Hello Dave & all, > 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. > [Mary Replies] Pirsig saying this sort of thing is exactly what has caused all the confusion about the nature of the Intellectual Level. Pirsig violates his own definition of the levels here. Communism is indeed predicated on using the intellect to construct a society, but that is not the same thing as saying Communism is "of" the Intellectual Level.
Here's the deal. As I understand it, the Intellectual Level is the set of SPOVs which germinated in the Social Level, but (and this is the important part) took on a life of their own. That is, Intellectual patterns serve intellectual purposes not social ones. I would demote Communism back down to the Social Level no matter how well thought out it is (or isn't) because the whole purpose of it is Social. I do agree with your point, though. Pirsig is demonstrating a liberal bias in favoring socialism, and in an idealistic world I would agree with him. Seems to me that socialism is more advanced than capitalism because it is the first social theory that attempts to bring fairness into the social contract. The problem with it, of course, is that it doesn't make provision for limiting or satisfying basic greed or territoriality in human nature. The weakness of every social level construct we've been able to think up is an inability to adequately address basic biological level motivations. Idealists attempt to construct utopias by ignoring or discounting the power of our biological level instincts and drives, while capitalists attempt to construct society based on nothing but. Somewhere there is a happy (or perhaps just at best an uneasy) medium between the two. Either extreme will run a society into the ground sooner or later. The trick will be to find a workable balance, but I submit that all the thought and intellectual energy that will go into finding that balance are Social Level activities and not Intellectual Level ones. Mary 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/
