[DMB]
As anyone can clearly see, my original post did not say the hippies
were "solely against Victorian social values".
[Arlo]
Of course not. The goal here for Platt was to distort and distract.
Plain and simple. And to do so he had to commit an egregious rhetoric
maneuver, which you pointed out. I'll repost.
[Platt before]
The hippie revolution was a challenge to the defective intellectual
level, not the social level.
[Platt one post later in a reply that included his original statement]
I'll give credit to DMB for admitting and demonstrating with quotes
that the hippie revolution was as much against intellectuals as it
was against social values...
[DMB]
Platt is pretending to correct an error that never existed.
[Arlo]
Well this is just talk-radio, Fox News style rhetoric. What's funny
to me is that he didn't even bother to erase his former words when he
altered his stance but one post later. Normally, I'd expect a good
two post buffer before we'd see this.
[DMB]
To say they're incoherent would be too generous.
[Arlo]
And wrong. Incoherence implies the lack of a strategy. What appears
as "incoherence" is simply the strategy to distort and distract. On
that note, like you, I'm not going to give that more than it deserves
here. There is a high quality dialogue to be had on the thoughts,
views and direction of the early hippie movement, say 1956-1965).
More on this to come...
Now onto your substantive points from before Platt's moronic distractions...
[DMB]
It wouldn't be changing the subject to point out that Pirsig's
diagnosis of the hippie's failure applies to political economics as well.
[Arlo]
Absolutely. Indeed, the Hippie movement was as much as response to
"politics" and "economics" as it was to other social/intellectual
structures, and I'd add to emphasize this, the "modes of production"
as pointed to ZMM. The word "mass" is something the Hippies revolted
against, which John points out in his recent post. Mass production.
Mass consumption. Mass marketing. Mass thinking.
[DMB]
As you may have noticed, I think it applies to the world of the fine
arts as well.
[Arlo]
Agree. I think one thing noticeable about early Hippie thinking (I
like how that sounds) is that they saw Pirsig's re-uniting of "art"
with everyday activity in a way that the larger culture did not
(still does not). We could talk a lot about Andy Warhol, but I think
his "selling out" of art to capitalism was more a statement against
the "divorce" of art from human activity than a glorification of mass
consumption. On a side note, I continue to think that it remains our
biggest challenge to do away with words like "artist" as applied to
certain domains (painting, sculpting, dance, music, etc.) and see the
"artist" from a Pirsigian (and Hippie) view that the label "artist"
should apply to anyone doing high-quality activity (from building
rotisseries, to gardening, to fixing motorcycles, to whatever).
[DMB]
In the next moral revolution, if it is to be successful, there will
be spirituality where there once was hedonism because the confusion
between Dynamic Quality and biological static quality will be gone.
[Arlo]
Agree. I think of the Peyote Experience of Pirsig as a good exemplar.
Here, the activity was "spiritual". It was not hedonistic. Pirsig
called it "de-hallucinating" and I think, given that it acted as a
catalyst for his formuation of the MOQ, he was correct. But there is
a world of difference between this and the over-indulgent "blow your
mind" hedonism that followed. What was missing was a way to
understand that experience in Dynamic terms rather than simply
biological ones. And that (I think John made this point, if I
understood) led to pursuing "trips" not to "de-hallucinate" but to
"feel good".
[DMB]
And I suppose that same negative attitude also applies to industrial,
institutional and commercial architecture, to our factory-like
educational system and scientific materialism in general.
[Arlo]
Yes, for sure. And this is where I think going back to Wolfe, Kenesy,
Kerouac, Lennon, Thompson, and others who rode this early wave is
very valuable.
"The citadel not of Quality, the citadel of form and substance.
Substance in the form of steel sheets and girders, substance in the
form of concrete piers and roads, in the form of brick, of asphalt,
of auto parts, old radios, and rails, dead carcasses of animals that
once grazed the prairies. Form and substance without Quality. That is
the soul of this place. Blind, huge, sinister and inhuman: seen by
the light of fire flaring upward in the night from the blast furnaces
in the south, through heavy coal smoke deeper and denser into the
neon of BEER and PIZZA and LAUNDROMAT signs and unknown and
meaningless signs along meaningless straight streets going off into
other straight streets forever. ... Along the streets that lead away
from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and
brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque,
twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince
themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and
glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for
by the vendors of substance. He thinks of them at night alone with
their advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off,
staring through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed
beyond them, when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only
truth that exists here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here
but dead neon and cement and brick." (ZMM)
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