Jon, Platt, Elliot and Y'all:
JM said:
Yes, I also find it amusing. I was tempted to take Dave's list and put
philosophy on the left and philosophology on the right, but ...
DMB:
OK. I guess my "thinking about thinking" thought isn't working very well. At
this point it has become a distraction and a hinderance, so I'll simply
abandon that approach. Let me try it another way. But first, just one of the
distractions...
JM said:
Sorry to mock you, Dave.... Dave, you appear to take this same holier than
though attitude in your posts to this forum.
DMB:
Quite alright. Mock away - as long as its a sincere criticism. But I have to
say that my "attitude" is irrelevant. You know. It has nothing to do with
the validity of the assertions. To parphrase Pirsig, saying Joe is crazy
tells us nothing about whether its night or day. As a matter of fact, I see
lots of false humility around here and it bugs me, but its just not
relevant, so I usually remain silent on the matter. Finally, I'd just point
out that the MOQ is a hierarchy of moral values, with one level being more
moral than the next, so its pretty easy to come off as "holier than thou"
when advocating such a system. Pirsig talks quite a bit about excellence in
ZAMM too. So please, gimme some slack on this one. I mean, who doesn't think
the best is best?
Now on to the actual topic; the distinction between social level thinking
and intellectual level thinking. Let's start with the first word many of us
learn as children; "no". Even this is an abstraction. A pre-verbal infant
could just scream and cry to express displeasure, but the ability to say
"no" is distinctly different. Its a symbol. Its a phonetic representation of
the little one's will. This is the very beginning of basic language. Its a
symbolic act that is pretty clearly NOT intellectual. Moving now to the
other end of the spectrum, to some of the most advanced social level
thinking, there is the case of dogmatic and mythic refusal to accept the
astronomical findings of Galileo...
I forget the man's name, but the "reasons" for rejecting what Galileo said
he saw were very sophisticated, were uttered by one of the most educated and
powerful figures of his day, and yet those reasons would seem completely
irrational to a modern mind. Galileo had insisted that he saw moons in orbit
around one of the planets. I think it was Jupiter. In any case, the
authority figure who denounced that observation said that it was impossible
for there to be any more planets than were already known at the time, the
number of which was seven. (Clearly he didn't understand the difference
between moons and planets either.) He "reasoned" that there since we have
seven holes in our heads, there can only be seven planets. At the time it
was believed that "as above, so below", that everything on earth is a
microcosm of what is in heaven. And so, the number of holes in your head HAD
to be the same as the number of planets in the heavens, and the same number
of heavens in the cosmos, etc.
Clearly, anyone who tried to make such an arguement today would be trucked
off to a nuthouse or a home for the feeble minded. And the point is that
Galileo's critic was using words, sentences and was otherwise engaged in
using symbolic abstractions. He could speak and write about as well as
anyone in that time, but it was not intellectual. It was mythic. It was
social level thinking. His "reasons" were confirmed by what all the best
"thinkers" believed at the time. It even has a certain kind of logic to it.
The difference between him and us is that he didn't have access to logic and
rational thinking as we understand it today. He couldn't very well think
about what he was thinking. He just knew that he knew what was true. I'm
sure he wrote a long essay detailing all the reasons why Galileo was wrong
and that such things just couldn't be true. But to those of us who have
access to critical thinking, the case he made would seem totally idiotic and
incomprehensible.
To begin thinking about thinking we start to ask questions like; How do you
know everthing on earth is a microcosm? Where'd you get that idea? To which
Galileo's critic would probably answer that, "It is written in the Bible" or
otherwise refer to "revealed" truth, to some mythic truth. This is the kind
of thinking that was rejected in the Enlightenment and the questioning of
such assumptions was the beginning of the formation of the scientific
method.
Of course the rejection of this social level thinking goes way back to those
rare gems like Buddha, Socrates and Jesus. The latter is supposed to have
said that "the rain falls upon the just and unjust alike". I'm sure today's
fundamentalists would have a different view of such a statement, but at its
heart it is a rejection of mythic thinking. He was saying that weather
conditions have nothing to do with your moral status. At a time when wars,
natural disasters and prosperity were seen as punishments and rewards from
God for a people's virtue or lack thereof, this was a damn radical idea.
Now, its clear that the old myths don't carry the same weight as they once
did and we have a whole new set of rationalized myths. But even with all
that, there are still millions of people who utterly reject the theory of
evolution in favor of a biblical version of creation. Likewise, there are
millions who support the modern state of Israel because they think its
necessary for Jesus' second coming. These people engage in all kinds of
sophisticated "reasoning" about Darwin's theory and about American foreign
policy in the middle-East. They even try, to a certain extent when pressed,
to think about what they're thinking, but they just can't rightly do it.
That's social level thinking. And its no accident that these same people are
very often hostile to intellectuals, they're often rabidly
anti-intellectual. They tend to view ignorance and "common sense" as a
virtue. "Salt of the earth" "Couldn't be a nicer guy" "Down to earth" is the
description they give to each other, as if ignorance was something to be
proud of. These people are a drag on human evolution. And if they win, we
lose. This is just one of the reasons why I think this issue is worth
sorting out. Learning to see the difference between social and intellectual
modes of thinking matters a great deal.
Thanks for your time,
DMB
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