Wim wrote....
Dear David B.,
Nice saga (2/3 20:19 -0700). I read the whole bloody mess as required. But
what should I write that five-page report about by tomorrow morning? I could
applaud it (hereby), but that doesn't take me 5 pages.
It doesn't contain any questions or controversial statements, not even
hidden at the end as I expected from past experience with your postings :-).
With friendly greetings,
Wim
DMB writes back...
Dearest Wim N.
I'm charmed by your applause, but you're not off the hook yet. Now you must
write a ten-page report praising my skill as a typist - or else. :-) It's
true. I let Joe and his friends do most of the talking last time. Thought it
was best to just put it out there with a minimum of commentary. Its true. I
asked no questions, but I hope it raised lots of them for you. I didn't make
any controversial statements because I've noticed that people tend to ignore
and forget things that offend. Its those static filters at work, I
guess.(This seems like an unlikely forum for thin-skinned philosophers. I
really don't get that. I find disagreement and criticism exhilarating, but
that's another topic.)But since you asked, let me say that the main point of
that epic post was this: Pirsig's description of the battle between social
and intellectual values is a great historic moment widely recognized by all
the best thinkers. Grasping the enormity and complexity of that moment
requires a careful examination of what we're leaving behind. And that the
social level is rich enough to be the parent of both SOM and the MOQ. And
even though I did not explicitly use it to dispute any specific claims made
by any MOQers, the contradictions are there. For example, you said to
Roger...
Wim...
I agree with you (2/3 19:56 -0500) that the social level is 'about social
interaction and working together and roles and status and division of
labor.' The social level indeed 'does involve a contest between the group
and the individual.'
DMB goes on...
I wouldn't really dispute or disagree to the point of saying you and Roger
are wrong, but I think those kinds of observations are so superficial that
they do not help us to understand anything at all about the MOQ. "Working
together and roles and status and division of labor" are all completely
obvious even to SOMers. The debate about how science is socially derived
seemed to turn on the funding of scientific institutions and whether or not
the physicist in question was socially sanctioned. There no nice way to say
it; that was just even more shallow. I hope those quotes from Campbell and
his friends show that SOM can be traced back to social level values
contained in the mythos. I hope they show that the mythos is much larger,
more subtle and complex than mere institutions or governments. Erin's post
on Jung went along way toward showing that the mythos, which includes
archetypes and the collective unconscious, has a profound impact on the
psychological make up of each and every one of us, including physicists.
(Thanks Erin.) Think of it this way: The mythos is bigger than every
culture, every religion, every society and every human being that has ever
existed. The mythos is bigger than all that put together. Each culture and
religion reflects only a tiny fraction of the total mythos. And Pirsig said
something like, "if you think you're outside of the mythos, then you don't
understand what it is. Its impossible."
I didn't mention 3WD or the "rights" debate explicitly either, but hoped it
would shed some light there too. On 2/18 3WD wrote...
Unfortunately the AMONG left the door open for both Governments and
People to "misconstrued rights" in both "arbitrary and tyrannical"
ways.
And he added some specific examples of this tyranny....
And this process continues with Civil "rights", both sides of Abortion
"rights", Child "rights", Education "rights", Animal "rights", Plant
"rights", the "rights" to clean air, water, land, and tommorrow the
"unalienable" right of all to have a 24 hour a day accessible public
toilet with scented Charmin..... in your house.
DMB....
What I see here is a fierce set of static filters, a ferocious karma dump
and some rather empty political sloganeering. (This is the stuff I made into
a bombastic stage play, which seemed like a suitable way to respond because
it left 3WD taking a dump on the bill of rights in a dark corner with his
gun. Hopefully that was more amusing than offensive to everyone except the
target of such crude humor.) I hoped yesterday's description of the end of
the horse age would shed some light on rights for Dave and everyone else
too. Here's how...
It seems to me that issues like animal's rights and plant's rights, if there
is such a thing as rights for plants, come out of the confusion wrought by
modernity's disassociation from nature. Although 3WD doesn't mention
feminism or women's rights, I think that is also connected to the end of the
horse age insofar as it was a patriarchal culture. I don't know that the
wish for clean air and water is being presented by anyone as a right, but I
suppose it ought to be. Again, this issue has alot to do with the alienation
from nature, a hostility to nature that is a feature of that same Sun/Steed
culture. The wish is be responsible stewards of the earth is a resurgence of
some of the values of the mother goddess (Gaia) culture. But of course
real rights, as Pirsig describes them, are designed to protect the
intellectual level values from social values. They're not supposed to
suppress some cultural values at the expense of other cultural values.
That's not the assertion of rights, its just a kind of non-shooting war.
(This is the same reason I disagreed with rick about the common law
tradition as a source for rights. We can't easily imagine without common law
as a basis, but the simple fact is that those traditions were rarely aimed
at protecting intellectual freedom and were developed locally and
organically rather than universally and in a principled way.) Real rights
don't have anything to do with toilet paper, scented or otherwise.
These are just some of the issues that I hoped to get at with yesterday's
post. How's that for controversy?
DMB
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