From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Oct 13 2002 - 01:25:35 BST
Sam and all:
Sam said:
Don't read too much into the Bible gateway site that I link to; it's simply
a place for me to look up Bible verses in different translations. Anything
beyond that I've never explored; I guess from what you say that it's
fundamentalist, but do you really think that's where I'm coming from?
DMB says:
I'm still trying to figure out where you're coming from. Why do you look up
bible verses in different languages? Do you believe it is the word of God?
That would explain alot, I suppose. I'm curious.
Sam said:
But I'm happy to get stuck into a more MoQ focussed discussion; hovering in
the background to what I wrote was a "we disagree about Pirsig" element,
which, to be fair Platt has already done much in articulating. But perhaps
it's worth me having a go as well.
DMB:
MOQ focused discussions? Yeah! Yahoo! Finally. But just for the record, I
think Platt is usually as wrong as wrong can be.
Pirsig writes: "What the Metaphysics of Quality concludes is that the old
Puritan and Victorian social codes should not be followed blindly, but
should not be attacked blindly either. They should be dusted off and
re-examined, fairly and impartially, to see what they were trying to
accomplish and what they actually *did* accomplish toward building a
stronger society." This comes a short distance after Pirsig has said "We are
living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and social
nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to
become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's role in
keeping the biological level under control. Intellectuals have failed to
understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly being
suppressed by social order."
Sam says:
To my way of reading him, Pirsig is saying that social institutions need to
be examined at the intellectual level to establish which are worth keeping,
and which we are able to discard. It would be stretching the point to say
that Pirsig subscribes to Conservatism, but it seems clear to me that he is
allowing the possibility of some form of Conservatism at the intellectual
level along the lines I have described (especially the bit: 'Intellectuals
have failed to understand....' which could be seen as something of a
Conservative mantra.)
DMB says:
I think that's about right. It would be a stretch to call the author a
Conservative. It would be confusing too. There is a kind of small "c"
conservative that is seperate from the political ideology and that respects
tradition. Before I was introduced to the MOQ, I used to call myself a
radical traditionalist. Its about having respect for what has come before
without being bound by it. And I'd love to get to the dusting-off part, the
reintegration part, but I think we're not ready for that yet. I mean, if we
can't agree about what belongs to these two conflicting levels first, such
re-examination is bound to be a bloody mess. (By "we" I mean this forum, not
just you and I.
Sam quotes from ZMM:
It chimes with something he writes in ZMM also, when he is talking about
individual Quality (ie character): "I think it's about time to return to the
rebuilding of *this* American resource - individual worth. There are
political reactionaries who've been saying something close to this for
years. I'm not one of them, but to the extent they're talking about real
individual worth and not just an excuse for giving more money to the rich,
they're right. We *do* need a return to individual integrity, self-reliance
and old-fashioned gumption. We really do."
And then Sam said:
I imagine that you will say Pirsig is not describing a Conservative attitude
here, but if so, we may simply end up with an argument about words, whereby
you *define* Conservative as exclusively social level, and presumably come
up with some other word to describe what Pirsig is here referring to. At
which point there isn't much left to discuss. That which I think
Conservatism seeks to fight for - an examination of social level
institutions and a preservation of those with high quality; an emphasis upon
self-reliance and ""traditional values"" - is, on my way of reading things,
something which Pirsig allows for in the MoQ. I'd be interested to know why
you disagree with my reading of Pirsig on these points.
DMB says:
Well, there you go. Pirsig says its "political reactionaries" who've been
saying something CLOSE to this and that he's "not one of them". The fact
that he can nearly agree with what they've been saying doesn't undo his
deliberate attempt to distance himself from political reactionaries.
(Interesting that this same sentiment is still expressed all the time and is
considered merely Conservative rather than reactionary. Tells us a little
about how much we've moved to the right since ZMM was written.) But more to
the point and your question, I don't have any problem with integrity,
self-reliance or gumption. Those are slam-dunk no-brainers and so the whole
issue strikes me as uninteresting. I mean who wants to be a dishonest
deadbeat with no ambition or passion? Nobody I've ever met, or heard of. And
as Pirsig also pionts out, political reactionaries say things that sound
good, but they often say them for undisclosed reasons like giving more money
to the rich. This duplicity is what I find so infuriating about today's
Conservatives. Try getting into a discussion with them about rights and
it'll usually turn to talk of guns and money, the only rights they seem to
recognize with any consistency. See, I worked in talk radio for a number of
years, a medium that is almost entirely dominated by Conservatives. I
learned all about how they operate, how they play the rhetorical game. And
so when posters here parrot the standard Conservative talking points without
any explanation or qualification, its very hard for me do believe that any
thought has gone into it or that it has any real value. Platt, for example,
hardly ever says anything that I haven't already heard hundreds of times on
talk radio. Which, as you can imagine, strikes me as not only stupid and
lazy, but also is totally boring.
Please, tell me somthing new.
DMB
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