dmb said to Matt: Right, to the extent that we have a living, functioning mythology at all, it is the church of reason, scientific materialism and SOM.
DM replied: ...with this, and very crucially, we have political failure, a failure of democracy and engagement. It seems to me that dualism, SOM, secularism, objectivism, materialism, support our current political stagnation, a stagnation that allows current elites to maintain the status quo. The repression of progressive politics I feel is tied up with objectivism and the way education does not address values and practical real world problem solving and issues (see Nick Maxwell's from Knowledge to Wisdom on this). I think that the secular orthodoxy designed to keep religious power out of education has been adopted to keep values in their entirety out of universities, and hence an engagement with real world problems where you have to take sides. dmb says: Nick Maxwell is an axe-grinding crank and a megalomaniac. And those are just two reason why I like him. His critique of science and his concern with values is similar to Pirsig's. He talks like a mystic too. But there's something a bit odd about the way you put it, DM. You invoked "secularism" twice and capped that off with a conflation of objectivism and "the repression of progressive politics". This gives the impression that you and/or Maxwell are advocating conservative politics and a dose of religiosity as a cure for SOM. >From an American perspective, that is already what we have plenty of and let >me tell you brother it ain't working out. For the current administration, a >big dose of "objectivism" would be a huge improvement. The most obvious objection to your suggestion would consist in simply pointing out that conservatism and religion are just as deeply implicated in SOM and can't be taken seriously as an alternative or a cure. And the reason "secular orthodoxy" keeps religion out of public schools because of what Huston Smith calls "the scandal of particularity", which is a polite way of saying that religious people have a long history of thinking their particular religion is the truest one (or the only true one) and a long history of killing those who think otherwise. The problem is that SOM does not allow us to see that secularism is more moral, more valuable, than these traditional truths. Rorty, for example, thinks that he has no "real" way to defend his liberal secular values so he has to take an ironic stance toward their defense. But, a person can study all the religion they want at the universities and colleges. I took a course in the philosophy of religion last semester and plan to do another one on the psychology of religion next semester. There's a gal in my program whose self-styled major is called "apocalyptic studies" or something like that. Or did I miss your point? Maybe you were just doing a parody of Platt. Or Bush. _________________________________________________________________ E-mail for the greater good. Join the i’m Initiative from Microsoft. http://im.live.com/Messenger/IM/Join/Default.aspx?source=EML_WL_ GreaterGood 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/
