"Is society going to dominate intellect or is intellect going to dominate
society? And if society wins, what's going to be left of intellect? And if
intellect wins what's going to be left of society?"
"Intellect is not an extension of society any more than society is an extension
of biology. Intellect is going its own way, and in doing so is at war with
society, seeking to subjugate society."
"Once intellect has been let out of the bottle of social restraint, it is
almost impossible to put it back in again. And it is immoral to try. A society
that tries to restrain the truth for its own purposes is a lower form of
evolution than a truth that restrains society for its own purposes."
"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."
"..the day Socrates died to establish the independence of intellectual patterns
from their social origins. Or the day Descartes decided to start with himself
as an ultimate source of reality. These were days of evolutionary
transformation."
John said to dmb:
I just want to make a point that seems silly, because it's so obvious, but the
patterns only compete within an individual's mental choices. Once they are put
into action, they are all, at least somewhat, social. Social patterns only
compete with intellectual patterns when they pull an individual attention
toward one direction or another. If that person decides to be more
intellect-oriented, he's going to have to find a society, in order for that
intellect to have any reality. Thus all competition is necessarily social in
nature, and intellect does not get involved in taking sides. ...
dmb says:
You keep repeating this idea that individuals are intellectual while society is
social. This causes all kinds of confusion and it's obviously not true. Any
philosophical discussion is demonstrative proof that intellectual values are a
collective property, belong to the whole society. One of Pirsig prime examples
of intellectual values is the Bill of Rights, as matter of fact. Obviously, the
nation's highest laws are all about society and yet they are not "social"
values. The question for our time is which level of values is going to be in
charge and taking sides is the whole point in an evolutionary morality! Pirsig
says repeatedly that intellectual values should be in charge - because they're
more moral. While it's true that this conflict also exist within individuals,
the political conflict between social and intellectual values plays itself out
as a contest between a society run by wealth and power and society based on
rights and social justice. He's talking about the intense rivalry between
fascism and communism in Europe and in the USA this is a milder form of right
vs left; fundamentalists and free market conservatives vs New Deal liberals.
The latter form of liberalism emerged about 100 years ago, just as Pirsig
says.
"The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which have overwhelmed this
century, is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution. ..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 regainits health." (Pirsig, Lila)
>From the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Liberalism...
"What has come to be known as ‘new’, ‘revisionist’, ‘welfare state’, or perhaps
best, ‘social justice’, liberalism challenges this intimate connection between
personal liberty and a private property based market order. Three factors help
explain the rise of this revisionist theory. First, the new liberalism arose in
the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period in which the
ability of a free market to sustain what Lord Beveridge called a ‘prosperous
equilibrium’ was being questioned. Believing that a private property based
market tended to be unstable, or could, as Keynes argued, get stuck in an
equilibrium with high unemployment, new liberals came to doubt that it was an
adequate foundation for a stable, free society. Here the second factor comes
into play: just as the new liberals were losing faith in the market, their
faith in government as a means of supervising economic life was increasing.
This was partly due to the experiences of the First World War, in which
government attempts at economic planning seemed to succeed; more importantly,
this reevaluation of the state was spurred by the democratization of western
states, and the conviction that, for the first time, elected officials could
truly be, in J.A. Hobson's phrase ‘representatives of the community’. [...]The
third factor underlying the development of the new liberalism was probably the
most fundamental: a growing conviction that, so far from being ‘the guardian of
every other right’, property rights generated an unjust inequality of power
that led to a less-than-equal liberty (typically, ‘positive liberty’) for the
working class. This theme is central to what is usually called ‘liberalism’ in
American politics, combining a strong endorsement of civil and personal
liberties with, at best, an indifference, and often enough an antipathy, to
private ownership."
"...if he had to pick one day when the shift from social domination of
intellect to intellectual domination of society took place, he would pick
November 11, 1918, Armistice Day, the end of World War I. And if he had to pick
one person who symbolized this shift more than any other, he would have picked
President Woodrow Wilson. The picture of him Phædrus would have selected is one
in which Wilson rides through New York City in an open touring car, doffing the
magnificent silk hat that symbolized his high rank in Victorian society. For a
cutline he would select something from Wilson's penetrating speeches that
symbolized his high rank in the intellectual community: We must use our
intelligenceto stop future war; social institutions can not be trusted to
function morally by themselves; they must be guided by intellect. Wilson
belonged in both worlds, Victorian society and the new intellectual world of
the twentieth century: the only university professor ever to be elected
president of the United States." (Pirsig, Lila)
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