Whenever I first read about what dialectical materialism is I didn't get it because it's like "that's how thinking works, duh. How else would you do it"? I've always thought that way, to the point that I struggle to think any other way. Idealism always made me extremely frustrated and confused and feel like the people using it had suddenly lost their mind. Even as a kid who didn't know what any of these words meant that is how I felt.
I figured out enough as I grew up, but I'm still not completely comfortable around people who think the way most Americans(and Westerners in general) think.
It may not be the dialectical materialism exactly that people I can more closely relate to believe in, but just the fact that they can think coherently, and consistently think coherently. They won't just accept contradictions without figuring out where they meet. If you point out a contradiction they can talk about it, they don't assume you have some special motivation for asking questions and begin searching for said motivation, ignoring what you said in the process.
I have a feeling there is some theory or something somewhere that would give me the vocabulary to talk about this more clearly. I'm struggling to find terms for these concepts.
What's up with that?
You can lead a lib to theory but you can't make them think. It's so frustrating with them and libertarians in my experience. I can introduce them to a point, but their whole ontological framework is a marketplace of coequal ideas they can pick from like cereal boxes. That basic materialist standard of observation isn't something they factor into the rest of their lives as a conscious effort. They're people who reject science or think it's a Marvel film, who hold mutually exclusive religious beliefs, and who blindly watch media that fits into their general bubble. Whatever I've said, it goes on the shelf next to the thing someone wearing glasses told them.
It's a shame because dialectical materialism is the easiest thing to grasp when you see it in technical work or something. I learned dialectics from medicine and animal rehab before I knew it was a political thing. That's driving my car. It's what makes horticulture interesting and ecology even more so. I've tried teaching it in those terms but then they don't cultivate that outward into a broader analysis. Things just aren't fundamentally systems or interdependent to them as every other perspective they're taking in on that issue is trying to mystify it. Teaching them that mystification is bad comes up against their entire core identity and how they think the universe works.
"That basic materialist standard of observation"...
You can blow people's minds just by stating clearly observable facts with almost no analysis. Just the idea that you first try and collect facts to analyze a situation isn't normal to people somehow.
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The downside of being the leftist Cassandra.
Once you know enough that you can actually start talking people through the "path" from "Thing A" all the way through to "Thing Z" you now sound like a tinfoil hat wearing conspiracist.
That too. I really hate how it's lumped with false demystification. Socialists are just hippies or libertarians or drunken uncles with some thoughts on what caused 9/11 despite it being a child's birthday party.
Lazy liberal horseshoe theory strikes again!
Hey can you expand a bit on dialectical materialism and horticulture?
For a plant to thrive, it needs all of its needs met like a human does. It needs to be fully dealienated from nutritional and environmental needs. Any kind of disruption to the broader systems it exists through- its need for water being denied by a drought, its need for sunlight obscured by a competing tree, its need for oxygen deprived by flood and iron by the soil's relationship to hydrogen- will harm or kill it and change those ecosystems as a result of it no longer providing some kind of labour to keep its current state. There's both a fundamental sense of balance there and a constantly evolving one, with the plant and its needs never existing in a static state along with the outside world it depends on. Like the other plants competing for sunlight and nutrition, that plant exists within a broader network of life. Herbivores depend on it and fertilise it, earthworms carve out root space while feeding on the organic matter, specific insects pollinate specific orchids and any disruption to the needs of the insect existing within that ecosystem will erase that species of orchid as a result of it not doing some kind of metabolic labour which continues its relationship. The bee transforms the pollen into the embryo in exchange for the honey that sustains its hive. There's a yin-yang aspect to that interconnectivity and it exists- has to exist- at all levels of interaction between an organism and its environment. As the ecosystem and its balance shift over time, the dialectical relationships based around resource needs and availability along with the social systems those create will make for new plants interacting with new animals in new ways.
My big interests in it are phytopathology where you're finding out what the contradictions are in a plant's needs, integrated pest management where you're directly affecting the organism relationships in the ecosystem, soil ecology where you see the fundamental engines of what enables plant life to exist on top of it, and permaculture where you're creating dealienated ecosystems.
Awesome. I hadn't thought about this before. Thanks for typing it all out, I appreciate it.
https://ia800900.us.archive.org/3/items/TheDialecticalBiologist/Lewontin_-Levins_the_dialectical_biologist.pdf
This book on dialectical scientific philosophy is really good. At least part of the first section is exploring dialectics through evolution.
Thanks I had no idea there was a whole division of the sciences that used dialectics
this is a great post. i'm in a related field and i think about this a lot and it's cool to see it put into words.
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