[DMB] I strongly suspect that Platt wants to equate intellect with SOM so that he can then take all of Pirsig's reasons for wanting to expand rationality and use them to destroy rationality instead.
[Arlo] Exactly. And to do so he has to ignore half of Pirsig and distort those who do not. As I said to John, no one is talking about turning "Quality" into an academic bon-bon, but the MOQ is a "metaphysics", an academic, intellectual, philosophical framework built around this pre-intellectual concept. As you correctly point out, where the goal should be to expand rationality as Pirsig intended, the goal for Platt is only to demonize academics, perfessery types and intellect as a whole. Why so many these days choose to champion ignorance is beyond me, but it is an unmistakable trend. Again, the irony in all this is that it was this same anti-intellectual, damn the perfessers attitude that nearly cost Pirsig his job in Montana, where the right-wing anti-intellectuals branded him a "radical professor". I suspect that if Pirsig were teaching these days, he would be in the same "crosshairs". [Horse] ... the way to think about what he says is to ask yourself the question "What would a typical Victorian think"! [Arlo] Precisely. Pirsig noted this when he called the modern era a slow drift back to Victorianism. Where Pirsig would want to replace the "SOM intellectuals" with "MOQ intellectuals" (expanded rationality), Platt seeks only to demonize intellect as a whole, and drift back to the dominance of the Victorians. [Horse] Now we can sit back and wait for Platt to accuse us of of ad hominem attacks and/or being lefty commie pinko interleckchuals. [Arlo] Yeah. Its just the same substance-free vitriol one hears on the talk-radio airwaves. I still laugh at the fact that when Platt can't "easily understand" a book, it must be because the author is an arrogant elitist. I suppose its "Dick and Jane Visit the Pyramids" for all! [Horse] Why is it that when Pirsig states quite categorically that both you and Bo are wrong about SOL - even going so far as to say that your conclusions undermine the MoQ - you ignore everything he says. [Arlo] This is just part and parcel of the "bumper-sticker mentality". Why bother with the body of substance when a few acontextual quotes serve much better? [DMB] Platt is essentially anti-intellectual and he reads Pirsig to serve that purpose. For Platt, what Pirsig thinks is beside the point. He doesn't care about that. He just thinks he found a little ammo depot in his war against liberals, intellectuals, atheists or basically anybody that doesn't fit his idea of a decent American. [Arlo] Spot on. 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/md/archives.html
