From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 00:53:18 GMT
Steve asked DMB:
Could you explain how you categorize patterns of value?
DMB says:
I'd be happy to try, but such a task is so large and broad that I'm tempted
to ask you to be more specific. Are you asking how to distinguish one level
from another? So it seems. It would be an unwise use of our time to discuss
the nature of the first two levels because these are fairly obvious. Its
safe to assume everybody knows the difference between rocks and animals, for
example. There is little dispute about this. The trouble begins when we try
to make distinctions between the social and intellectual patterns, no?
One rule of thumb is to ask yourself about the age of the static patterns in
question. If it existed before the ancient Greeks, it is extremely unlikely
that we can rightly categorize it as an intellectual value. If anyone can
think of an exception to this rule, I would be amazed. This rule of thumb
emerges from the fact that the static levels represent an evolutionary
sequence where each level depends upon the previous ones for its existence.
When using this rule, it is important to get a sense of the scale of things
too. Think of the monkey dance, for example. (The very recent "mentality of
apes" post isn't very long. If you havent seen it yet, I'd urge you to take
a look.) There we are looking way, way back into pre-history. As Campbell
paints it, we were dancing like that some 600,000 years ago. The social
level began to evolve a very long time ago. And even if we stretch the birth
date of the intellect back to 1000 BC, we're still talking about half of one
percent of the total arch of human evolution! Intellect is something like
the tip of the iceberg. Beyond our animal selves, something like 99.5
percent of who and what we are is social. In historical terms, intellect is
a brand spanking new, paper thin layer on top of the extremely ancient
social level.
Another way to think about the difference between the social and
intellectual level is to take in the many examples cited in Lila and add
them up. Putting all these examples together creates a picture of two
distinct categories. I find this method to be a little bit more complicated,
but the examples are of actual historical events and actual people, so it
gives us plenty of meat to sink our teeth into.
How is that for starters?
Thanks for your time,
DMB
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