Mlerner10, Bob. Scott, Bill, Platt and thank god for Glove and Rich: I've been reading along with the government thread. Here's my two cents. The difference between discovered and created laws echoes a distinction made by my extremely religious college biology Professor. He gave a lecture on the difference between revealed truth, meaning the bible, and discovered truth, meaning modern science. He was about to begin teaching the chapter on evolution and his intellectual and religious values were in conflict. He sweated as he talked. I believe the MOQ maintains that all laws are inventions. All laws are provisional, judged on a pragmatic basis, until something better comes along. Eistein's view of gravity is better as ideas go, but in the real world of engineering and rocket science Newton's law still rules. Rich and Glove are right to point out that the NAZIs were anything but intellectual. One of the reasons that Fascism is so hard for people to understand is that it is mostly irrational and emotionally charged. Confusion about the nature of fascism is also due to the West's sympathy for many of its elements. The similarities between far right Americans and that of the NAZIs are too numerous to list. They are both rabidly anti-intellectual, anti-communist, highly nationalistic and militarisitc. You could say the same about Fascist Spain, Italy and Germany. For reasons unknown to me, Fascist leaders are almost always former communists or socialist before they turn against it. You could say all these things about (spell?) Radavan Karadich and Slovodon Meloshevic. I think Pirsig mentions the Victorians, the Fascist and the Hippies for a reason. They are each a part of the same story of the 20th century. He uses these examples to show the relatively new battle between the social and intellectual levels and to demonstrate the failure of the amoral scientific world view. The victorians, he says, were the clinging to power and their social level vaules even as the intellectual level was struggling for supremacy. Queen Victoria died just about the time the theory of relativity was formulated, cinema and automobiles were invented and the last European Monarchy fell from power. This was the sound of the arrival of the intellectual level of values in Western civilization. But the new ruler inherited a wrecked infrastructure, a global economic depression, a flu epidemic and a horrified and decimated population. Talk about a fixer-upper! Civilization was nearly ruined after WWI, when the intellect finally came to dominate the culture and victorian values subsided. Its easy to see WWII fascism as a reaction to the failures of this new dominator. Hitler got revenge on that new order of things. He tore it down in every way. In spite of the evil he commited, he was quite the victorian. He was into clean living, family values, patriotism, loved his dog and smiled at children. He was the ultimate defender of German social values against the elite jewish communist internationalists. America's militia members and Klu Klux Klaners hold an ideology nearly identicle to Hilter's, but believe liberals are fascists. Go figure. The hippies also reacted against amoral scientific objectivity. As Rich said, they were mostly hedonists, opting for biological values over both social AND intellectual values. Turn on, tune in and drop out. They mistook the biological for the essential and the mystical. But Pirsig also rejects this same amoral scientific objectivity, trashing subject/object metaphysics and insisting on Quality as the primary reality. I think its safe to say that the main idea behind Pirsig's work is to undo the view that there is an objective world without values, to rescue morality from mere subjectivity and place it back at the center of reality, where it belongs. And Pirsig makes it very clear that it is moral for the intellectual level to be in charge of things, so long as it doesn't undermine the lower level values to the point of injury or destruction. Pirsig is decidedly NOT anti-intellectual. He is a philosopher and a metaphysician. I believe is also a mystic and neatly incorporates that view into the MOQ. I seriously doubt that Pirsig's MOQ supports the theories of economists Hayek and von Mises. I happen to have graduated from Hillsdale College, where they have the world's largest collection of works by and about Ludwig von Mises. I'm no expert, but its safe to say that both economist present theories that are essentailly founded on... you guess it,... amoral scientific objectivity. It is an economic system that sees the cost of labor as no different that the cost of electricity. They are both just costs, which must be kept at a minimum. The existence of poverty and vast inequality are simply accepted as objective facts. War is good for the economy, but it kills lots of people and destroys enormous wealth. Full employment is bad for the economy, it causes inflation and outrageous labor costs, but its real good for people. Von Mises and Hayeck and lots of other economist put economics before people. Part of the reason so many are so sick of Hollywood is tied up in this same attitude. Like every other industry, their main reason for being is to make money. Sex and violence have made Hollywood rich, but its not so good for the culture. Intellectual movies out of tinsle town are few and far between. Their game is Lethal Terminator and John Rambo Wayne. And don't forget the video game and action figure spin off. Or are movies now the spin off? Scary thing is, these same forces also control our news media, which are mostly owned by arms makers. Pretty soon there'll be just two companies in the world and everyone will work for one or the other. The new world order is just more of the same amoral scientific objectivity and we're likely to see the 20th century repeat itself in the 21st, unless something changes. David B. MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
