[Platt] > Right. Liberals of the 20's got all hepped up about eugenics which would > weed out undesirables such as knuckle-dragging right wingnuts. > Supporters included Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Winston > Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Margaret Sanger, the > National Academy of Sciences and the American Medical Association. > Uncle Joe Stalin was long admired by academic liberals who now have > turned to Mao and Che Guevara for guidance and inspiration.
[Dave] Perfect Platt, thank you for the lead in. So what the point of all this Red silliness? The intellect and it's fallible nature, even RMP's. We have been at this long enough to know that the MoQ is chock full of enough logical and practical holes to float an aircraft carrier through. Even as we hold out hope that a metaphysics, the most general statements about reality, should be free from political bias. But for all practical purposes it is impossible to divorce political bias from individual thought. Platt leans to the right, DMB and many others here lean to the left. RMP tried to straddle the fence but in the end he too leans towards the socialist side of the spectrum. He defends socialism because in theory it's intellectual, more moral, but lays it aside because by and large as practiced it doesn't work. He defends capitalism because it works, but in the same breath discounts it as less moral because it is not intellectual. He is torn between his love of theory and his understanding that theories are subject to the pragmatic test of how good they work. Nowhere is this more crucial than at the social level. Let's see if I can illustrate where political bias confuses the intellect in RMP's thoughts. DMB and RMP start with this argument: >[RMP] > "Communism and socialism, programs for the intellectual control of society, > were confronted by the reactionary forces of fascism, a program for the social > control of intellect. ...The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which > have overwhelmed this century, is explained by a conflict between levels of > evolution. This conflict explains the driving force behind Hitler not as an > insane search for power but as an all-consuming glorification of social > authority and hatred of intellectualism. ...In the United States the economic > and social upheaval was not so great as in Europe, but Franklin Roosevelt and > the New Deal, nevertheless, became the center of a lesser storm between social > and intellectual forces. The New Deal was many things, but at the center of it > all was the belief that intellectual planning by the government was necessary > for society to regain it's health." (Chapter 22) What RMP compares and contrasts in this part of Chapter 22 is capitalism, socialism, communism, and fascism. He claims that capitalism and fascism are social patterns and thus less moral than socialism and communism which are intellectual patterns, thus of a higher moral order. Rather than trying to use Pirsig to argue with Pirsig which we have seen can lead around in circles I am going to use general internet sources, like Wikipedia, even though I know some think these sources are grossly over simplified or just plain wrong they still give a common base of reference. RMP claim 1: Capitalism is a social pattern. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_capitalism If we start with the history of capitalism we find with great <irony> given the present state of radical Islam, that they invented it. Go to the history link and see the range of ideas they invented that are still in use today. But RMP claims that none of these ideas are intellectual, all social. So immediately we run up against a bias. The scientific bias that claims that some overall theory must always lead practice. The gravity argument. But rather that try to refute that let's at this point agree with RMP and say that capitalism evolved socially starting in the 8th to12th centuries. From this base it spread to be later adopted in Europe. > By the 17th century, the concept of "rationalism" took over the idea of > revelation; the economy, state, and church became separated from each other > (i.e. secularized); and the notion of the sanctity of property as formalized > through writings of John Locke came to dominant the mainstream views. http://www.economictheories.org/2008/06/rise-of-capitalism-and-religion-in.h tml >From the other (Greek based) direction the secular thoughts emerge and John Locke starts to lay the base on which a theory of capitalism could be built. And let's not forget that Plato and Aristotle disagreed on the nature of private and public goods. > Mercantilism declined in Great Britain in the mid-18th century, when a new > group of economic theorists, led by Adam Smith, challenged fundamental > mercantilist doctrines as the belief that the amount of the world's wealth > remained constant and that a state could only increase its wealth at the > expense of another state. [Wikipedia History of Capitalism] So even if, as RMP claims capitalism is a social pattern, by 1776 with Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations" intellectual theories for capitalism had been developed. Capitalism had risen to the intellectual the level. If we turn to the history of socialism we find: > The history of socialism finds its origins in the French Revolution of 1789 > and the changes brought about by the Industrial Revolution, although it has > precedents in earlier movements and ideas. Like the concept of capitalism, it > embraces a wide range of views.[1] > The term 'socialism' is variously attributed to Pierre Leroux in 1834, who > called socialism "the doctrine which would not give up any of the principles > of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity" of the French Revolution of 1789[2] or to > Marie Roch Louis Reybaud in France, or else in England to Robert Owen, who is > considered the father of the cooperative movement.[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_socialism So we see that before "socialism" was even hinted at "capitalism" had centuries of practice and a well develop basis of theory. Even before we move to Engel and Marx in the 19th century the theory and practice of capitalism was they dominant model and just as RMP claims fascism was a reaction to communism we find that socialism was an emerging reaction to the existing intellectual economic theory of capitalism. So RMP claim that capitalism was not an intellectual pattern at the time of the emergence of socialism is just not valid. Even if you buy the gravity argument that "gravity" really doesn't exists until it theory is expounded it doesn't apply in this case because the theories (intellectual patterns) of capitalism preceded socialism being even a twinkle in anyone's eye. I'm suggesting that his mistake in this call was because of RMP underlying liberal political bias. (conscious or unconscious) [To Be Cont] Dave 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/
