Hi David B., Ken, Mary and Group:
Ken has done an excellent job of providing balance to David's one-
sided view of the atomic bombing of Japan. Now to offer some
balance to David's one-sided presentation of Pirsig's views on
intellect.
The quotes David used from Chapter 13 should be read against
Chapters 22 and 24 where Pirsig lays out the dark side of the
intellectual level. Here are a few excerpts just to remind you that
intellect's dominance of the social level, instead of enhancing quality
as David suggests, has in Pirsig�s opinion made life WORSE than it
was during the Victorian era.
"Now it should be stated at this point that the Metaphysics of Quality
*supports* the dominance of intellect over society. It says intellect is
a higher level of evolution that society; therefore, it is a more moral
level of evolution than society. It is better for an idea to destroy a
society than it is for a society to destroy an idea. But having said
this, the Metaphysics of Quality goes on to say that science, the
intellectual pattern that has 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 subject-object science, the world is a
completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point to
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?
�In the time that Phaedrus grew up, intellect was dominant over
society, but the results of the new social looseness weren't turning
out as predicted. Something was wrong. The world was no doubt in
better shape intellectually and technologically, but despite that,
somehow, the 'quality' of it was not good. There was no way you
could say why this quality was no good. You just felt it.
"Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and
so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of
it descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and
futility had become a far *worse* prison of the spirit than the old
Victorian �virtue' ever was. That streetcar ride with Lila so long ago.
That was the feeling. There was no way he could ever get to Lila or
understand her and no way she could ever understand him because
all this intellect and it relationships and products and contrivances
intervened. They had lost some of their *realness.* They were living
in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual
electromechanical machine that had been created for their
happiness saying: PARADISE, PARADISE, PARADISE but which
had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience itself--and
from each other."
A complete reading of Chapters 22 and 24 exposes the true morality
of intellectuals. There isn't any. It's empty relativism, the primary
cause of today's moral decline. As for the �reason for reason,� it�s
not as David says "the reason why intellectual level values should
dominate social values." The real reason for reason is described as
follows in Chapter 24:
"(The intellect�s) historical purpose has been to help a society find
food, detect danger and defeat enemies. It can do this well or
poorly, depending on the concepts it invents for this purpose." (Note
the phrase, "defeat enemies.")
Finally, to balance off David's glorification of intellectuals, this quote
from Lila, Chapter 30:
"Static social and intellectual patterns are only an *intermediate*
level of evolution. They are good servants in the process of life but if
allowed to turn into masters destroy it."
That the defect in the intellectual level can destroy a society is
evident. One need look no further than the late Communist Russia.
Let us not forget that rewriting history was one of that evil regime�s
basic functions.
Platt
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