From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Feb 15 2003 - 20:08:41 GMT
Platt and all:
To dismiss Socialism, Platt quoted RMP:
"What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth-century
faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is disastrously
naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in which everyone without coercion
cooperates
happily with everyone else for the mutual good of all is a devastating
fiction." -- Robert M. Pirsig.
DMB says:
I think Platt reads this quote too narrowing. He uses it to undermine his
political enemies, but this is a case of severe underemployment. Its like
using a rocket surgeon to wait on tables. It not only undermines the
presumptions of "commies", but of modernity itself. The quote is about one
of the central problems of SOM, namely its blindness to the power and
necessity of the social level. So the quote is really about something much
bigger and broader than Platt imagines and effects a much wider range of
political beliefs than he suggests. Campbell recognizes the same problem.
Check it out.
"Since about the year 1914 there has been evident in our progressive world
an increasing disregard and even disdain for those ritual forms that once
brought forth, and up to now have sustainded, this infinitely rich and
fruitfully developing civilization. There is a ridiculous nature-boy
sentimentalism that with increasing force ts taking over. Its beginning
dates back to the eighteeth century of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, with its
artificial back-to-nature movements and conception of the Noble Savage.
Americans abroad, from the period of Mark Twain onward, have been notortious
exemplars of the ideal, representing as conspicuously as possible the
innocent belief that Europeans, living in older and stuffier enviroments,
should be refreshed and wakened to their own natural innocencies by the
unadulterated boorishness of a product of God's Counrty, our sweet American
soil, and our Bill of Rights. In Germany, between the wars, the WANDERVOGEL,
with their knapsacks and guitars, and the later Hitler Youth, were
representatives of this reactionary trend in modern life. And now, (1971)
right here in God's Country itself, idyllic scenes of barefoot white and
black "Indians" camping on our sidewalks with their tomstoms, bedrolls, and
papooses are promising to turn entire sections of our cities into fields for
anthropological research. For, as in all societies, so among these, there
are distinguishing costumes, rites of initiation, required beliefs, and the
rest. They are here, however, explicitly reactionary and reductive, as
though in the line of biological evolution one were to regress from the
state of the chimpanzee to that of the starfish or even amoeba. The
complexity of social patterning is rejected and reduced, and with that, life
freedom and force have been not gained but lost." Joseph Campbell
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