Quoting david buchanan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Platt said: > Pirsig, I hasten to add, pointed out that modern intellect, in its attempt > to guide society, contains a fatal flaw, namely, an inability to acknowledge > the existence of values. Thus, the "evolutionary leap" has fallen into an > abyss. > > dmb says: > I'd say your reasoning contains a fatal flaw, Platt. And it would bother me > so much if you hadn't already been corrected on this point several dozen > times. By your logic, flaws in social level values should compell us to > embrace the laws of the jungle so that the world is run by rape and pillage. > By your logic, the negative side of the internal combustion engine should > compell us all to return to riding horses. By your logic, we should accept > devolution and return to a monarchical form of government. (Franco, the > Spainish Fascist dictator tried to restore the monarch on his way out in > 1975. The King of England was a big fan of Hitler. Henry Ford was a pen-pal > Hitler.) See, the thing about American reactionaries is that they look very, > very American. Its a sort of hyper-muscular assertion of what would > otherwise be normal social level values and so its hard to get people to be > alarmed about it. Its like trying to get people to be afraid of hot dogs, > apple pie and dear old mom. Its like trying to get people to see that having > a bible-thumping cowboy in the whitehouse is a recipie for disaster. I mean, > just look at the results. These guys are taking a huge dump on the > constitution, on the democratic process, on our rights, our system of checks > and balances, on artists and intellectuals. They've even drawn complaints > from academic journals for their atttepts to interfere with what is allowed > to be published. They've altered scientific reports for political and > financial reasons. Not to mention all the facts they had to ignore in order > to make a case for war with Iraq. Now we're fighting the wrong war, don't > have the resources to fight the actual enemy and everyone on the planet > thinks Americans are as stupid as is Bush. Its a huge disaster. > > And yet there are millions of Platts out there cheering them on. And in this > case we are talking about a flaw that has quite literally been fatal to many > thousands of people. > > But having your input on this point does serve a purpose. It allows us to > see what standard American anti-intellectualism looks like. As a bad > example, you're very good. > > dmb
Hi DMB, Hope you feel better now that you got all that vicious bile out of your system. As for intellect being flawed in its dominance of the social level, your argument is not with me, but with Pirsig: "But having said this, the Metaphysics of Quality goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that bas been appointed to take over society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no objective reality. You can look through a microscope or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a single moral. There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They exist only in your imagination. >From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong because there are no morals, just functions.. Now that intellect was in command of society for the first time in history, was this the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with?" (Lila, 22) ------------------------------------------------- This mail sent through IMP: http://horde.org/imp/ Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
