Hi Platt, Hamish,
GLENN:
He doesn't mean this entirely. He doesn't like it when science
rejects social values if those social values are rejecting biological
values. To do this is not morally justifiable. This is why he thinks
science is on the side of criminals. Of everything that constitutes
the intellectual level, apparently only science is guilty of this type
of infraction.
PLATT:
I see your point, although you exaggerate in saying Pirsig thinks
science is on the side of criminals. When science looks at the
universe, it doesn’t see any morals. With scientific objectivity as
your guide, you try to remain neutral regarding criminal behavior,
secure in the knowledge that what is considered a crime in one
culture may be celebrated in another.
Well, physicists don't see morals in what they study but anthropologists
do. I think it's proper that anthropologists remain neutral about behaviors
observed in one culture that can be seen in a different moral light in
another, including what might be deemed criminal behaviors. Infanticide
can be seen as murder in one culture and as a great honor in another (the
Incas). And if I'm not mistaken, Platt, you agreed with me on this.
This idea of cultural relativism comes up in Ch. 24 when Pirsig talks about
the moral paralysis in America with regard to its treatment of black
criminals. His reasoning is that liberal intellectuals were against
applying American social codes (laws) to black criminals because these
blacks belonged to a different culture, and the scientific pattern of
amoral objectivity says morals are culturally relative.
But did liberal intellectuals really think American blacks were part of
another culture? Aren't blacks American citizens and rightfully under the
jurisdiction of American law? These blacks were born in America, and
probably their parents and grandparents as well. How much African culture
were they practicing? The answer is, practically none. Remember, Pirsig is
talking about the 1960s, well before it became fashionable to explore your
roots and declare yourself an "African American".
I think Pirsig senses this problem so he has to try to explain how
intellectuals could be mixed up to think this. And of course it's SOM that
mixes them up:
PIRSIG (Ch. 24)
A subject-object metaphysics lumps biological man and cultural man
together as aspects of a single molecular unit.
Here Pirsig is trying to convince us that an SOMer can't distinguish
biological characteristics from cultural ones, or that they're both
bundled up in our molecules somehow which makes them easy to confuse,
since an SOMer doesn't believe in anything outside his physical body.
Bull-o-ney (I can curse too, Hamish!). If this is true then where does the
word 'culture' come from? Shouldn't everything be 'biological' and
'genetic'? Pirsig makes it sound like 'culture' is a reserved term for
MOQ, and SOM can't lay claim to it. And this is the kind of pill you're
forced to swallow to seal the argument that scientific objectivity is
ultimately to blame:
PIRSIG (continues)
It goes on to reason that because it is immoral to speak against a
people because of their genetic characteristics it is therefore also
immoral to speak against a people because of their cultural
characteristics. The anthropological doctrine of cultural relativism
reinforces this. It says you cannot judge one culture in terms of the
values of another. Science says there is no morality outside of
cultural morality, therefore any moral censorship of minority patterns
of crime in this city [NY] is itself immoral.
This is the paralysis.
The more likely (and obvious) reason liberal intellectuals let blacks off
with light sentences for their crimes is that blacks are habitually
subjected to racism. Pirsig seems to deny, or at least fails to mention,
that white racism toward blacks is real. Instead he portrays racism as
slander, a charge that blacks level against whites after the crime is
committed. He seems to fail to acknowledge that crimes are sometimes
committed by blacks because they can't find a decent paying job (among
other reasons) in a racist society. It's common practice for liberal
judges in western culture to lessen sentences for mitigating circumstances
such as systematic racism.
Now it's interesting to speculate why Pirsig would discuss the black
problem in particular vis-a-vis the more general problem of moral decay,
and I think it's probably because his son Chris *died* at the hands of
blacks. It's not hard to imagine, knowing Pirsig's analytic and manic
nature and the awful heartbreak every parent suffers over the loss of a
child, that he would obsess at great length over *why* such a thing
happened. In other words, he's probably given the black/crime phenomena a
lot of thought. And knowing him as we do, he would not be satisfied with
the immediate motives of the murder but would trace the causes and
sub-causes back to the roots of the black/crime issue, back to where the
problem all began. Though Pirsig leaves it unstated, you only need to add
the event of Chris' stabbing to the chain of correlations above to
conclude that he believes scientific objectivity was the root cause of his
son's murder.
PLATT:
...
I think it’s this [nonjudgmental or morally neutral] attitude, required
of the scientific method, that Pirsig sees as spilling over into
everyday life and causing problems.
...
It is precisely this scientific taboo against making moral
judgments that has seeped into general thought patterns of
Westerners and, according to Pirsig, accounts for a widespread
decline in moral standards. So long as “objectivity” prevails as the
intellectual holy grail, there’s no way to break the grip of
“whateverism.”
There's probably a lot of other things that are responsible for moral
decline that have greater and more direct influence than the attitude
required for finding truth (the scientific method). I could also make an
argument that the moral decline is more perception than anything. But I
don't feel the burden is on me to find alternative theories. After all,
you and Pirsig are making this claim and the burden is on you to show it
is compelling. All you've done here is restate the claim for the Nth time.
When I've complained about this in past posts your replies have been that
he wrote a whole book on the subject and that I should re-read ch. 4 and
24. I've given you my opinions on Boas, Mead, and now the black/crime
issue. What's next?
Even though I feel like I'm punching holes in this claim I can't say I've
proved it wrong, either, because this is a wholly subjective issue. This
is a battle for hearts and minds, not facts and figures. Hamish.
On the face of it the claim even seems possible. There is a kind of
general sense to it. But when you try to apply it to specific cases of
moral decay the charge has a ring of absurdity about it: rappers spew
hate-filled lyrics, guests throw chairs and punches on the Jerry Springer
show, and blacks murder Chris ultimately because of a scientific attitude
employed to discover the secrets of nature, and the crux of this attitude,
which we call objectivity, is that we verify our hypotheses?
Is there really enough positive correlation to get from there to here, and
if there isn't much, can we still justify it by claiming that society is
such an unstable system that it could be rocked by it anyway, like the way
some believe the fluttering of a butterfly's wings in Mexico effect the
weather 3 days later in New York? Anything is possible but is it likely?
Ultimately I'm cynical about charges like this because the more I read of
the post-modernist, holist, animist, etc. literature, the more I get the
feeling that similar attacks from these are motivated by socio-political
arguments taken to extremes (see Ebert quote below). Such writers take
legitimate concerns like river pollution and pesticides on fruits and
vegetables and end up tracing the problem back to Newton and Kepler, and
for good measure, the entire Judeo-Christian tradition. Obviously these
folks have big fish to fry. And they make it sound compelling, and they
make it sound like we're on the brink of extinction. After I slept on it I
wasn't so impressed, but it shows how easy it is to be sucked in by
rhetoric, dogma, and the authority of literate, intelligent people with
impressive vocabularies.
GLENN:
I never said Pirsig was out to destroy science. What I've said is
he's out to "discredit science enough to allow for explanations of
reality that are unscientific."
PLATT:
This appears to bolster my statement in a previous post that
“scientists have become the high priests of our age, telling us
what and what not to believe.” Aren’t you implying that only
science can explain reality? You seem to say that nonscientific
explanations are intellectually out of bounds.
Yes, I'm saying that only science has a shot at explaining reality with
any degree of surety. Common sense is good enough for a lot of things,
but it only takes you so far and the explanations are shallow. But I'm
also saying reality includes things science and common sense can't, or
can't yet, explain.
The quote was originally my take on Pirsig's motivations and express
*his* view of what *others* think. By his reasoning, the vast majority of
people in the world restrict reality to only those things supported by
orthodox science. He thinks this restriction is wrong. I reasoned that
part of his motivation for attacking science was to loosen the grip science
has on people in order that they might accept unscientific things as
reality, including their associated unscientific explanations.
I don't think people are as gripped by science as he suggests.
I think people have long accepted as reality some things science can't
(or can't yet) explain and furthermore I think it's reasonable that this is
done. So I don't see the point in attacking science if people already think
this way.
PLATT:
I can agree with your statement if you limit reality to the material
world of physics and biology, Pirsig’s first two levels. But you’ve
been arguing all along that scientists, like everybody else,
consider “logic, mathematics, art and music, cultural values, pain,
morals, love, patriotism, awe, jealousy, etc.” just as real as the
material world and that they “don’t study these things because
they’re too hard to study, not because they’re unreal.” So here we
have a lot of real stuff that science can’t study and can’t explain.
Are we then to shrug our shoulders and admit that any explanation
of these things is as good as any other and therefore all are
equally worthless? If one doesn’t allow for explanations that are
unscientific, such a conclusion seems inevitable.
The history of science shows that most first hypotheses about phenomena
were wrong (falsified by experiment) and had to be re-evaluated or refined.
So guessing, even educated guessing, on the interpretations or explanations
of harder things will also most likely yield a wrong answer.
>From a personal perspective, unverifiable explanations of phenomena do not
seem equally worthless. I think some explanations are more far-fetched than
others, and so do you. But it seems we are in disagreement about what is
far-fetched, and since neither of our explanations or interpretations can
be tested, we will never know. Philosophers will never be in short demand,
I daresay.
Good science is our only hope for gaining meaningful knowledge - knowledge
we are reasonably sure is right. And I stand firm on that.
And Hamish, for your information, I only pray 3 times a day to the
Objective Gods, not the outrageous number you cited! Try to get your
objective facts straight next time.
PLATT:
Generally speaking, all explanations of reality, including scientific
explanations, begin with one or more assumptions that can’t be
empirically verified. I’m not ready to accept science’s beginning
assumption that everything is created by chance from quantum
soup. As I’ve said before, it stretches credulity to believe that mind
resulted from mindless shuffling of primordial slime.
Certainly physical laws were in operation so it's not as random as you
make it out to be. It's not too hard to believe how suns and planets
were formed and there are decent theories about these. Theories about the
origins of life and its evolution are still problematic. Strange attractors
and other ideas coming out of Chaos theory, including the computer
simulated Game of Life, suggest that interesting and surprising things can
spring up out of initially random configurations that are acted on by a
few simple rules. In any event, 15 billion years is a long time to wait
for nothing interesting to happen.
Your phrase "mindless shuffling of primordial slime" reminds me of
this paragraph from John David Ebert in "Twilight of the Clockwork God":
EBERT:
And even though the scientific insights of Galileo, Kepler and Newton
fused the laws of the heavens together with those of the earth into a
single continuum, the mechanistic picture created therein was really
only a secular version of the Christian cosmos. The vision of a
gigantic spiritual being pushing dead matter about through empty space
is precisely the theological canvas upon which Newton paints his world
of forces acting upon stubbornly resistant masses, for matter in the
Newtonian universe behaves sort of like the zombies in Dawn of the
Dead, wandering blindly through space, driven by primordial inertial
tendencies until harnessed by external forces.
PLATT:
By comparison, life after death appears infinitely reasonable.
I envy you for that, and I hope you're right!
PLATT:
Wouldn’t you agree that a strong belief in ANY explanation of how
things get created closes off scientific investigation, including the
strong scientific belief that creation of the universe happened by
accident?
On the contrary, scientific explanations for the creation, for example,
of suns, planets, mountains, and life all lead to new scientific inquiry.
The belief that the big bang was an accident is not a scientific belief.
There is no scientific evidence that suggests it was an accident. There
is no evidence to suggest any cause.
PLATT:
I’ve read about Sheldrake and was initially quite taken with his
ideas of “memory fields.” But since then I’ve become quite
suspicious of “fields” in general because they seem to be very
fashionable in scientific circles these days. I guess it got started
with Bohr’s quantum fields, then it went to Pribrams’s holographic
fields, Bohm’s implicate fields, and the latest (at least that I’m
aware of) from Steve Brand (referred to by Peter Lennox), who
says all is software and “Even though photons of light and
subatomic particles are rather different from ripples and
whirlpools, in an important way they are the same: each is a
disturbance in a field or fields (magnetic, electrical or Olympic-
sized), which persists through propagation.”
Fields are kind of interesting in that they start out as models for
conceptualizing the influence of a force on matter through space, and
then over time they become a kind of reality in and of themselves; a good
example of reification. Certainly magnetic, gravitational and quantum
fields are mainstream concepts, but holographic and implicate fields
I've never heard of. What kind of literature are you finding these in?
I'm interested in learning how scientific they are.
PLATT:
So undefined, mysterious “fields” keep popping up all over in
current scientific literature, which makes me wary. Likewise I’m
suspicious of systems theory, chaos theory, meme theory, and
any other theory that finds its way into cocktail party conversations
or college bull sessions. There are fashions in science that come
and go just as in other disciplines. I’m skeptical of them all, as I
am of pop psychology and New Age divinations.
Glad to hear it.
PLATT:
Which is why I enjoy our exchange, Glenn. Your skepticism of the
MOQ is refreshing on this site.
Thanks, Platt. That's nice to hear, especially since we disagree. You've
been very good about putting up with me.
Glenn
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