[Krimel]to Platt: No, we always live and breathe in the context of others. We are the product of our culture and culture provides the context and the raw material for every advancement made by every individual. The advance of any individual is not an advance at all unless it is appreciated and adopted by others. An advancement only has meaning in the context of culture.
Andre: Hi Krimel, if we always live and breathe in the context of others no change will ever be possible. I happen to live and breathe in a society at present where people are forced to 'live and breathe in the context of others'. (it is at times suffocating!) [Krimel] I don't see how it follows that living in a social context means that change is not possible. Change is variations on themes, modifying and extending existing knowledge. Societies like species and knowledge go through the process of evolution. I would suggest that the success of a society can be measured in terms of the amount of force required to secure stability. If everyone has to be "forced" to act in certain ways that is inefficient and corrosive. [Andre] How to explain a Gautama Buddha, Lao Tsu, Leonardo Di Vinci, Michael Angelo, Newton, Jesus, Bach, Beethoven, Rachmaninov,van Gogh, Drake, Callas, Proust, Durrell, Einstein, King, Lennon, and many others. Their genius was an opennes to DQ,and doing something with this, each within their own fields. Of course you are correct when you say that somewhere along the line their 'products' will have to be appreciated 'by others'. But this isn't really the point. Point is that any advance is usually apprehended by one individual only. It is the starting point. If it is conceived to be 'better' by enough 'others' then it will be adopted. [Krimel] In any society people operate within a certain range of behavior. Like nearly any measurement taken on a population you will find a normal distribution of everything from height, to income to intelligence to creativity. Certain individuals will always excel just as some will fail. The point of a society is to affect the shape of that Gaussian distribution. For Platt and Ham and to a large extent Craig society has almost no right to impose on the individual. Platt and Craig especially have argued that taxation is theft for example. Others myself included have argued that society supports its individual members, providing them with opportunity, creating and maintaining public infrastructure and laying down the rules that reduce uncertainty in social interactions. Pirsig mentions Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture in Lila. He borrows her account of the Zuni brujo completely from her. Benedict's whole point is that cultures have personalities or rather that individual cultures tend to favor certain personality types and people with those personalities succeed better within those cultures. This is entirely about the normal distribution of specific individual traits within a particular culture. I saw another example of this recently in the work of Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist studying the stress response. He collected blood samples from a troop of baboons over a period of years. He noted that the alpha males of the troops were aggressive and violent and imbued the troop with a kind of totalitarian culture and that members of the troop were highly stressed. One year when he arrived to collect samples he found that the troop had been stricken with a disease and most of them had died. As the population rebuilt itself over a period of years a different kind of culture emerged that was more cooperative and supportive of the individual members and far less stressful. Furthermore the troop now resisted the attempts of aggressive members to assert themselves into dominant roles. The point I guess is that the role of individuals within cultures and of cultures toward individuals is highly variable and complex. It is not a matter of all or none. But Platt almost never seems willing to acknowledge this so in responding to him I have a tendency to overstate a case that might otherwise seem obvious. [Andre] Neither of these worked in isolation but they created something from all the foregoing, plus their own apprehension of DQ and created something new and original. [Krimel] I should also point out that the names you list fall on one tail of the Gaussian curve. Bundy, Bush, Gacy, Hitler, Reagan, Stalin, Genghis Kahn, Pol Pot and Idi Amin fall on the opposite tail and they too followed DQ as they understood it. [Andre] In the same way did weak Dynamic subatomic forces seize carbon as their primary vehicle. Here was an opportunity to create variety out of 'life and breath in the context of others' (bear with me, this is pulling your analogy to the sub-atomic level). And what a variety has been chosen.(Lila p149-50). It 'worked' because it was better...simple and easy and that's why it survived and 'we' are here. [Krimel] I think it is a gross error to talk about DQ as a force. It is a description of how things act and respond but it is not a causal agent. It is an adjective not a noun. The example you give comes from what I consider to be Pirsig's unforgivably poor account of evolution. Things don't survive because they are "better." Things don't work because they are "better". They are "better" because they work. Things that don't work, don't survive. What persists is what is left, which is "better" than nothing. 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/
