Platt said:
... In Chapters 22 and 24 of Lila, Pirsig lays out how intellectuals have
played a prominent role in creating social paralysis. Is it any wonder that
there's an anti-intellectual crowd? One need only open his eyes and mind --
and read ZAMM and Lila -- to understand.
dmb says:
That conclusion is incorrect. As many have tried to explain, you are conflating
intellect with a defect. You are confusing the patient with his disease. MOQers
are supposed to be opposed to SOM, not intellect or the grammatical structure
of the english language. In short, you're just wrong about this
anti-intellectual stuff. You're imposing your own attitudes on the material and
to do that you have to ignore a great deal of what Pirsig says about intellect.
As you know from that last time we went through this (Oct 25th) Pirsig said:
"...a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social
values is absolutely superior to one that does not." (Lila, p.311)
"From a static point of view, socialism is more moral than capitalism. It's a
higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually guided society, not just a
society that is guided by mindless traditions."
"It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than
socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less
moral as static patterns go."
You should be able to see that intellect and the flaw are two different things.
Your task is to discover where one concept ends and the other begins. You are
conflating and confusing the metaphysical assumptions of science with intellect
itself. This is distinction should be clear in these passage from one of your
favorite chapters (22) but I'm not holding my breath:
"But having said this, the Metaphysics of Quality goes on to say that science,
the intellectual pattern that bas been appointed to take over society, has a
defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for
morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no
objective reality. You can look through a microscope or telescope or
oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a single moral.
There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They exist only in your
imagination. From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a
completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing
is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There
is nothing morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying,
with theft, with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally
wrong because there are no morals, just functions.. Now that intellect was in
command of society for the first time in history, was this the intellectual
pattern it was going to run society with?"
“Like the stuff Rigel was throwing at him this morning, the old Victorian
morality. That was entirely within that one code—the social code. Phaedrus
thought that code was good enough as far as it went, but it really didn't go
anywhere. It didn't know its origins and it didn't know its own destinations,
and not knowing them it had to be exactly what it was: hopelessly static,
hopelessly stupid, a form of evil in itself.”
"Everybody thinks those Victorian moral codes are stupid and evil, or
old-fashioned at least, except maybe a few religious fundamentalists and
ultra-right-wingers and ignorant uneducated people like that. That's why
Rigel's sermon seemed so peculiar. Usually people like Rigel do their
sermonizing in favor of whatever is popular. That way they're safe. Didn't he
know all that stuff went out years ago? Where was he during the revolution of
the sixties? ...Where has he been during this whole century? That's what this
whole century's been about, this struggle between intellectual and social
patterns. That's the theme song of the 20th century."
"When the social climate changes from preposterous social restraint of all
intellect to a relative abandonment of all social patterns, the result is a
hurricane of social forces. That hurricane is the history of the twentieth
century."
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