From: Arlo Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Wed Dec 08 2004 - 16:39:33 GMT
Platt, Anyone else who may be interested...
Platt, you've made the statement many times that terrorism is a biological
level value. That is, confronting terrorists with military action is in
fact confronting biological level patterns with social level patterns.
Something about this does not seem right to me. In the Pirsig citations, he
equates the sexual revolution with biological quality, and this I
understand because "sex" does have biological quality. What I don't see is
how terrorism has biological quality? Or, how does terrorism increase
biological quality? Sex certainly does, as most would agree having sex is a
pleasurable, biological experience. Society "repressses" this biological
quality out of fear of overpopulation, a breakdown of patriarchal lineages,
etc. Alcohol and drug use, I can see the argument being made, are
biological level values, because their use is pleasurable on the biological
level. Again, society repressses drug and alcohol use out of concern that
addiction leads to crime, inebriation leads to accidents, etc. So, again,
with these I can see the conflict as biological-social.
But with terrorism, who could say that participating in terrorist
activities increases biological quality? If anything, I'd be immediately
tempted to say that "terrorism" is a social-level value masquarading as an
intellectual level value. Or that the conflict between terrorism and "us"
is a conflict between two opposing static social patterns. You could
certainly argue that of these two social patterns, one has more quality
because of its openness to Intellectual quality and DQ.
What is biological about terrorism? To take the example of a car-bomber,
what about that activity could be seen as a biological level quality?
Indeed, I'd have to say that for that individual, they have to make a very
UN-biological quality decision, and that their (mis)guidance comes from
adherence to static social patterns, or perhaps what I would see
(personally, in the case of suicide bombers) as low-quality intellectual
patterns. But biological? Can you explain that more?
Arlo
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