From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun Nov 24 2002 - 19:48:19 GMT
Sam, Lawry, Platt and y'all:
From chapter 17: "When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as
inventions of "man" but as higher organisms than biological man, the
phenomenon of war and genocide and all the other forms of human
ex[ploitation become more intelligible. "Mankind" has never been interested
in getting itself killed. But the superorganism, the Giant, who is a pattern
of values superimposed on top of biological human bodies, doesn't mind
losing a few bodies to protect his greater interest.
Lawry said:
My thought, centrally, is this: that within the strengths that create empire
and preeminence, often lie the seeds of eventual weakness and failure. To
simplify: those who build and run empires come to believe their own
propaganda: they come to believe that they are intrinsically superior to all
others, and that their preeminence is theirs by right. They develop an
overweening arrogance and growing ignorance, ignorance based on their
assumption that they have nothing left to learn. Their power, they believe,
will be sufficient to keep them in power.
DMB says:
Gents, let us think about genocide, war, and empire. Perhaps Sam's question
concerning the "worst thing" thing about 9/11 might be illuminated by an
exploration of this topic. I think Platt's Sunday post about "A Moral
Reckoning" touches on this too. I mean, if the Catholic church, an
organization that is supposedly a bastion of morality, can comply with or
engage in genocide... Well, God help us all.
Pirsig's idea that the social level is better understood as a giant
superorganism really works for me. I've come to see things this way and
recognize it all the time when I read the news and such. A book review in
the current issue of THE NATION caught my eye. The book is called, WAR IS A
FORCE THAT GIVES US MEANING. But don't the title fool you. The author, Chris
Hedges, does not celebrate war nor is he a pacifist. As the reviewer puts
it, Hedges "seeks to identify universal factors that drive people to engage
in and, more important, to embrace and find virtue in war, despite the often
devastating implications". The author is a veteran journalist who's seen a
variety of conflicts up close and personally. He was in El Salvador, the
Gulf, the former Yugoslavia during the wars there and detected certain
commonalities. From his descriptions, I think its pretty clear how the
"Giant" works in terms of the actual individuals involved.
The reviewer says, "All wars, even those waged by sides he supports, are
based on national myths, most of which are, at their core, racist. They are
racist in that they assert the inherent goodness of "us" and the evil of
"them". This black and white thinking allows us to kill the enemy without
conscience, while celbrating our success in slaying without mercy those who
oppose us." He quotes from the book, "Thus killing is done in our name,
killing that concerns us little, while those who kill our own are seen as
having crawled out of the deepest recesses of the earth, lacking our own
humanity and goodness".
If this doesn't remind you of Dubya, then you're just not paying attention.
("You're either with us or you're against us" "The axis of evil" "We're
gonna smoke em outta their caves") At a time when we desperately need to
transcend these kinds of social level values, we're being dragged back down
into this hell. This black and white mythical thinking is part of the
cultural immune system and its part of what holds a culture together.
The reveiwer goes on. "The myths of war are part of a larger ideological
repertoire. All groups, especially nations, have them, often centered around
their creation. We, too, in the United States struggle with such myths, says
the author, only grudgingly admitting, for example, that the country's
founding fathers were slave owners and that its territorial expanse entailed
genodie against the native population. There is a tendency among nationalist
to see the world as we like, what Hedges calls "mythic reality". It is a
tendency that war increases even as it silences those on the political
margins who think independently while destroying a society's "authentic
culture", which permits us to examine ourselves and our society critically.
In its stead, the state rushes in to create a new culture, an unquestioning
one infused with empty symbols, patriotic songs and sentimental drivel."
Hedges says that this kind of patriotic nationalism is "often a thinly veild
form of collective self-sorship that celebrates our goodness, our ideals,
our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us". And he
points out how we tend to forget or downplay our nasty surrogates like the
Shah of Iran of Zaires's Mobutu. "Such facts do not register prominently in
the national memory as we edit out unpleasantries in constructin our
self-definition. We thus often becomes as deaf and dumb as those we condemn,
even though we have our own terroritst - such as the Nicaraguan contras and
the late Jonas Savimbi, whom Ronald Reagan referred to as the Abraham
Lincoln of Angola. (Reagan also refered to the contras as the moral
equivilant of the founding fathers.) The Reagan years, he says, helped to
resurrect the "plague of nationalism" after it was discredited by the war in
Veitnam. As a result, "the infection of nationalism now lies unchecked and
is blindly accepted in the march we make as a naton toward another war." As
you may have guessed Hedges is referring to Bush's push for war with Iraq.
So how is it that people buy into this mythic nonsense? The reviewer says,
"Like the state, the media invoke the language or moral certitude,
presenting the state's mission in almost sacred terms - for Hedges, a type
of fundamentalism. The author sees the tendency within modern society to
turn away from institutions outside the state for moral and spiritual
guidance as facilitation "the cause". Instead, we increasingly and
dangerously turn to the state and its institutions during war, with many
effectively worshipping them" (The talking heads on FOX news said that Bush
rose to the occasion so well after the 9/11 attacks because "god is on our
side". I kid you not. So-called journalist actually said that on national
television and they were deadly serious.) The author concludes that the only
way to start healing is to recognize our role in these tragedies. He says,
part of that repentance involves the struggle to bring the truth of the past
to light. "In order to escape the miasma of war there must be some partial
rehabilitation, some recognition of the denial and perversion, some new way
given to speak that lays bare the myth as fantasy and the cause as
bankrupt". And I'd like to suggest that Pirsig's MOQ can serve that purpose.
His idea of the social level as a superorganism that doesn't mind losing a
few bodies is a new way to reveal the bankruptcy of these myths and his
intelllectual level is the means by which this kind of nationalism can be
transcended.
God bless America, ;-)
DMB
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