A Good Passage from Karl Ove Knausgaard

I'm onto volume two of Karl Ove Knausgaard's excellent series of autobiographical novels, My Struggle. (As I've said previously, the title's echo of a more famous work seems to be deliberate and ironic.) 

It's really excellent, and I'm surprised I'm enjoying it so much, because I mostly don't like modern literature (to put it mildly). I generally find it pretentious and banal.

Anyway, when volume two begins Knausgaard (a Norwegian) is living in Sweden with his wife and young children, and finds himself musing on the eternal question of heredity vs. environment:

When I was growing up I was taught to look for the explanation of all human qualities, actions and phenomena in the environment in which they originated... Such an attitude can at first sight seem humanistic, inasmuch as it is intimately bound up with the notion that all people are equal, but upon closer examination it could just as well be an expression of a mechanistic attitude to man, who, born empty, allows his life to be shaped by his surroundings.

...Out with spirituality, out with feeling, in with a new materialism, but it never struck them [his parents' generation] that the same attitude could lie behind the demolition of old parts of town to make way for roads and car parks, which naturally the intellectual left opposed, and perhaps it has not been possible to be aware of this until now, when the link between the idea of equality and capitalism, the welfare state and liberalism, Marxist materialism and the consumer society is obvious because the biggest equality creator of all is money, it levels all differences, and if your character and your fate are entities that can be shaped, money is the most natural shaper, and this gives way to the fascinating phenomenon whereby crowds of people assert their individuality and originality by shopping in an identitical way, while those who once ushered all this in with their affirmation of equality, their emphasis on material values and belief in change, are now inveighing against their handiwork, which they believe the enemy created...

Although Knausgaard goes on to add that "like all simple reasoning this is not true either", I think he's pretty much right.

(These kind of political or historical reflections have not been very common in the novel so far, but I anticipate they'll get more frequent as it goes along, from what I've read about it. So far it's been more about the protagonist's individual lived experience.)