Hi Spiritual (if I may call you that?)
On 26 Oct. you wrote:
> What do you mean by "its outlook"?
This STARTS with our disagreement, but I mean what value level
a culture is at, like the Western World is intellect-focussed,
having democracy, an independent judicial system, free press
(everything that LILA lists as intellectual patterns) as highest
good. This in contrast to a social value culture that sees these
things as a threat to social stability, regarding holy scriptures as
the highest arbiter and that a secular state leaving religion to the
individual is evil.
>From this it sounds as if the levels are some external
political/cultural systems that we may adopt or not, but we ARE
all levels (value has us) and if intellect is insufficient the social
kicks in. The 11.september attacks was one such event that
intellect could not cope with and the Americans turned social i.e:
emotional, patriotically, (hateful too I guess) but intellect returned,
USA did not turn into a dictatorship. critical voices sounded and
now Bush will (possibly) be removed.
[Bo]
> > If so ancient mythologies were "intellectual" and that's patently
> > wrong, that era was social VALUE through and through.
Spiritual:
> This has been a hang-up during moq discussions. I'm not hung-up
> on this issue, and apparently your not hung-up on the issue either,
> meaning, we both have confident perspectives on the intellectual-social
> distinction. Where I see the intellectual pattern in ancient cultures is
> those people that came up with the myths. Those ancient folks that
> were creative under their own accord used their noggin'. Now, the
> folks that followed what the aristocrats, astronomers, and shamans,
> etc... had to say about the world in a more complete socialization
> process and mimicking behaviors (role-modeling, etc...), these folks
> where valuing, socially, what others came up with and they didn't
> intellectualize or debate the programs, they just saw these programs as
> what they did. It was their society/culture. I would say the contarians
> of, for example, some Amerindian cultures, where brujo enough,
> intellectual enough to not follow social values completely. They didn't
> have teachers that much. They thought their way through more often.
> Please, please I pray, don't take this as an individual v. collective
> where individual is intellectual and collective is social. What I'm
> saying here is that cultures have contarians. These people go against
> the grain, but I see the culture allowing these contarians to play out
> their roles in a certain way. Culture is still influencing the kinds of
> contarians, so, these individuals are never strictly individuals
> separated from society doing whatever they want without culture having
> a say.
This is material for several arm-length posts and you admittedly
have some Pirsig backing, but somehow it goes against the MOQ
grain. The static hierarchy rose in time, there was a time when
inorganic values was all there were (NB. The biological level may
have made it at some distant planet, but that's irrelevant) then an
epoch when biology ruled and consequently one when social
experience was "leading edge". The latter necessarily included
human beings with language and as intelligent as ourselves, but
if their ideas are seen as intellect all goes haywire. Only later did
the intellectual level emerge and IMO the description of SOM in
ZAMM fits like the proverbial hand and glove.
I pick this from yours above:
> Where I see the intellectual pattern in ancient cultures is those
> people that came up with the myths. Those ancient folks that were
> creative under their own accord used their noggin'.
IMO this Is something different, namely "intelligence" and I think
Pirsig went over it too lightly, for example in LILA (page
The intellect's evolutionary purpose has never been to discover an
ultimate meaning of the universe. That is a relatively recent fad.
Its historical purpose has been to help a society find food, detect
danger, and defeat enemies. It can do this well or poorly, depending
on the concepts it invents for this purpose.
Concepts are language and not per se intellect (to see concepts
as different from reality is) It's clearly intelligence he speaks
about, because it's not only society members that needs help to
find food, biological life is "hungry" too and we know that animals
can be very smart and inventive, learning from experience,
using tools ...etc. Consquently "intelligence" is a biological
pattern.
> I'm trying to point out that the levels don't exclusively fight against
> each other. That would seem to be chaotic. Some cooperation does
> exist. The previous level is the foundation of the level this previous
> level supports. I do notice the conflict, as well. I'm saying it's
> not all conflict though.
Remember that the level context is only "visible" from the meta-
level of MOQ, the levels are blind to this, that's why the MOQ
may be such a revolution. I keep returning to one aspect of the
the intellect vs society struggle, namely "western values vs
islam". It's not that the muslims are less intelligent, but social
value is dominant in their region and the islamists fights for status
quo because the social level sees intellect as evil.
> Notice the point in the comedy. Do you really hold yourself as
> being on the 'high ground' or 'authority' of what the moq is all about?
I know I sound megalomaniac, but the MOQ is revolution or
nothing at all. When I read ZAMM for the first time (1978) I was
(as Leonard Cohen sings "oppressed by the figures of beauty")
oppressed by SOM. All attempts to break its strictures were
spited. IMO the "spiritual" (New Age) movement is solidly inside
its premises. With Pirsig I suddenly saw the escape route he
envisaged: SOM was a metaphysics (in a far wider sense than
the Aristotelian ones, had in fact created the notion of a
subjective theory different from reality) that had emerged in time
and consequently replacable by a more comprehensive
metaphysics. The proto-moq looked promising, but with LILA the
final MOQ had the weaknesses of an intellect not clearly SOM,
but more like intelligence or SOM's "mind" .. or something that
no-one to this day knows what is.
Bo
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