn't justify wishy-washy thinking.

Crystal: Look, what I'm saying is that just because a group has screwed-up cult-like behaviors, doesn't mean that everything you learned there is hogwash. You still take a lot from the Maoism you learned in the RCP, right? And that's the way that I still benefit from some of the practices and experiences of oneness and compassion I had with my guru group.

Benji: I'd say I'm at least as much a libertarian communist at this point as a Maoist, and anyway many of the old line struggles need serious rethinking these days. But I get it, and in theory you're right -- I'm sure you had meaningful psychological experiences that can help you be a better person, and all that. I just want to make it clear that I can't seriously consider the idea that spirits and reincarnation and "we're all one and let's love ourselves into world peace" mumbo jumbo are real.

Nelt: Well, why not?

Benji: Not to be simplistic about it, but I think the traditional Marxist view on this is spot on. Religion is pretty generally a kind of narcotic drug that comforts you in the here and now with promises that all will be well, defanging your willingness to do the hard, gritty work of figuring out how to take responsibility for making change in solidarity with others. And when you look at the situation with unblinkered materialist gaze, you can see the real social forces that give rise to all the mystifying rationalizations for the status quo. That's the essence of a properly scientific socialism. You strip away the superstitions -- not just the religious ones, but all the idealisms -- and you can start to see the actual processes of historical development, the better to act upon them.

Nelt: It's interesting that you mention science in this. You know I work in a lab, right? I've been thinking about how much science has changed since the 19th century.

Crystal: Yeah, I've been reading some of the new science, you know, the way quantum conceptions of reality fundamentally disrupt the whole Newtonian worldview, and stuff.

Nelt: What's amazing is how long it's been, and still how little most people's basically Newtonian assumptions have actually caught up.

Benji: Look, I admit that my physics is a bit rusty, but I have talked to some of my scientist friends who get upset at all the New Age appropriation of their work. They seem pretty clear that the basic Newtonian laws are still completely valid at all but the most extreme lengths or timescales.

Nelt: Yeah, that's been the way that generations of scientists have managed the disruption. But it's really no longer defensible. Just in the last few years, there's been all these very rigorous demonstrations that the weirdest quantum behaviors, like entanglement and superposition, can persist over macroscopic distances and times. And now it's moved from provocation to commonplace that photosynthesis itself, the basis of almost all of life, integrates a macroscopic quantum energy transfer by sampling a superposition of eigenstates in a completely warm, wet environment. The core realization is that noise in the environment can actually prolong coherence. Some of the key assumptions and simplifications that make the Newtonian classical world legitimate, simply don't hold in an increasing suite of assemblages. Perhaps especially where life is concerned.

Crystal: You're saying that it's not just at the level of the cosmos itself, the -- whatchacallit? -- Planck-length scale of the quantum foam, at which everything is connected to everything else? But that whole living systems can be entangled with each other?

Benji: You're running away with this! Even if photosynthesis takes advantage of some quantum shortcuts, that doesn't mean that you and I can send mystical images in our dreams half way across the world, or what have you. A world stranger than we may have thought doesn't mean "anything goes"!

Crystal: No, of course. But it does mean that it is no longer -- or no longer should be -- unthinkable for at least some of these kinds of experiences and mysteries that have been lumped together as superstition or the "paranormal" to be legitimate. For forever we have been told "there's just no possible mechanism" and "extraordinary claims require extraordinary -- read impossible -- proof". That's just no longer justified. But really, Nelt, your comment about how much science has changed goes far beyond quantum coherence in avian magnetoreception. It's really about the core patterns of how to understand systems, or that's what I'm thinking.

Nelt: Right, you're talking about chaos theory and complex systems? How so many systems have emergent behaviors that can only be understood in any realistic way by considering the system as a whole, not just the interactions of the parts.

Benji: Hmmm, including social systems? But this is something that I think dialectical materialisms have grasped for a long time. You can't just look at individuals within an economy, as if they're operating in a vacuum the way that many neoclassical economists try to. You have to understand the dialectical processes that operate at the level of the social domain as a whole, and then that helps you understand what conditions the formation and dynamics of any individual depending on their class position or whatnot.

Crystal: But you know, it's not just the Marxists that have seen this better than the vulgar Newtonians. (pondering) I mean, in a sense, isn't this awareness of the need to consider large and complex self-regulating systems as wholes -- isn't this perhaps the meaning of what so many people have called "spirit"? I mean, thinking about it now -- what is the complex self-regulating system that we have the most connection with? Surely it's human consciousness. So the personification of nature spirits, of ethnic pantheons, doesn't this perhaps capture a deep truth that the "break it down into its mechanistic parts" approach really misses?

Benji: This is an interesting approach. It's almost like a kind of materialist understanding of "spirit". But I'm not sure "believers" wouldn't be offended by referring to all these personified Gods and Spirits as just analogies.

Crystal: Well, they're not necessarily "just" analogies. I mean, of course there are all kinds of mistakes and simplifications that people make. A system very different from, and much bigger than, us -- like a forest ecosystem say -- is going to be different in very important ways from a human. But maybe not in the essence of being a complex whole that can't be considered as just its parts.

Nelt: And are you suggesting that they can be communicated with, engaged, like a human?

Crystal: Well, not like a human, of course -- and this is obviously moving beyond anything that you're saying is being "proven" in a scientific context right now. But sure, if we assume that something analagous to the kinds of quantum entanglements you've described may actually allow for humans to somehow "entangle" actions or perceptions between us and other large systems -- then there might be ways to interact with what we're calling "spirits". And if we were going to explore whether and how this may happen, who would we ask? The scientists that have been sure for centuries that the very question is against the rules? Or maybe people that have been a bit more empirical in following their direct experiences.

Benji: You're saying that I should be more respectful of your experiences in that cult of yours. OK, point taken. And I'll follow along with this conjecture of ours, too. OK, let's say this is a novel but powerful interpretation of the idea of spirit. Hell, there's a ton of different kinds of complex systems! There's got to be a whole ton of different kinds of spirit too, yeah?

Nelt: Well, often people talk about small, local spirits, like of trees or lakes; and ancestors; and larger spirits that define major patterns in the world; or celestial bodies; and of course pantheons (or sometimes single deities) that are identified with and perhaps help reproduce particular ethnicities.

Benji: So what would be the gods of our social system?

Crystal: The Empire? Well, Mammon of course!

Benji: Hmmm, that may not completely be a joke. It puts the ideas of commodity fetishism in a new light. I suppose following this along could suggest that perhaps it's not completely an illusion that the objects of our labor and consumption assume an outsize reality.

Nelt: Yes, but those are spirits it is our proper task to dis-spell! And I think that's part of what makes this more than just an interesting hitchhiking chat. I mean, I was having this conversation the other day where we were thinking about ethnicity and race and class, and what it is that really is the core of the Empire that we need to disrupt so that all our fierce antagonistic resistance doesn't just become the fuel of the next cycle of co-optation and exploitation. Maybe this is a fruitful way to think about it.

Benji: What, kill the God of the Empire? Didn't Nietzsche tell us that's already been done?

Crystal: I totally love Nietzsche! I read him every day, savoring the crazy rich impetuous mania he gives us. And yes, he was saying "God is dead" -- but he was describing the ossified, received God of moralizing diktat from on high, that people only "believe" in a kind of conventional way. Isn't this a way of describing the same process as the overthrow of the Titans by the Olympians? Or maybe the way the Roman pantheon gave way to the Christian ascendancy, with Constantine.

Benji: That approach has two main problems. I mean, in modernity there's no explicit new pantheon replacing the old "God". There's something specific about how profoundly disenchanted the modern world is. But more importantly, this is very much the problem of idealism: you're looking at the content of what people think or "believe", the ideas they have, rather than the actual systems that are operating.

Nelt: So you're saying that we have to look for the actual spirits in the material dynamics of the social world, rather than in the content of specific belief systems?

Benji: Yeah, or else we're going to get hoodwinked, the same way people deceive themselves about why they do what they do.

Crystal: So, it's not just the formality of what names the Gods receive, but something deeper down in the "material" conditions-of-spirit that determines, for example, when the old Gods die and the new ones come, and also how profound that change is. And in terms of what it means to "truly" be committed to the revolution, right, maybe it has something to do with what "spirit" or "gods" we're somehow participating in reproducing.

Nelt: And which ones we're against.

Benji: And which ones we're against.

(Silence. The car rises over a hill, and descends.)