Dan said to John:
...The driving forces of the social level are celebrity values of fame and
wealth. ...Praise is a form of celebrity value, like the applause the actor
hears after nailing a particularly difficult line. A raise in pay or a bonus is
wonderful but if it doesn't come with a pat on the back, it means less. In
fact, it means nothing. Notice that none of this has anything to do with
subject/object metaphysics.
dmb says:
Yep. Fame and fortune, wealth and celebrity, are the central organizing
principles of social level values. The giant operates on ego, face, honor and a
whole lot of posturing. How do celebrities get famous and how do the wealthy
get so rich? By serving the giant and serving him well. How does Pirsig put it?
Sex is to biological values and celebrity is to social values.
The idea that wisdom is more valuable than fame and fortune is as old as
Plato’s dialogues, at least, but Pirsig frames them in an evolutionary
hierarchy and otherwise turbo-charges the idea. Celebrity is to society as sex
is to biology, he says. Celebrity is the central organizing principle that
shapes and directs the culture, he says, a fundamental force in social
evolution. We can’t know how far back the celebrity factor goes, maybe all the
way back to the early Pleistocene era, but it is conspicuously on display
already in some of the world’s oldest writing, in the first cuneiform tablets
of ancient Babylon. Of all the things that could be written at the dawn
civilization, what do these ancient clay tablets actually say? It’s mostly
audacious bragging. I can almost hear it preformed as a rap song.
“I, Hammurabi, am the big wheel here. I have this many horses and this many
concubines and his many slaves and this many oxen, and I am one of the greatest
of the greatest kings there ever was, and you better believe it.” (Lila 256)
Same as it ever was, it’s all about me and my bling. “That’s what writing was
invented for,” Pirsig says. All the gods, kings, heroes and villains, and
legendary warriors are celebrities too, not very different from today’s sports
stars, rock stars, film characters and the actors who portray them. As Pirsig
tells it, our culture is filled with all kinds of “celebrity devices”. These
devices include things like awards, trophies and blue ribbons, titles, gossip
and ass-kissing, as well as the badges, uniforms and robes of authority. Even
monumental architecture like the pyramids of Egypt or Trump Tower would count
as celebrity devices. This celebrity force is like a never-ending and
all-consuming popularity contest. It’s just like high school, except with lots
of lawyers, guns, and money.
“High school was really the place for celebrity. That’s what had those jocks
out playing football every afternoon. That’s what the pom-pom girls were all
about. It was celebrity. …In fact you can measure the quality of a university
by comparing the relative strengths of the celebrity patterns and the
intellectual patterns. You never get rid of the celebrities, even at the best
universities, but there the intellectuals could ignore them and be in a class
by themselves.” (Lila 257)
Please notice that Pirsig doesn’t just make a distinction between “social” and
“intellectual” values, he sets them into a ranked order wherein the celebrity
factor is supposed to decrease in importance as we mature or develop. He makes
a case, well beyond the topic of fame and fortune, that social and intellectual
values are not only distinctly different from each other, they are sometimes
even opposed to each other. The unflattering idea of “selling-out” serves as a
handy example of their opposition. It’s a shameful thing for a person to
abandon their principles for the sake of cash, popularity, nookie, or otherwise
bend to expedience. The artists, scientists and philosophers aren’t supposed to
be in it for the money or the fame. They’re supposed to care about beauty,
truth, and wisdom.
On this view, trading such things for cash isn’t like prostitution. It is
prostitution. It feels degenerate, sleazy and wrong, Pirsig says, because it
is. He explains his decision not to sell his book to Redford in these terms. He
shouldn’t give up the rights because books of philosophy are intellectual and
movies are social, Pirisg thought. That’s what everyone was telling him anyway.
One of Pirsig’s earliest and most enthusiastic fans, the New Yorker critic
George Steiner told him not to. You’ll be sorry if you do, he warned. Pirsig’s
Manhattan attorney told him the same thing. “Look, if you love your book my
advice is don’t sell it to Hollywood,” he said. Even Redford warned him not to
do it. Hollywood movies are about good guys and bad guys, about drama, conflict
and action. There’s no chance that they won’t wreck it, Pirsig thought, not
even with a stand-up dude like Robert Redford at the helm. That’s why Pirsig’s
book still hasn’t been turned into movie. It probably won’t get made unless and
until somebody figures out how to do it without abandoning the philosophical
content of Zen and the Art.
Pirsig has a few words about his own celebrity, about the weirdness of suddenly
becoming famous himself. He was world-class nerd for most of his life and
certainly not the type of guy that would be of any interest to the pom-pom
girls. But after his first book was published ladies at parties would come over
to rub up against him, teenage girls would squeal with delight at the sight of
him, and powerful woman felt that they had to have him. There is the darker
side too, with stalkers and psychotic fans. Those distorting mirrors can mess
with a person’s head in all kinds of ways – so Pirsig quietly spends his time
at home. These chapters on the nature of celebrity are titillating and slightly
obscene but they are interesting – if not genuinely illuminating – and Pirsig
finishes the topic with a thought-provoking question.
“Money and celebrity are fame and fortune, traditionally paired as twin forces
in the dynamic generation of social values. Both fame and fortune are huge
dynamic parameters that give society its shape and meaning.We have whole
departments of universities, in fact, whole colleges, devoted to the study of
economics, that is fortune, but what do we have that is similarly devoted to
the study of fame?” (Lila 258)
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