Hi David B, Ken and Group:
If Harold Walsby is representative of the intellectual level, give me
the social level any day.
According to Walsby�s hierarchy of ideologies as presented by
David B., to attain the state of having no ideology is to attain
intellectual nirvana.
But, Walsby�s hierarchy contains an obvious self-contradiction
which destroys it. To have no ideology is an ideology. His hierarchy
self destructs.
Similar sorts of intellectual charlatanism can easily be found
among the so-called intelligentsia who are forever spouting self-
contradictory nonsense such as environmentalists who prattle
about all life forms having equal value, a qualitative distinction that
denies all qualitative distinctions, or the multiculturalists who intone
that we should respect all perspectives except (of course) any
perspective that contradicts their�s.
Pirsig warns us against over indulgence in intellectualism. You�ll
recall the many words he spends condemning �objective�
anthropology as practiced by Franz Boas and his acolytes.
Walsby may or may not be an anthropologist (David B. doesn�t
say), but his work comes across suspiciously like Pirsig�s
comment in Lila, Chap. 22:
�An American anthropologist could no more embrace nonobjectivity
than a Stalinist bureaucrat could play the stock market. And for the
same kind of ideological, conformist reasons.�
In Walsby�s theory I hear an ideological ax being ground--the
superiority of intellectuals who say they are above all ideologies but
howl like stuck pigs when their own pet ideologies are challenged.
Never underestimate the vitriol of intellectual caught in a faulty
assumption or self-contradiction.
Finally, to David B. who staunchly defends the proposition that
intellectuals should rule society, the following reminder of intellect�s
fatal flaw seems appropriate. From Lila, Chap. 22:
�Now, it should be stated at this point that the Metaphysics of
Quality supports this dominance of intellect over society. It says
intellect is a higher level of evolution than society; therefore, it is a
more moral level 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 a subject-object science, the world is a
completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in
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? As far as Phaedrus knew, that question has never
been successfully answered.�
The whole point of Lila was to answer that question--the only
intellectual treatise I�m aware of that begins with the assumption
that morals not only have objective reality but are all that is.
Platt
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