Pirsig wrote: Communism and socialism, programs for intellectual control of society, were confronted by the reactionary forces of fascism, a program for the social control of intellect.
Craigerb replied: International socialism/national socialism--not a lot to choose from. dmb says: Craig's comment is a fine example of the kind of ideological distortions I was just complaining about. Pirsig has made a clear and simple statement contrasting intellectual level "isms" and social level "isms" using concrete historical examples. By referring to fascism as "national socialism" he has distorted and confused Pirsig's simple point, as if that label accurately characterized Hitler, Franco and Mussolini, the founder of fascism. By that logic the People's Republic of China is run by the Republican party. By that logic, the choice between FDR's New Deal and Hitler's NAZI policies doesn't give us "a lot to choose from". One saved the Western Democracies and the other murdered tens of millions, but hey, why quibble over little details like that, eh? See, this is what keeps us from getting anywhere. Pirsig's explanations about the difference between social and intellectual values are in large part centered around the historical conflict between these various "isms" but with nonsense like this going on we can never have an intelligent conversation about the differences between them. I guess that's bound to happen when we're talking about values, ranking values. By definition, this is what people care about and fight about. Wars have been fought over it and these political conflicts continue up to this moment.... dmb said: ...the New Deal is classic American liberalism and the conservative movement - along with the boys from the Chicago school of ecomonics - has been taking it apart bit by bit for decades. Craig replied: Thankfully. The challenge for us at MD is to present the intellectual backing for the 2 systems & to evaluate which has the higher value. dmb says: Well, you can probably defend fascism intellectually (if you can overcome the moral qualms) but that would only mean your defense is intellectual. The thing you'd be defending would still be a glorification of social authority. And if money is a measure of social quality, which is what Pirsig says, then capitalism and the so-called "free market" is an ideology that rejects intellectual control of social level values. And this is only consistent with fascism as it was understood by its founder, who said, "Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power". I mean, if one understands the differences between the various ideologies discussed by Pirsig then the difference between the two top static levels is quite clear. But let me move to another example, this time from the end of chapter 21 of LILA. The stuff in brackets is my commentary but the rest is Pirsig.... Phaedrus thought the metaphysics of substance [SOM] fails to illuminate the gulf between ourselves and Victorians because it regards both society AND intellect as possessions of biology. ...In a substance metaphysics, consequently, the distinction between society ad intellect is sort of like a distinction between what's in the right pocket and what's in the left pocket of biological man. In a value metaphysics, on the other hand, society and intellect are patterns of value, They're real. They're independent. They're not properties of "man" any more than cats are the property of catfood or a tree is a property of soil. ...This is true of intellect and society. Intellect has its own patterns and goals that are as independent of society as society is independent of biology. [My little method of asking, "what does it serve" hinges on this idea of distinctly different goals.] A value metaphysics makes it possible to see that there's a conflict between intellect and society that's just as fierce as the conflict between society and biology or the conflict between biology and death. Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it our, and that is the key to an understanding of both the Victorians and the twentieth century. What distinguishes the patterns of values called Victorian from the post-World War I period that followed it is, according to the MOQ, a cataclysmic shift in levels of static value: an earthquake in values, an earthquake of such enormous consequence that we are still stunned by it, so stunned that we haven't yet figured out what has happened to us. The advent of both democratic and communistic socialism and the fascist reaction to them has been the consequence of this earthquake. ...the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. [Pirsig later points out that the present is a period o f neo-Victorians, a slipping back to the last static latch.] What held the Victorian patterns together was a social code, not an intellectual one. They called it morals, but really it was just a social code. As a code it was just like their ornamental cast-iron furniture: expensive looking, cheaply made, brittle, cold, and uncomfortable. The new culture that has emerged is the first in history to believe that patterns of society must be subordinate to patterns of intellect. ...If one realizes that the essence of the Victorian value patterns was an elevation of society above everything else, then all sorts of things fall into place. ...Victorians repressed the truth whenever it seemed socially unacceptable, just as they repressed thoughts about the powdery horse manure. ...With Victorian spirits atrophied and their minds hemmed in by social restraints, all avenues to any quality other than social quality were closed. And so this social base which had no intellectual meaning a nd no biological purpose slowly and helplessly drifted toward its own stupid self-destruction: toward the senseless murder of millions of its own children on the battlefields of World War I. dmb continues: Chapter 21 ends there with the "senseless murder of millions" and the stuff I already quoted about FDR's democratic socialism and Hitler's fascism comes from the first pages of the next chapter. And what is this intellectualism that the Victorians found so ungraceful and which Hitler hated so vehemently? Its not a mystery at all. "Suddenly, before the old Victorian's eyes, a whole new social caste, a caste of intellectual Brahmins, was being created ABOVE their own military and economic castes. ...And so, from the idea that society is man's highest achievement, the twentieth century moved to the idea that intellect is man's highest achievement. Within the academic world everything was blooming. University enrollments zoomed. The Ph.D. was on its way to becoming the ultimate social status symbol. Money poured in for education in a flood the academic world had never seen. New academic fields were expanding into new undreamed-of territories at a breathless pace,..." Now think about all this in terms of today's conservatives, in terms of what conservative MOQers say in this forum. Do they not generally support the "military and economic castes"? Don't they often express resentment toward the academic world, toward any kind of socialism? Don't they generally dispute global warming, the theory of evolution, and attack criticisms of war and capitalism as if they were criticism of goodness and freedom itself? I mean, if you don't see how Pirsig's descriptions work to explain the conflicts we continually have in this forum on this topic, then Jeez, I really don't know what else I could add to make it any more obvious. As you can probably tell, I'm very frustrated by this apparently unwillingness to look at this issue through the lens of "isms". Yes, people get passionate and that can complicate matters but this conflict of "isms" is the richest and most detailed way to get at the conflict between levels. Those are the examples Pirsig chooses and that's how it goes down in the real world. Politics is not a distraction from the topic. Quite the oppostie. It is the topic. So it seems awfully foolish to try to avoid it. People not only call each other unflattering names, the kill each other over this stuff. Let's not pretend its supposed to be pretty or comforting or polite, okay, because that would just be more Victorian bullshit. Thanks. dmb _________________________________________________________________ Keep your kids safer online with Windows Live Family Safety. http://www.windowslive.com/family_safety/overview.html?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_family_safety_072008 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/
