Arlo stated to Ant, August 22nd:
Platt has nothing whatsoever to offer except ad nauseuam rehashing of tired
one-liners like "leftist loony" and "radical left Marxist fringe". He
offers nothing to the dialogue except inane polarizing ideology that serves
nothing, certainly not the topics as were being discussed.
Platt then asked August 22nd:
Maybe you two professors, instead of commiserating with one another about
that awful, file, despicable, inane, stupid, nauseating, polarizing Platt,
could address the issue raised by Pirsig in Lila, namely:
"Phaedrus remembered a conversation in the early sixties with a University
of Chicago faculty member who was moving out of the Woodlawn neighborhood
next to the university. He was moving because criminal blacks had moved in
and it had become too dangerous to live there. Phaedrus had said he didn't
think moving out was any solution."
"The professor had blown up at him. 'What you don't know!' he had said.
'We've tried everything! We've tried workshops, study groups, councils.
We've spent years in this. If there's anything we've missed we don't know
what it is. Everything has failed' "
---cut in the text here--- (not mentioned by Platt)
"Phaedrus now thought that part of the professor's paralysis was a
commitment to the twentieth-century intellectual doctrines in which his
university has had a prominent roll." (Lila, 24)
So tell us. What intellectual doctrines have changed in the university to
break the professor's paralysis? I'm sure not only me but SA would like to
know.
Ant McWatt comments:
The counter-culture of the 1960s happened. The rights of blacks, women,
gays and other "minorities" have changed for the better in the United States
(though there is still a long way to go). That's why you now have both a
woman _and_ a black man planning to stand for the leadership of the Democrat
party while in 1961 such a circumstance would have been unthinkable.
The professor that Pirsig mentioned hadn't tried "everything." All the
well-meaning program/mes the professor tried were relatively superficial as
the US in the early 1960s was a far more racist society at an institutional
level than it is now. It requires change at a fundamental level (where the
colour of one's skin becomes meaningless at the social level) to ensure a
black criminal can't play the "racism" card at an intellectual level when
tackled by the police and other social authorities.
As Pirsig confirms in the next part of Chapter 24:
Part of the paralysis probably came from the fact that the criminals were
black. If it had been a group of trash whites moving into the neighborhood,
robbing and raping and killing, the response would have been much fiercer,
but when whites denounced blacks for robbing and raping and killing they
left themselves open to the charge of racism. In the atmosphere of public
opinion of that time no intellectual dared to open himself to the charge of
being a racist. Just the thought of it shut him up tight. Paralysis.
.
_________________________________________________________________
Got a favourite clothes shop, bar or restaurant? Share your local knowledge
http://www.backofmyhand.com
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/
