Why It's Hard to Talk To Scientific Materialists About Spirituality

Generally I don't, but sometimes I do.

I’m sick today and am having a hard time focusing, so I thought I’d write down a few points that I think about a lot, on the topic of discussing spirituality with scientific materialists. I have thought about this topic so much that I can write this post while highly distracted. :)

I’m motivated to write this for two reasons:

A. I often ponder the Pitfalls Lying In Store for people who get into spirituality and/or energy work and/or the occult, or whatever. (Some people call this material “woo.”) One of the pitfalls is that, if you go far enough down the rabbit hole, then you may experience periods where it’s way harder to have intimate conversations with people who aren’t on the same page. This is often more emotionally challenging than people think it will be in advance. If you are studying woo stuff, it’s worth knowing that this can happen, and what it can be like when it happens.

B. When I tell scientific materialists I don’t want to talk about woo, they sometimes want to know why. So, once I finish this post, I will have a convenient link I can send these folks when they ask this question.

N.B.: The phrase “scientific materialist” is generally used to mean “someone who doesn’t believe in spirituality, religion, energy work, or anything woo, and who does believe in science.” Some people don’t like this phrase, but in my experience it’s the most common phrase for this category of person, so that’s why I use it. And just to be clear, I’m not saying conversations with scientific materialists are useless. Some of my favorite people are scientific materialists, like the person who recommended the textbook Consciousness: An Introduction by Susan Blackmore. That textbook is a serious academic summary of consciousness research that is respectful of most woo phenomena, and it does a good job, so I now recommend it to anyone interested in this topic, whether they believe in woo or not.

So yeah, these conversations can sometimes yield unusual insight but there are, simultaneously, good reasons not to go there. Generally, I just don’t get into in-depth conversations about spirituality with scientific materialists. To some extent, the risks are the same as any relationship that involves a trusting conversation with other people, but woo stuff is especially tricky. To wit:

1. Scientific materialists generally express a lack of respect or outright hostility to woo stuff, and some will weaponize honest disclosures. Many materialists seem to think it’s fine if they are relentlessly mean-spirited and combative about spirituality. At the least, this can be exhausting. In extreme cases, it can get nasty and backstabby, which is risky in a culture like ours where woo stuff is stigmatized.

Example: Once upon a time, I had a close relationship with a materialist who insisted that I talk about woo with him, at length. I didn’t want to talk about it at first, but he eventually convinced me, and we proceeded to converge on a shared vocabulary — or at least, we converged on a vocabulary that we used mutually. At the time, I thought that we had grown closer to understanding each other.

Later, we had a falling out, at which point he used out-of-context screenshots of texts and emails to make me look “crazy” to other people, sometimes in sensitive environments. (This was most effective with his fellow materialists, because many scientific materialists seem to enjoy sitting around discussing the “craziness” of spiritual people.) What made his actions all the more frustrating was that, since I trusted him, it never occurred to me that our intimate conversations would turn into this bizarre kompromat. So I allowed weird metaphors and flights of fancy to persist between us that I wouldn’t have let fly in a less trusted context, which made his screenshots easier for him to weaponize later. Fortunately, I don’t think his usage of this material worked as intended on most of the people he tried it on, so there’s that. But the fact that he did this was enough to make me feel that it may never again be worth going to that level of effort to communicate with a materialist who expresses hostility to this topic.

2. It is generally extremely hard to communicate about woo experience, even when people share good intentions; so even in the best-case scenario, it can lead to mutual alienation. A lot of the time, mystical or spiritual experiences are just plain hard to describe. This means that trying to describe them can end with both people feeling confused and frustrated, even if they truly are operating in good faith. Worse, one person can conclude the other is deliberately trying to hide something. 

Example: A good friend who is a materialist told me, a couple years back, that they felt I was actively trying to keep my weird spiritual stuff from them. (Specifically, they suggested that I was trying to preserve my sense of exclusivity or specialness by communicating gnomically about mystical practices and states.) However, this was after I had tried to describe my experience as clearly as I could, using the simplest language available to me. I wasn’t trying to hold anything back from my conversations with this friend, yet even my heartfelt attempts at clear language and authentic communication came across as impenetrably mystical. So it felt like the very attempt to include my friend in my life, by talking about this thing that’s important to me, created distance between us.

3. Many scientific materialists are expressing a paradigm that’s both limited and predictable, leading to conversations that are repetitive and boring. As a teenager, I was an atheist; in my late teens, I took psychedelics for the first time, which converted me into an agnostic, though not exactly a “believer;” then, in my early thirties, I had an experience that showed what it’s like to suddenly start believing in God. This range of experiences means that I generally can encapsulate a scientific materialist mindset better than most people expect me to, because it used to be my baseline as well. So, generally, I can anticipate the arguments that scientific materialists will make.

Examples of conversations I’ve had over and over again: “Have you considered X, Y, or Z cognitive bias and the role it plays in your spiritual practice, such as confirmation bias?” (Yes.) “If woo stuff is real then why can’t it be replicated in randomized controlled trials?” (I don’t know; however, I suspect the answer is that subjectivity is mechanistically important for the operation of woo stuff. As a side note, I’ll point out that plenty of science can’t be replicated in RCTs, either, given the replication crisis and all.) “Since you believe in God and magic and miracles, don’t you also believe in [my hobbyhorse], and don’t you think that’s terrible?” (Please don’t assume what I believe if you don’t know me very well.) “Given that your beliefs seem to be due to your experiences, can you explain why I haven’t had the experiences that would make me believe the same things you believe?” (That’s a big question. I don’t know the answer to it.)

To summarize: When I can expect the conversation to be repetitive and boring and also to carry the risks stated in reasons 1 and 2, that doesn’t make me inclined to engage. My ancestors fought for religious freedom in America, and a wonderful thing about that freedom is that I have the right to ignore most kinds of inquisition. (The book Occult America, by Mitch Horowitz, contains many interesting historical notes about how that freedom has worked for different woo movements through this great country’s history.) I’m not saying I never do it. But I guess I would hope for a scientific materialist to convincingly express respectful and positive intentions while asking for perspectives on this stuff from people like me.

Special Option 4. To know, to will, to dare, to be silent. This phrase is widely attributed to Eliphas Lévi, an occultist from the 1800s; a random blog I found while Googling the phrase contains a decent summary. It’s a phrase that reveals new meanings over time — the “be silent” part in particular. I feel that there are good times to talk about this stuff, but reality seems to contain a lot of feints about how, where, and when.