Hi Platt
15 February you wrote:
> True enough, but would you not agree that someone (an individual) had
> to be first in putting truth above opinion and starting objectivity on
> the road to becoming the dominant way of thinking?
Bo:
Of course it was human beings who did so, but in a moqish sense the
social level is a human domain and it was the 3rd. LEVEL that
spawned the 4th. not the biological "man". As said to Ron the
individual has existed from times immemorial without transcending the
social reality. Some leverage outside it was needed and in my opinion
the emergence of the SOM fits.
Platt ctd:
> The story of the brujo that Pirsig spends a lot of time on is an
> emblematic case of the individual vs. society -- plus in a later
> chapter he describes the role of individual contrarians who alone are
> responsible for changing static social patterns of conformity.
Bo:
I see your point, but I don't think the Brujo example is about the
intellectual- vs.social level struggle, rather an intra-society shift.In
LILA he says that the said story was crucial in his arriving at the
Dynamic/Static split, he had tried many ways, but finding them "dead
ends".
LILA:
Just as the biological immune system will destroy a life- saving
skin graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia,
so will a cultural immune system fight off a beneficial new kind
of understanding like that of the brujo in Zuñi with the same
kind of vigor it uses to destroy crime.
Here I must object. The way the "cultural immune system" is described
(at other places) it'sintellect's "immune system", but the Zuni tribe was
definitely not "intellectual". What he speaks of here is the SOCIAL
immune system and what the Brujo brought about was SOCIAL
change. OK this you may agree with.
LILA ctd:
It can't distinguish between them. Phædrus recognized that
there's nothing immoral in a culture not being ready to accept
something Dynamic. Static latching is necessary to sustain the
gains the culture has made in the past. The solution is not to
condemn the culture as stupid but to look for those factors that
will make the new information acceptable: the keys. He
thought of this Metaphysics of Quality as a key.
He goes on calling the Zunis (part of a) culture, but here it's clearly
understood in the SOCIAL sense. If the intra-level change are dynamic
- if not THAT is reserved for the inter-level shift? OK I know that Pirsig
sees the biological evolution as a dynamic/static interaction so ....well
let's suspend that question.
Platt ctd:
> What's puzzling is how the word "individual" seems to raise hackles
> when the MOQ itself was created in the fertile brain of an individual
> named Robert Pirsig, not some amorphous, fictional "collective mind."
Yes, Pirsig clearly was a 4th.level Brujo but his intellectual shift was far
more radical than Brujo's social one and here the true intellectual
immune system kicked in, he was declared insane and hospitalized
(the system works from within, he felt mentally ill, that's the trick).
> Pirsig himself is a contrarian of the first order whose ideas go
> completely against the grain of current cultural consensus. In fact,
> the main character in his novel "Lila" is a "loner" like him.
> Celebrating the individual is a major theme of his work.
Still a "culture" can be social-value-dominated (as was the Zuñi
Indians) but it can also be intellect-value-dominated as was the USA of
young Pirsig's days. So his premises were intellect (SOM as I see it)
and it was intellect's immune system that felled him, not the social one.
You know I see his MOQ so incompatible with intellect's S/O pattern
that it spells a level-like shift, but this is outside the scope of this
thread so enough.
Bo
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