"There are very important and practical issues raised by following this alternative route which says, let's look to material conditions, to the systems of production, to the needs that human beings have, and to competing alternative solutions to the satisfaction of those needs"
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Harris is doing something deceptively radical here: he’s proposing a demotion. Not of people, exactly, but of the stories people tell about themselves. “Alternative route” is the tell. He’s positioning cultural materialism as a deliberate exit ramp from the then-dominant habit in anthropology of treating beliefs, symbols, and ideals as the main engines of history. Instead, he insists we start with “material conditions” and “systems of production” - the hard constraints of energy, ecology, technology, labor, and the logistics of feeding and organizing populations.
The intent is practical in the most polemical sense: if you want explanations that travel across cases and don’t collapse into “they believe this because they believe this,” you track incentives and bottlenecks. The subtext is a quiet impatience with interpretive accounts that sound humane but explain little. By framing needs as concrete and solutions as “competing,” Harris smuggles in a kind of cultural natural selection: societies aren’t just meaning-making machines; they’re problem-solving systems under pressure, and the solutions that scale tend to reproduce themselves.
Context matters. Harris wrote in an era when social science was fighting over whether culture should be read like a text or analyzed like an infrastructure. His wording borrows the authority of science (“very important and practical”) while offering an almost democratic promise: start with needs, and you can compare outcomes without exoticizing anyone. It’s also a warning. If you ignore production, you risk mistaking decoration for structure - and confusing moral satisfaction with explanatory power.
The intent is practical in the most polemical sense: if you want explanations that travel across cases and don’t collapse into “they believe this because they believe this,” you track incentives and bottlenecks. The subtext is a quiet impatience with interpretive accounts that sound humane but explain little. By framing needs as concrete and solutions as “competing,” Harris smuggles in a kind of cultural natural selection: societies aren’t just meaning-making machines; they’re problem-solving systems under pressure, and the solutions that scale tend to reproduce themselves.
Context matters. Harris wrote in an era when social science was fighting over whether culture should be read like a text or analyzed like an infrastructure. His wording borrows the authority of science (“very important and practical”) while offering an almost democratic promise: start with needs, and you can compare outcomes without exoticizing anyone. It’s also a warning. If you ignore production, you risk mistaking decoration for structure - and confusing moral satisfaction with explanatory power.
Quote Details
| Topic | Justice |
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