Reification: The Repression and Quantification of Mystery in Modern Culture Part 2

The various ways our culture encourages us to reduce the mysterious and the inexpressible to the rational and the explainable

A Note: I am currently on a break until September. During the break free subscribers will receive one re-post of an archived post every three weeks and paid subscribers will receive two every three weeks. I have selected these because I am confident they are rich enough that a second read will be valuable.

If you would like to read a little bit about my break and how it is related to my creative process feel free to check out my latest original post, “Reflections on the Creative Process” which is pinned to my home page. Also please feel free to explore the archives during this time. All archived posts that were originally free are still free. I hope you find something valuable here weather you are reading again or for the first time. I look forward to actively re-engaging with you all in September.

This is a follow up to last week’s post. I recommend reading that first. You can find it here:

https://recontextualize.substack.com/p/reification-the-suppression-and-quantification-1dd

Though I will do enough recap such that this can also stand alone if you would like to read it on its own.

Georg Luckas along with a group of like minded thinkers known as the Critical Theorists pointed out the way a capitalist society not only structures our economic and professional lives but also encourages us to value ourselves, our time, and human life itself in a particular way. Luckas claimed that capitalism, often subconsciously, encourages us to adopt a moral system that values our own life primarily based on the way it produces quantifiable value in the marketplace. Luckas refers to this process as a reification, claiming that it encourages us to measure and quantify that which many alternative moral, religious, and ethical system claim to be the qualitative measure of value itself, human life. 

In my previous post I suggested that this process of reducing the worth of human life to its market value is one manifestation of a more fundamental cultural trend which takes anything that has a primarily felt, intuitive, and immediate value and reinterprets it as only having worth if it can fit into a larger, measurable system that can be grasped by the intellect. This more general conception of reification takes something that is mysterious yet meaningful and valuable in many people’s experiences and attempts to demystify it by making it easily graspable by conceptual, linear thinking. In this post I want to point to three  other cultural domains in which I see this process of reification occurring to substantiate the claim that this process of demystification is a dominant element of our cultural spirit; first in the realm of metaphysics, second interpersonal relationships, and third medicine.