Hi Platt
First:
On 31 Aug you said that I had said
> > The MOQ, like any metaphysics, is a map that resides at the
> > intellectual level but at a place higher than the SOM map, enabling us
> > to see SOM's shortcomings.
and commented it this way:
> Bo says the MOQ map is more encompassing and therefore better than
> SOM. Good point. (Suggests to me that SOM is like a 1492 map of the
> world compared to a modern MOQ map.)
Where have you found this? God, did I ever say anything as counter to my
impression of the MOQ? The notion of SOM an old map and the MOQ a
new map, i.e: that intellectual patterns are maps of the real world is what I
have opposed from the very beginning. Please don't spoil my frail
reputation as an original thinker (wry smile).
Second:
On 21 Aug. you wrote:
> It's always a pleasure to read about current affairs and find an
> author supporting the views of the MOQ. An article I happened across
> today not only presented a highly interesting and different approach
> to the war on terrorism, but used a couple of unmistakable MOQ-like
> positions to support the argument. Basically, the author says the
> West is faced with a similar situation to the motivations that
> brought Italy to invade Ethiopia in the 30's, not for the usual
> economic or political advantages, but "to bolster the fascist
> collective fantasy that insisted on casting the Italians as a
> conquering race, the heirs of Imperial Rome." Today, the West faces
> another aberrant "fantasy ideology" that motivates radical Islam.
You are a master of finding interesting issues and of applying the MOQ
to them, and I have been pondering this ever since. I expected a response
from Marco regarding the Italian campaign in Ethiopia - he is equally
masterful of giving us insights into Italy's various "antics" :-)
> The passages that struck me as being right out of the MOQ book are
> as follows:
> "The allusion to William James's famous essay "The Will to Believe"
> is not an accident, for James exercised a profound influence on the
> two thinkers essential to understanding both Italian fascism in
> particular and fantasy ideology in general - Vilfredo Pareto and
> Georges Sorel. All three men begin with the same assumption: If
> human beings are limited to acting only on those beliefs that can be
> logically and scientifically demonstrated, they could not survive,
> simply because this degree of certainty is restricted only to
> mathematics and the hard sciences - which, by themselves, are not
> remotely sufficient to guide us through the world as it exists.
> Hence, human beings must have a large set of beliefs that cannot be
> demonstrated logically and scientifically - beliefs that are
> therefore irrational as judged by the hard sciences."
> Sound familiar--scientific intellect ill-equipped to control
> society?
"Scientific-intellect"? OK, Intellect is most distinctly expressed through
science, but there is only one intellectual level and as the value above
Society it is the only one equipped to control society (social value).
> "There is one decisive advantage to the "evildoer" metaphor, and it
> is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not
> make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make
> them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers'
> point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or
> reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to
> vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner
> that you would deal with a fatal epidemic - you try to wipe it out.
> So perhaps it is time to retire the war metaphor and to deploy one
> that is more fitting: the struggle to eradicate disease. The fantasy
> ideologies of the twentieth century, after all, spread like a virus
> in susceptible populations: Their propagation was not that suggested
> by John Stuart Mill's marketplace of ideas - fantasy ideologies were
> not debated and examined, weighed and measured, evaluated and
> compared. They grew and spread like a cancer in the body politic.
> For the people who accepted them did not accept them as tentative or
> provisional. They were unalterable and absolute. And finally, after
> driving out all other competing ideas and ideologies, they literally
> turned their host organism into the instrument of their own
> poisonous and deadly will."
> Here the connection to the MOQ should be transparent. But for those
> who may have forgotten, here's the pertinent quote from LILA,
> Chap.24:
> "Intellectuals must find biological behavior, no matter what its
> ethnic connection, and limit or destroy destructive biological
> patterns with complete moral ruthlessness, the way a doctor destroys
> germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization
> itself."
The above LILA quote is about the university professors who, in their effort
to objectivise (read:excuse) the criminals, joined forces with biology and thus
threatened the social order. Now, I believe that we have previously agreed
on an intellect vs society interpretation of the development that
climaxed on Sep.11, and you seem to agree with that, but to see the
counter-strike as a society vs biology struggle isn't fully consistent?
If we compare the two situations, the intellectuals are "the West" and
radical Islam becomes the defenders of "social order". The
terror attack is then to be compared with a situation if the campus society
attacked the intellectuals! In the LILA quote the "biological
behavior" that the intellectuals must find and destroy ...etc. is
rather to be compared to the disorder that the Islamic fundamentalist
fear that liberalism will release on THEM. But now,
unless it's my turn to end up in a dispute with Platt, I'll
better explain.
The above is the MOQ explanation, but neither party knows about that.
The West sees a backward culture with some fanatics who have found an
enemy in free trade and USA's military presence, and they in turn look upon
the said "freedom" as an undermining of "Umma" (God's order) and the US
bases a sacrilege.
Back in the MOQ view the "war on terror" is a Western (US) retreat to the
same (social) plane as the terrorists, but Intellect isn't far away (the rights of
the prisoners at Guantanamo soon became an issue for instance). One may
imagine an ideal situation where the West solely trusted Intellect's
superiority, yet stopped imposing its "gospel" on cultures not ripe for them,
but its own social "giant" must be appeased.
Bo
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