From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Aug 30 2004 - 03:03:05 BST
DMB and all:
There's no point in responding to DMB's long diatribe impugning my motives
and questioning my intelligence. Sadly, his hatred of President Bush and
the current administration has not only brought out his mean streak, but
has also loosened his grip on reality. Case in point, his version of
Pirsig's view of conservatism:
> dmb replies:
> To be generous, Pirsig's respect for tradition and the accomplishments of
> the social level does make him a conservative in some sense of the word,
> the best sense of the word. But his stance is very far from the American
> conservatives of today, who are rightly described by Pirsig as
> neo-Victorian reactionaries, exploitive capitalists, church bigots and
> ignorant hicks. I know that's harsh, but these are the demographic
> realities of the Republican party and Pirsig's own admittedly insulting
> terms.
Pirsig never described conservatives in the terms DMB seems to think he
did. In fact, here's what Pirsig really said:
"The MOQ supports both conservatism and liberalism at the same time.
Freedom and order are contradictory but both are necessary at the same
time." (LS, Note 180)
And, lest we forget, Pirsig also said:
"It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than
socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are
less moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise system
superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively,
have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and
selling of things." (Lila, 17)
I don't think DMB will ever get over the fact that Pirsig called the free
enterprise system superior to socialism.
Platt
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