Ron said to John:
... All I was trying to playfully point out is that by virtue of considering
ALL ideas equally and sifting through them with a critical eye, you are going
to have to deal with the assholes pranksters fools and the simple minded. You
know, morons.
dmb says:
Right, considering ALL ideas to be equally valid is the worst kind of
sophomoric relativism. That view is actually a straw man version of relativism
because that's something that only a teenager could believe, an actual
sophomore or freshman. Even Richard Rorty, who's kinda infamous for being a
relativist himself, used to complain about simplistic relativism of his
undergrad students. Even worse, John is using this extreme view, this vacuous
relativism, to defend the legitimacy of the opposite exterme: Absolutism.
It seems this relativism is one of the consequences of misconstruing the
social-intellectual conflict as the conflict between society and the
individual. But that's not what Pragmatism or the MOQ says. That's what lots of
18th century thinkers said, what Ayn Rand and lots of free-market conservatives
say but not Pirsig. We are social creatures all the way down. Just like our
primate cousins live today, we have lived in groups together since before we
were human. The MOQ's intellectual level is just like the social and biological
levels in this respect.
We can see that even highly intellectual practices like science or professional
philosophy are inherently collective, public activities. It's not just that
everyone is engaged in an ongoing dialogue in the peer-reviewed Journals, but
everyone is suspend in the same language, shares a set of common meanings,
definitions, and often work together for common goals. Of course this involves
particular persons, just as social level roles like Kings, Bishops, and Knights
are played by particular persons. But there is no escape into individuality at
the intellectual level. The kind of individualism that allows the sophomoric
relativist to believe he stands alone and has his own definitions, his own
concepts, his own mythos, is not a lone wolf hero. He's just ungeared from the
common lot of humanity. As Pirsig points out, a person with a culture of their
own is an insane person. The intellectual level could not function without the
common practices and a common set of terms in which me
anings can be shared.
As Dan pointed out, the contrarians who act as agents of cultural evolution are
responding to and acting within their society. They are acting as critics and
stand out from the keepers of the status quo but they are crucial to that
groups needs and their rebellion only makes sense in relation to that society.
The truth is exactly the opposite of what Ayn Rand, Maggie Thatcher, and Rand
Paul think. They think there is no such thing as society, that society is only
a collection of individuals. Individuality is actually a social construct, an
achievement of development that can only ever happen because we're social
creatures first.
And that's also why we don't get to decide for ourselves what words mean or
what defines concepts. Communication simply isn't possible without a shared,
public language, a common set of understandings. And when guys like John use
simplistic relativism to defend Absolute Idealism, it's hard to believe that
they're operating within that shared public space. To complain that someone is
misusing the key terms of a discussion is not some petty, pedantic complaint
about grammar or spelling or what ever. It's a complete show-stopper because
then you can't exchange ideas. It makes communication impossible.
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