JONATHAN TRIES TO CLARIFY THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL VALUES AND THE
INTELLECTUAL PROCESS.
Hi Pirsigians,
> All Philosophers: This is a perfect example of what I'm talking about.
> Jonathan's "argument" is entirely free of any intellectual content. It
> deliberately ignores the issues and ideas raised in the genocide
debate
> in favor of mocking disapproval . . .
Maybe I should have avoided the sarcasm - that's not the first time it
misfired!
I apologise to all those who misunderstood my intent.
Dave, I think you missed my point entirely. I've seen everything you've
written, and you clearly don't like the fact that the U.S.A. decided to
use atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. No problem with that.
What I object is the way you dismiss Truman's decision because (as you
put it on 17 July):
>there was no valid intellect involved in the decision to
>bomb the Japanese cities. IMO the act was based on
>social level values in spite of the fact that the weapon
>used was highly scientific and intellectual . . .
[snip]
>To oversimplify for the sake of brevity and clarity, it is my
>view that the atomic bombing of Japan was based on
>Victorian fascist social values, ignored the new intellecual
>values, and was, therefore, immoral
It seems to me that Dave's objection to the bombings is based on equally
social ANTI-fascist values. Intellect operates on a base of social
values - it has to.
Pirsig says: (Lila Ch. 12):
"The intellectual level of patterns, in the historic process of freeing
itself from its parent social level, namely the church, has tended to
invent a myth of independence from the social levels for its own benefit
..."
>From a social point of view, (looking from the bottom as Roger would
say), Intellect is a just PROCESS, a means for sorting out and
arbitrating between social values. For the intellect, Social values are
just data.
Dave says that Truman's data processing was invalid, but from reading
his posts, it is clear that he thinks that Truman was using bad data
(incorrect social values).
This division between data and process has its uses, even in the MoQ. BO
has equated the "Subject-Object" logic process with the Intellectual
level (his SOLAQI idea), and I agree that SO-logic is a major component.
But I believe that Pirsig and other philosophers also tell us that the
data vs. process division is itself "value-laden". Attempts to isolate
the intellect from social values, while an essential tool, can lead to
absurdity if made absolute.
One example I've been thinking about is the Louise Woodward trial that
hit the news last year. Ms. Woodward was a nanny found guilty by a
Massachusetts jury of MURDERING the child in her care. By some absurdity
of the Mass. legal PROCESS, the jury was given no access to a more
lenient "manslaughter" verdict. IMO the jury's moral integrity is beyond
question, but the process appears to have led to a screwy result.
Fortunately for Ms. Woodward, the Judge was allowed to take the highly
unusual step of setting aside the jury's verdict and imposing his own. I
understand that most people think he did the right thing - certainly the
US appeals system concurred.
Not many legal systems have such a fail-safe, and in this case its value
became very clear. Basically, the system says that justice demands
strict adherence to the process, following steps A to Z, but if at the
end the result looks wrong it can be overridden!!!! I suppose that the
"MoQ" justification is that no system should be so rigid as to disallow
an innovative (DYNAMIC) solution to an unexpected problem. That's called
being open minded. However, the MoQ also tells us that excessive
deviations from static rules leads to chaos - one shouldn't be so open
minded that one's brains fall out:-).
What the MoQ doesn't tell us is where to draw the line.
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