[Krimel] > Just a word on "scientism". This seems to be a word, if not invented by > certainly co-opted by the romantics and the religious right. It is > rather > like the Pee Wee move that Arlo rants against. Romantics like dmb and > religious fundamentalists want to say, sure we have assumptions (faith) > but > so do you. Sure we have values but so do you. Sure we have core beliefs > but > so do you. Nanny nanny boo boo.
Krimel plays the victim card . . ..boo hoo. > I would say at least with regards to the "values" of science that they > are > among our highest and best. Science values the pursuit of "truth". > Science > values knowledge and sharing of knowledge freely. It values integrity > and > honesty. It values rigor and logic and questioning the status quo. It also values SOM doctrine, heedless of its harmful effect on the human spirit . . . as Pirsig explains: "Everyone seemed to be guided by an "objective," "scientific" view of life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved material body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge physically, and therefore no two people can ever really communicate except in the mode of ship's radio operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and thinks like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals. "Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian "virtue" ever was. That streetcar ride with Lila so long ago. That was the feeling. There was no way he could ever get to Lila or understand her and no way she could ever understand him because all this intellect and its relationships and products and contrivances intervened. They had lost some of their realness. They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE PARADISE PARADISE but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself-and from each other. (Lila, 22) 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/
