"With the rise of late of all kinds of “idealish” spirituality (not a typo: I am introducing this as technical term), I find myself almost longing for a counter-revolutionary rise of erudite, BS-melting eliminative materialists. I appreciate thinkers like, eg, Ray Brassier for really going there in books like Nihil Unbound.

I feel like idealish spirituality is too inflated a response to the threat of eliminative materialism. Both positions are too extreme. I was reminded while reading this of Rudolf Steiner’s comments to wealthy Stuttgart theosophists interested in his threefolding proposal that they ought never to forget they are able to sit comfortably warm at home meditating on lofty divine ideas like brotherly love only because of the coal mined by children in England that fires their furnace.

I just don’t follow the logic of the mini-manifesto below. They group together idealism and panpsychism in a way that I know for sure would annoy Bernardo Kastrup. They remind us that industrial civilization is causing a mass extinction and is once again on the verge of world war, only to offer the idealish solution: we must realize that the material world is an illusion and only consciousness is real.

I call this manifesto “idealish” not because I don’t have deep respect for the history of idealist philosophy. I just think a careful study of the Platonic lineage up to and including the so-called German Idealists leads in some surprising directions not particularly well characterized by the claim that “everything is consciousness.

We cannot spiritually bypass our way out of the threat of ecological collapse and nuclear war. The Earth is dying, and we are killing her, with no sign of slowing. If anything, we need to fall more in love with matter.

I do agree with the authors...though, that we are our own biggest enemy in all of this. Something has gone wrong with the psyche. I worry that seeking ideologically extreme escape hatches into nihilistic materialism or analytic idealism is just a symptom of psychological imbalance. We need to hold the middle”.

”Evil is real. But I think most Christians have a confused idea of Satan. To say we are our own worst enemy is to acknowledge sin. But I also find it important to acknowledge the role of the adversaries Lucifer and Ahriman in tempting us off the Christic path. Satan is a confusion of two adversaries: Lucifer tempts us into exaggerated spiritual pride and wants us to withdraw from the Earth and social responsibilities, while Ahriman tempts us into exaggerated materialism and greed, wanting us to reject the idea of spirit all together to embrace technological control as the only value. Christ mediates between these two extremes, allowing us to integrate spirit and material existence”.

Mathew Segall