Denis David and Y'all:
THE SOCIAL LEVEL IS FULL OF USEFUL INFORMATION.
Its a very curious exercise to examine conversations about sports,
weather and small injuries for their intellectual content. Looking at
language is bound to be fruitful because it's common to both the social
and intellectual levels. You seem to suggest that conversation is
intellectual to the extent that information is exchanged, but I'd simply
point out that lots of information is exchanged on the social level too,
its just a different kind, with a different purpose. Recall Pirsigs
description of pre-historical societies? Everything was ritual. Learning
to get food, clothing and shelter was done by ritual. They manufactured
weapons, built houses, no doubt they had different kinds of outfits for
the various members of the society. They had "technology" in that sense,
but it was trasmitted by ritual, by demonstration and without
blueprints. The exchange of information is not exclusively intellectual.
That's another thing the two top levels have in common, they both convey
meaning.
WHY ARE INTELLECTUALS SO DAMN RUDE?
You ought to be nice to your baker. Make small talk if it puts some one
at ease. If we are going to live together we've got to get along. This
is good, but its not intellectual. I dare say intellectual integrity can
suffer in our attempts to get along. Pirsig rails against his fraternity
brothers who would sell their brains to corporations. It represents the
degeneracy of dragging a one level's values down into lowers ones.
Remember Pirsig wouldn't sell ZAMM to Redford? He reasoned that his book
is intellectual, but movies are a social medium, so selling the rights
would be immoral and degernerate. If corporate chemists and Robert
Redford movies are social, then talking football is very far from
intellectual. See it doesn't have much to do with the topic of the
conversation, the level of education or intelligence of those doing the
talking. The difference between social and intellectual levels is the
distinctly seperate values they represent.
HOW ARE YOU DOING TODAY?
Remember when Lila and the Captain go into New York city together? They
enter the Giant. They are both dealing on a social level, but she's
hanging out with her old pimp and the Captian is meeting with a movie
star. That's a huge range. Everybody involved in those two
conversations, at the pimp's bar and the author's hotel room, was trying
to get something. But what a difference! Biologically oriented Lila
suggested terrible crimes to Jamie, ran out of food and medicine, got
caught in the rain, and her encounter with the Giant just about
destroyed her. The Captian, who is undoubtedly intellectual, handles the
Giant much better, He's a celebrity in his own right, he's wealthy, he
has reserved some shelter for the night. And in the end he was
strengthened enough by the encounter that he could help Lila and sail
off into the Ocean. Pimps and movie stars! Not bad for a philosophy
book!
CAUGHT IN THE CROSSFIRE!
On one side is biology. Its supposed to be controlled by society. So we
have rituals at birth, marriage cermonies, funerals at the end of life,
prayers and rituals at mealtime and even in the kitchen, and lots of
other forms surrounding our biological functions. There are rites and
rituals most occupations too. Pirsig points out that this kind of
organization actually has a liberating effect, freeing the organism from
the pressures of survival alone in the wild. Pirsig says the
Enlightenment notion that "Man is born free, yet everywhere he is in
chains" simply isn't true. SOM goes along with this mistaken notion,
believeing that societies are created by the mind of man, instead of the
other way around. SOM does not recognize the vaildity of the social
level and its power to restrain brute biological forces. The problem
with SOM is that it has caught society in a crossfire. Pirsig says this
is why we've seen such an increase in vice crime, hedonism, consumerism,
etc.
WHAT IS THAT AWFUL SMELL?
Nihilism, cynicism and apathy are cheap these days. Existentail angst is
going for about three cents per ton. SOM is ignorant of the social
level's value, dismissing it as prejudice, superstition and wishful
thinking. That's SOM's biggest mistake because it not only put society
in a deadly and inescapable crossfire, it has caused "the death of God".
Marx is the most obvious example. He was an intellectual who saw
religion as nothing more than an opiate for the masses. Nietszche's
"Geneology of Morals" paints a similar picture. Think about the enormity
of it. All Western cultures believed in the gods or a God and it was the
central organizing priciple and the center of life streaching back tens
of thousands of years, and then in one brief historical moment it was
all shattered. No more creator. No more protector. No more pupose of
meaning. Nothing matters. The terrible secret loneliness of the
twentieth century is the smell of god's rotting corpse.
PREACHERS IN THE PHYSICS LAB?
Absolutely not. Pirsig's paper (SODV) explains what he means by social
level mediation in the scientific method by pointing to Bohr's
Domplimentarity. That's where the "suspended in language" quote comes
from. To simplify it a bit, all four levels are involved; The equipment
and the observers constitute the first two levels, just as in any other
experiment. But the data is then expressed not only with mathematical
equations (intellectual), but also with verbal descriptions. By
re-introducing language as an essential part of the scientific method,
the social level is involved once again. And I'm sure this is just the
beginning. Maybe social level mediation could also include ask questions
about the social and moral implications of our science and technology.
Maybe we need that level simply to ask if we should rather than just if
we can do something. Maybe the social level would prevent certain
technologies from ever leaving the research phase. Maybe it would even
give our machines and bulidings a better aesthetic quality.
But the most important part of the social level mediation would have to
be in our personal lives and in the larger society. We are social
animals after all. And SOM has made us all into feral children. The
impact on individuals is huge. The blind spot isn't just with our
science, its in our psyches too. God should not have died, he should
have kept on evolving like everything else.
Campbell's "Hero with a Thousand Faces" says that the hero myths always
tell the same story. The hero's journey is a symbolic representation of
the psychological road we must all travel in order to be who we really
are. And as the stories go, it hardly matters if you want to or not. We
live out these myths on an unconscious level wether we realize it or
not. We all have these myths within us, just as we all have bones and
kidneys. It is part of our evolutionary heritage. They are social level
static patterns of quality. WE can find these myths expressed in every
time and every culture. The same motifs and scenarios found in these
tales also appear in dreams. They were re-discovered by psychologists,
not theologians or archeologists. Its no accident that Freud could name
neurotic comlpexes after ancient Greek gods and the charcaters in their
plays. (Electra, Oedipus, you know)
OOPs, all out of time...
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