On Global Disparities

Watch a segment from the documentary "We" here. In this segment Arundhati Roy, the writer and activist, talks about the ever-widening disparities between the rich and the poor in the world today.

Roy's comments in this segment end at a very insightful point where she says that both socialism and market capitalism are inherently flawed and are bound to fail. Because both are conjured up by the human-mind but they destroy themselves by human nature!

I am reminded here of Shaheed Sadr's profound analysis at the beginning of his book, Our Philosophy (here). Any social system that does not take into account the various dimensions of human nature, including the material and the spiritual; any system that does not have a program for curing the problems in hearts and for developing the good potentials in human souls, and only focuses upon the material factors, is bound to fail - be they the socialist states or the welfare systems anchored in capitalist economies. Similarly, a movement that focuses only on reforming the system, but no concern for reforming and disciplining hearts, can't go very far. Because ego and vices of hearts often lead to internal disputes, competition, factionalization, corruption, and abuse of power. These problems become especially visible once the common enemy is removed from the scene and/or once these movements get hold of power.

Islam is against materialism because materialism causes social injustice and oppression. But also because Islam wants to nurture the inner spirituality and other potential noble qualities in human beings, and materialism ('slavery of this world') takes them in exactly the opposite direction. Often non-religious movements choose to resist materialism because of its consequences on society; that is, they resist materialism for instrumental (means to ends) reasons. Islam, however, places importance on simplicity and modesty because they are valuable in themselves for human perfection. Hence, even if the world becomes full of resources and everyone has more than what he/she needs, Islam would still stress on simplicity and modesty in the lifestyles and pursuits of its followers. With its ideals of human perfection and emphasis on the eternal life in the hereafter, Islam provides a powerful rational and emotional stimulus for individuals to abstain from materialism and channel their self-interest into attaining lofty human ideals and qualities. I would discuss this point further in another post, Inshallah. In addition to the abovementioned text of Shaheed Sadr, you can also refer to Shaheed Mutahhari's following works: "Spiritual Discourses" and "Perfect Man."

Back to Roy's documentary. I highly recommend watching the whole documentary, here. It is a very thoughtful reflection on our state of affairs, at the current juncture of the history of human civilization. The documentary is based on a critically acclaimed speech delivered in 2002 by the award winning author and activist Arundhati Roy. The speech has been turned into a fast paced, musical documentary with the title 'We'. The issues reflected on in 'We' range from sep 11, wars, palestine, and kashmir to corporation, global inequality, and sweatshops, and many others, all thematically connected through a longing for justice for all.

A quote from Arundhati Roy from elsewhere:

“In the midst of putative peace, a writer can, like I did, be unfortunate enough to stumble on a silent war. The trouble is that once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And once you’ve seen it, keeping quiet, saying nothing, becomes as political an act as speaking out.”

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Materialism and Its Discontents

Let's look at materialism at the structural level. By 'structural' I primarily refer to the institutions of politics and economics in the global as well as national contexts. How these structure human relations in society, how they stratify and differentially treat people in different groups - economic classes, racial majorities and minorities, women, elderly, immigrants, and so on.

While reading the wonderful speech by Arundhati Roy which I quote below I could not help but think about the description of 'Dajjal' given in our religious sources. Can't today the Dajjal of New Imperialism, with 'materialism' as its single eye through which it perceives and scrutinizes the world, make the earth heaven for some people and hell for other people? Can't it place mountains of food and resources for people who follow it and deprive others of even a single loaf of bread who do not follow it? Does it not try to lure people with promises of heaven (happiness) and hell (suffering) on earth?

A much argued issue is that of who controls this system? A few multi-national institutions, a few economies of the so-called developed world, or something else? In other words, where do we locate the power and coercion of this materialistic system? The question of power is important because it explains, at least partially, why do people who do not benefit from this system still follow it?

Materialism can be seen in the myriad of practices of global capitalist institutions (corporations, international financial institutions, neoliberal policies) enforced by a global coercion, what Tom Friedman likes to call 'the hidden fist'. See here. Most of world resources are today controlled by a few powers/economies, and in a sense, these powers/economies (try to) determine heaven and hell for people on earth. For example, they can shrink the economies of the Asian Tigers into half almost overnight in 1997 (See Asian Financial Crisis). And yet they can protect the dictatorial and corrupt regimes around the world through military support and economic Aid, no matter how unpopular these regimes may be among their own people.

Scholars find so many parallels between these practices and the pre-21st century colonialism/imperialism that they like to name these practices as manifestations of a 'New Imperialism'.

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Excerpts from Do Turkeys Enjoy Thanksgiving?, a speech delivered by Arundhati Roy on January 16, 2004.

"LAST JANUARY thousands of us from across the world gathered in Porto Allegre in Brazil and declared — reiterated — that "Another World is Possible". A few thousand miles north, in Washington, George Bush and his aides were thinking the same thing.

Our project was the World Social Forum. Theirs — to further what many call The Project for the New American Century.

In the great cities of Europe and America, where a few years ago these things would only have been whispered, now people are openly talking about the good side of Imperialism and the need for a strong Empire to police an unruly world. The new missionaries want order at the cost of justice. Discipline at the cost of dignity. And ascendancy at any price. Occasionally some of us are invited to `debate' the issue on `neutral' platforms provided by the corporate media. Debating Imperialism is a bit like debating the pros and cons of rape. What can we say? That we really miss it?

In any case, New Imperialism is already upon us. It's a remodelled, streamlined version of what we once knew. For the first time in history, a single Empire with an arsenal of weapons that could obliterate the world in an afternoon has complete, unipolar, economic and military hegemony. It uses different weapons to break open different markets. There isn't a country on God's earth that is not caught in the cross hairs of the American cruise missile and the IMF chequebook. Argentina's the model if you want to be the poster-boy of neoliberal capitalism, Iraq if you're the black sheep.

Poor countries that are geo-politically of strategic value to Empire, or have a `market' of any size, or infrastructure that can be privatized, or, god forbid, natural resources of value — oil, gold, diamonds, cobalt, coal — must do as they're told, or become military targets. Those with the greatest reserves of natural wealth are most at risk. Unless they surrender their resources willingly to the corporate machine, civil unrest will be fomented, or war will be waged. In this new age of Empire, when nothing is as it appears to be, executives of concerned companies are allowed to influence foreign policy decisions. The Centre for Public Integrity in Washington found that nine out of the 30 members of the Defence Policy Board of the U.S. Government were connected to companies that were awarded defence contracts for $ 76 billion between 2001 and 2002. George Shultz, former U.S. Secretary of State, was Chairman of the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq. He is also on the Board of Directors of the Bechtel Group. When asked about a conflict of interest, in the case of a war in Iraq he said, " I don't know that Bechtel would particularly benefit from it. But if there's work to be done, Bechtel is the type of company that could do it. But nobody looks at it as something you benefit from." After the war, Bechtel signed a $680 million contract for reconstruction in Iraq.

This brutal blueprint has been used over and over again, across Latin America, Africa, Central and South-East Asia. It has cost millions of lives. It goes without saying that every war Empire wages becomes a Just War. This, in large part, is due to the role of the corporate media. It's important to understand that the corporate media doesn't just support the neo-liberal project. It is the neo-liberal project. This is not a moral position it has chosen to take, it's structural. It's intrinsic to the economics of how the mass media works.

"A government's victims are not only those that it kills and imprisons. Those who are displaced and dispossessed and sentenced to a lifetime of starvation and deprivation must count among them too. Millions of people have been dispossessed by `development' projects. In the past 55 years, Big Dams alone have displaced between 33 million and 55 million people in India. They have no recourse to justice.

In the last two years there has been a series of incidents when police have opened fire on peaceful protestors, most of them Adivasi and Dalit. When it comes to the poor, and in particular Dalit and Adivasi communities, they get killed for encroaching on forest land, and killed when they're trying to protect forest land from encroachments — by dams, mines, steel plants and other `development' projects. In almost every instance in which the police opened fire, the government's strategy has been to say the firing was provoked by an act of violence. Those who have been fired upon are immediately called militants.

Across the country, thousands of innocent people including minors have been arrested under POTA (Prevention of Terrorism Act) and are being held in jail indefinitely and without trial. In the era of the War against Terror, poverty is being slyly conflated with terrorism. In the era of corporate globalisation, poverty is a crime. Protesting against further impoverishment is terrorism. And now, our Supreme Court says that going on strike is a crime. Criticising the court of course is a crime, too. They're sealing the exits.

Like Old Imperialism, New Imperialism too relies for its success on a network of agents — corrupt, local elites who service Empire. We all know the sordid story of Enron in India. The then Maharashtra Government signed a power purchase agreement which gave Enron profits that amounted to sixty per cent of India's entire rural development budget. A single American company was guaranteed a profit equivalent to funds for infrastructural development for about 500 million people!

Unlike in the old days the New Imperialist doesn't need to trudge around the tropics risking malaria or diahorrea or early death. New Imperialism can be conducted on e-mail. The vulgar, hands-on racism of Old Imperialism is outdated. The cornerstone of New Imperialism is New Racism.

"Part of the project of New Racism is New Genocide. In this new era of economic interdependence, New Genocide can be facilitated by economic sanctions. It means creating conditions that lead to mass death without actually going out and killing people. Dennis Halliday, the U.N. humanitarian coordinator in Iraq between '97 and '98 (after which he resigned in disgust), used the term genocide to describe the sanctions in Iraq. In Iraq the sanctions outdid Saddam Hussein's best efforts by claiming more than half a million children's lives.

In the new era, Apartheid as formal policy is antiquated and unnecessary. International instruments of trade and finance oversee a complex system of multilateral trade laws and financial agreements that keep the poor in their Bantustans anyway. Its whole purpose is to institutionalise inequity. Why else would it be that the U.S. taxes a garment made by a Bangladeshi manufacturer 20 times more than it taxes a garment made in the U.K.? Why else would it be that countries that grow 90 per cent of the world's cocoa bean produce only 5 per cent of the world's chocolate? Why else would it be that countries that grow cocoa bean, like the Ivory Coast and Ghana, are taxed out of the market if they try and turn it into chocolate? Why else would it be that rich countries that spend over a billion dollars a day on subsidies to farmers demand that poor countries like India withdraw all agricultural subsidies, including subsidised electricity? Why else would it be that after having been plundered by colonising regimes for more than half a century, former colonies are steeped in debt to those same regimes, and repay them some $ 382 billion a year?

For all these reasons, the derailing of trade agreements at Cancun was crucial for us. Though our governments try and take the credit, we know that it was the result of years of struggle by many millions of people in many, many countries. What Cancun taught us is that in order to inflict real damage and force radical change, it is vital for local resistance movements to make international alliances. From Cancun we learned the importance of globalising resistance.

No individual nation can stand up to the project of Corporate Globalisation on its own. Time and again we have seen that when it comes to the neo-liberal project, the heroes of our times are suddenly diminished. Extraordinary, charismatic men, giants in Opposition, when they seize power and become Heads of State, they become powerless on the global stage. I'm thinking here of President Lula of Brazil. Lula was the hero of the World Social Forum last year. This year he's busy implementing IMF guidelines, reducing pension benefits and purging radicals from the Workers' Party. I'm thinking also of ex-President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela. Within two years of taking office in 1994, his government genuflected with hardly a caveat to the Market God. It instituted a massive programme of privatisation and structural adjustment, which has left millions of people homeless, jobless and without water and electricity.

Why does this happen? There's little point in beating our breasts and feeling betrayed. Lula and Mandela are, by any reckoning, magnificent men. But the moment they cross the floor from the Opposition into Government they become hostage to a spectrum of threats — most malevolent among them the threat of capital flight, which can destroy any government overnight. To imagine that a leader's personal charisma and a c.v. of struggle will dent the Corporate Cartel is to have no understanding of how Capitalism works, or for that matter, how power works. Radical change will not be negotiated by governments; it can only be enforced by people."

Read the full text at The Hindu.

Image: Capital by Viktor Deni (1919)

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Rotten Tomatoes

Below is an example of how materialistic greed can blind people from seeing its grave consequences for the lives of thousands of fellow human beings. Although the below story is an example from the US, this illness of heart, this cancer is by no means limited to this region. We can observe similar examples in our own families and societies.

What we also need to do is to place this story in the context of structure and culture. How are resources distributed in society, on what principles and through what economic mechanisms? Next, what are the ideological underpinnings supporting such mode(s) of resource distribution? Through what institutional and cultural mechanisms does this economic exploitation become possible and justified? Can we imagine alternatives? For example, would making everything 'equal' and building a 'class-less society' solve the problem of injustice, which socialism/communism thought of as the solution, however un-realistic and impractical it was?

Shaheed Sadr argues here that it won't because the root of the problem would still be there. That root lies in the nafs.

"Verily the love of this world is the root-cause of all evils." - The Holy Prophet (peace be upon him and his dear ones).

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New York Times
November 29, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor

Penny Foolish
By Eric Schlosser

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation’s most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Florida’s tomato growers have long faced pressure to reduce operating costs; one way to do that is to keep migrant wages as low as possible. Although some of the pressure has come from increased competition with Mexican growers, most of it has been forcefully applied by the largest purchaser of Florida tomatoes: American fast food chains that want millions of pounds of cheap tomatoes as a garnish for their hamburgers, tacos and salads.

In 2005, Florida tomato pickers gained their first significant pay raise since the late 1970s when Taco Bell ended a consumer boycott by agreeing to pay an extra penny per pound for its tomatoes, with the extra cent going directly to the farm workers. Last April, McDonald’s agreed to a similar arrangement, increasing the wages of its tomato pickers to about 77 cents per bucket. But Burger King, whose headquarters are in Florida, has adamantly refused to pay the extra penny — and its refusal has encouraged tomato growers to cancel the deals already struck with Taco Bell and McDonald’s.

This month the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange, representing 90 percent of the state’s growers, announced that it will not allow any of its members to collect the extra penny for farm workers. Reggie Brown, the executive vice president of the group, described the surcharge for poor migrants as “pretty much near un-American.”

Migrant farm laborers have long been among America’s most impoverished workers. Perhaps 80 percent of the migrants in Florida are illegal immigrants and thus especially vulnerable to abuse. During the past decade, the United States Justice Department has prosecuted half a dozen cases of slavery among farm workers in Florida. Migrants have been driven into debt, forced to work for nothing and kept in chained trailers at night. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers — a farm worker alliance based in Immokalee, Fla. — has done a heroic job improving the lives of migrants in the state, investigating slavery cases and negotiating the penny-per-pound surcharge with fast food chains.

Now the Florida Tomato Growers Exchange has threatened a fine of $100,000 for any grower who accepts an extra penny per pound for migrant wages. The organization claims that such a surcharge would violate “federal and state laws related to antitrust, labor and racketeering.” It has not explained how that extra penny would break those laws; nor has it explained why other surcharges routinely imposed by the growers (for things like higher fuel costs) are perfectly legal.

The prominent role that Burger King has played in rescinding the pay raise offers a spectacle of yuletide greed worthy of Charles Dickens. Burger King has justified its behavior by claiming that it has no control over the labor practices of its suppliers. “Florida growers have a right to run their businesses how they see fit,” a Burger King spokesman told The St. Petersburg Times.

Yet the company has adopted a far more activist approach when the issue is the well-being of livestock. In March, Burger King announced strict new rules on how its meatpacking suppliers should treat chickens and hogs. As for human rights abuses, Burger King has suggested that if the poor farm workers of southern Florida need more money, they should apply for jobs at its restaurants.

Three private equity firms — Bain Capital, the Texas Pacific Group and Goldman Sachs Capital Partners — control most of Burger King’s stock. Last year, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, Lloyd C. Blankfein, earned the largest annual bonus in Wall Street history, and this year he stands to receive an even larger one. Goldman Sachs has served its investors well lately, avoiding the subprime mortgage meltdown and, according to Business Week, doubling the value of its Burger King investment within three years.

Telling Burger King to pay an extra penny for tomatoes and provide a decent wage to migrant workers would hardly bankrupt the company. Indeed, it would cost Burger King only $250,000 a year. At Goldman Sachs, that sort of money shouldn’t be too hard to find. In 2006, the bonuses of the top 12 Goldman Sachs executives exceeded $200 million — more than twice as much money as all of the roughly 10,000 tomato pickers in southern Florida earned that year. Now Mr. Blankfein should find a way to share some of his company’s good fortune with the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

Eric Schlosser is the author of “Fast Food Nation” and “Reefer Madness.”

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MATERIALISM AS ZEITGEIST

What is this 'Matrix', this 'Hegemony' (or ‘dominance without hegemony,’ if you prefer), this 'Totalizing System' of Materialism that I refer to in my previous posts?

The phenomenon of Materialism that I have in mind is the resultant of a particular historical development in the West, which is generally referred to as 'Modernity'. Materialism is one of the defining characteristics of this modernity. Materialism is not just an intellectual mode of thought or a cultural discourse - that's just one component of it. It is rather an all-encompassing phenomenon that functions at the (analytically distinct) levels of structure, culture, and individual instincts, intentions, and actions. Hence, my choice of the broad heuristic terms like 'matrix', 'hegemony', and 'totalizing system'.

Shaheed Mutahhari has given four excellent lectures on the causes of materialistic tendencies in the West (here - I, II, III, IV). Mutahhari makes it clear that these materialistic tendencies are a historical development, and certain political and doctrinal factors led to their rise in the West. That is, it is not just an outcome of a theological or philosophical outlook. Rather, it is a product of multiple causes. This specific history also explains the particular beliefs and attitudes in the West regarding the ‘separation of church and the state’, emphasis on secularism, rational thought, individualism, materialism, and capitalism. Together, these elements constitute the particular 'form' of modernity of the 'West', more specifically, America and Western Europe.

Following Mutahhari's sociological argument, I would add that religion had multiple kinds of roles in the development of materialistic tendencies in the West. Whereas modernity emerged in reaction to the suppresion of free thought and rights by Church dogma, certain religious idioms also played a pioneering role in modernity's construction. The German Sociologist, Max Weber, has in his book "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" compellingly argued that religion (as an institution, as a belief set, and an emotional force, all sociologically speaking) may have been an active force behind the rise of capitalism in the West.

As he describes, in certain Protestant Sects (particularly, Calvinism) materialistic accomplishments and worldly success were seen as a sign of Divine Favor. The pursuit of the materialistic accomplishments was the 'calling' for each person. And it was this calling that provided the impulse for accumulation of wealth and the efficiency and calculation in business dealings. (You see the same rigorous efficiency and calculation in the Protestant missions around the world which generated massive archives of numbers and descriptions for the regions in Africa, Asia, Oceania, and Americas they worked in.) This is of course a very simplified version of Weber's argument. But the point here is that religion, or certain religious understandings, can very well promote materialism in society.

Weber anticipated this development in his description of the “Iron Cage” of the 'disenchanted' future. In this particular book, Weber was mostly concerned about the development of capitalism: how it was shaped by certain religious idioms, and how “the spirit of capitalism” has, in turn, shaped societies and individuals. Weber anticipated an increasingly rationalized (in the Weberian sense) human life in the capitalist society, which he gloomily characterized in terms of an “iron cage” of large-scale, rule-based rational-control. I won’t go into the insightful implications of his argument here, although part of my argument is similar to his: that the force of materialism has become so pervasive today that it is now producing effects similar to that of an “iron cage”.

This is because the religious idioms may have promoted the spirit of materialism, but once materialism became the dominant logic of economics, after the shift from agrarian-feudal to capitalist-market economy, once it became dominant in the cultural discourse and political institutions, it assumed a life of its own, a logic of its own. It became a social force that now shapes the structure, culture, and individual subjectivities, and in turn, gets reproduced in each generation. It has assumed a force so enormous, so pervasive, so encompassing that it has become normal and invisible (see my earlier post, entitled ‘to consume or not to consume).

Hence, I use the German expression ‘Zeitgeist’ to describe it as the ‘spirit’ of our age, which is in a way close to, but not exactly in, the Hegelian sense of alive and active “World Spirit”. I intentionally want to use such a broad conceptual formulation of materialism here. Because, as I argued in an earlier post ('to consume or not to consume'), focusing on particular aspects of materialism, like consumerism, would not help with either understanding or solving the problems resulting from materialism today. Because materialism is so enormous and so pervasive that addressing its particular facets without addressing its deeper linkages to structures, cultures, and human nature would be like attempting to cure the symptoms without addressing the roots. To address that deeper linkages require that we look at materialism in its full enormity, and the solution would require a substantial qualitative transformation into how we engage in our social relations and how we build our societies.

However, it is both beyond the scope of this space and my abilities at the moment to even attempt to do this task. My focus therefore is limited to the sociology of materialism, trying to look at how materialism is affecting our lives and social relations. The questions I examine are: Who are the individuals and institutional actors here, what are their interests and agendas, who is benefitting from its spread, how are people on the receiving end engaging (accomodating or resisting) the increasingly globalized materialism in their lives, coming through capital, media, education, politics and policies?

Implications

One, we need to analyze materialism not just at the individual level where many times the focus is on controlling our low desires (nafsani khawahishaat). But also on the level of cultural discourse (fikri ghulami) where sometimes people may genuinely believe that their religion allows them to live in a certain way. In the case of the 'Protestant Ethic', the religious idioms actually demanded that the followers accumulate wealth in order to be successful in this world and the hereafter. Religion, thus, as an ideology and as an emotional force, can take the followers in different directions depending on the content of the message. Therefore, it is important to analyze the content of the message too. (Analysis of other pertinent issues, like, unity among ourselves, domestic violence, youth issues, also require this multi-level approach in my opinion. As we work on the individual level (on nafsani khawahishaat), we also need to look at the cultural content of already existing discourse in our communities and the conflicting messages we are getting from outside, and compare both of them to the true teachings of Quran and Ahlulbayt. Similarly we also need to look at the structural arrangements in our communities that determine certain roles and possibilities for individuals).

Two, I also want to emphasize that the three levels, the individual, the cultural, and the structural (various institutions), are all independent, causally speaking, and can influence the other levels to promote materialism. A change in the economic structure, for example, like neo-liberal reforms, can also bring about materialism in a society, even though that society may not have gone through the same historically specific experience of Western Modernity. This is the independent causal force that materialism has developed today. The particular history of the Western Modernity has definite implications on the form of materialism in the West, but it may not translate in exactly same terms in other parts of the world; other societies engage with this materialism (corporatization in the name of globalization) in their own ways, informed by their local histories, politics, and cultures.

Three, related to above, we need to understand that materialism cannot affect one level of the society without affecting others. It is not possible for the neo-liberal reforms to take full effect without changing the local culture and subjectivities of the individuals. The changing consumption behavior in Egypt, Turkey, and more recently in Pakistan after the neo-liberal reforms are the examples. Check out “Today’s Consumption in Egypt” by Mona Abaza for an illustration. Materialism in the name of 'development' or 'modernization' thus comes to a society with a multi-level agenda, as also pointed out by Shaheed Baqir Sadr in “Islam and Schools of Economics”. As a side note, I should note here that Shaheed Sadr did not consider “Islamic Economics” to be a “science” of economics; rather, to him it is a set of “ideals” and “values” involving justice and fair distribution of resources that through institutionalization into economy could help building the desired just and tawheedi society. Materialism, likewise, has its own set of values, including an emphasis on competition and profit making which it spreads wherever it goes.

Four, we also need to understand that any movement aimed at resisting this materialism may very well start from changing an individual self. That is, an effective movement would have to first de-construct the hegemony in the mind of the followers, to get a person out of the ‘matrix’ of materialism. So, granted, the first step is always to reform the individual self. But to induce changes in the larger society, the movement would need to have a plan – a plan for all three inter-connected levels that I describe above. This is the question of "What's next?" after we 'reform the individual self'. I would argue that working collectively to build alternative institutions and movements is a required condition of even making that first step to happen for a large number of people, realistically speaking. We need to work on both individual and collective levels simultaneously.

For examples of collective action, we can take ideas from the movements working for saving forests, clean productions, labor rights, conscious-consuming, fair trade, curtailing influence of corporations, movements promoting ideas of sustainability and equity, green-chemistry, renewable energy, and local living economy. The last one is about developing alternative institutions like Consumers' Coops to resist large corporations, to build markets and products that are environment-friendly and honor fair trade and fair wages.

The utility of building such resources and institutions is many-fold. One, it makes a point that alternatives are possible AND practical. Two, it makes it easier for people, who are chained by the current structures, to make opt-out choices. For example, the development and availability of an Islamic finance system would allow people to not depend/become slave of the mainstream commercial banking system. Three, like-minded people can come together to support each other, in living simple life-style, in upbringing 'saleh' (pious) children in this kind of environment. Remember, it takes a village to raise a child.

To follow this approach is not being materialistic (as some would say 'you are depending on the 'worldly' factors'), rather it is about being REALISTIC (see here and here).

Two Clarifications

One, when I refer to the ‘matrix’ of materialism, as experienced today, I do not specifically mean to refer to Christianity or Judaism, which if you look into, are often very anti-materialistic in their teachings. Materialism is a distinct phenomenon which I refer to with the expression 'zeitgeist' and its has its independent dynamics and force.

Two, as I mentioned earlier that although this materialism emerged in the west as part of the modernity, it is not restricted to the West anymore. It is now exported and experienced (albeit in multiple ways of accomodation and resistance) all throughout the world through Hollywood movies, cable tv, neoliberal reforms, corporatization, etc. So when I look at materialism in these posts, I have both the West and the rest of the world in mind.

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Materialism: To Put It Simply

I wanted to share a few points about what I am referring to as ‘materialism’ in these posts. These points should clarify the basis of my arguments.

Let me start with ‘what it is not’. By materialism do I mean a school of philosophy that denies the existence of God? This is the theological sense of materialism that has existed in different forms from as early as 600 BCE. Well, not exactly.

Do I mean to refer to materialistic epistemology (theory of knowledge) in philosophy that considers sense experience to be the primary source (if not the only source) of knowledge? Again, not exactly.

In very simple words, what I have in mind is the materialism that we describe in our daily lives as being ‘worldly’, ‘hedonistic’, ‘slave of the world’, ‘too materialistic’, etc. The focus here is on attitudes and actions, which may have some philosophical-materialistic underpinnings, direct or indirect, or may not have any such at all.

The distinction between the philosophical sense of materialism and the ‘worldly’ materialism in our daily lives is important to keep in mind. Because not all who may be materialistic in the second sense are necessarily materialistic in the first sense. In other words, it won't be always correct to assume that a materialistic person (in the second sense) does not believe in God. On the contrary, a person can very well be a believer in God and at the same time very materialistic. For example, according to official statistics, more than 90% of Americans admit that they believe in some super-natural deity. Yet we know how highly materialistic the American society is.

This materialistic tendency is not limited to Western societies though. One notices that many people feel that after paying their Zakat and Khums they can spend their money however and wherever they desire and in whatever manner they want, all guilt-free. Hence, we see the luxurious lifestyle and the extravagance in weddings and other social occasions. We can probably think of many examples from our own communities.

If I can make a side comment here, in this second tendency of materialism, the religious obligations are treated as a series of DOs and DONOTs, instead of a PROCESS through which the target is to develop a certain subjectivity in people, with certain attitudes and outlook of the world involving taqwa, simplicity, modesty, and responsibility toward the plight of other humans. These ideals and attitudes are supposed to be the natural results of Islamic obligations, such as Fasting and Zakat/Khums.

Anyway, back to the issue of definition. The above description was materialism in simple words. However, so far, the description has mainly focused on the ‘outcome’ or ‘manifestation’ of materialism in our lives, on the individual level of attitudes and actions. In the next post, I want to dwell into a more complex understanding of materialism. Materialism in this understanding is a historical development, and over last few centuries, it has turned into the dominant (if not hegemonic) force of our time. A phenomenon that is becoming so pervasive and encompassing in our societies that we can possibly describe it with the German expression, ‘Zeitgeist’, or “the spirit of the age”.

Image: The Golden Calf - from the Quranic story (also mentioned in biblical sources). I like to think about the Golden Calf as a symbolic representation of all forms of idols that we create around ourselves, the chief among them is the idol of our own 'hawas' or low desires. Because the Quran states that idolatry is not just about worshipping certain statues or physical idols. People can also make their family, children, possessions, pursuit of power and status, their tribes and nations, as their idols or 'ilah'. Consider the following verse for example: "Have you seen him who takes his low desires for his god?" (Quran 25:43). I believe that materialism is the dominant form of idolatry in our age. More on this later, Inshallah.

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