From: ian glendinning (psybertron@gmail.com)
Date: Thu Jul 28 2005 - 06:44:01 BST
Platt, you are infuriating, and you know it.
You also know I'm damn sure, that when Pirsig used that phrase it was
to make the very point Ant et al are making to you.
Course, if you didn't (know it) you'd be amazingly ignorant.
Grrr
Ian.
On 7/28/05, Platt Holden <pholden@sc.rr.com> wrote:
> > Ant McWatt comments:
> >
> > Platt,
> >
> > As killing can also be done for intellectual and social reasons and affects
> > the biological, social and intellectual levels your assumption that it is
> > just limited to the biological level is incorrect. Your parentheses in
> > Pirsig's paragraph (quoted above) therefore distorts the meaning of LILA to
> > fit in with your own low quality biases.
>
> No, just pointing to Pirsig's "low quality biases." Using the example of the
> rise in crime and the riots among blacks in the 60's, he explained why
> liberal intellectuals just didn't get it. Lest you doubt, here's Pirsig
> setting the context:
>
> "Phaedrus remembered a conversation in the early sixties with a University
> of Chicago faculty member who was moving out of the Woodlawn neighborhood
> next to the university. He was moving because CRIMINAL blacks had moved in
> and it had become too dangerous to live there. Phaedrus had said he didn't
> think moving out was any solution.
> "The professor had blown up at him. "What you don't know!" he had said.
> "We've tried everything! We've tried workshops, study groups, councils.
> We've spent years in this. If there's anything we've missed we don't know
> what it is. Everything has failed."
> "The professor added, "You don't understand what a defeat this has been
> for us. It's as though we never even tried." (Lila, 24)
>
> Note the phrase "criminal blacks" which I'm sure Ant and msh find
> ignorantly biased and offensive.
>
> Pirsig then immediately goes on to explain how to deal with criminals.
>
> "Phaedrus had had no answer at the time, but he had one now. The idea that
> BIOLOGICAL CRIMES can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk
> CRIME to death, doesn't work. Intellectual patterns cannot directly
> control biological patterns. Only social patterns can control BIOLOGICAL
> patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and BIOLOGY
> is not words. The instrument of conversation between society and BIOLOGY
> has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun. All the laws of
> history, all the arguments, all the Constitutions and the Bills of Rights
> and Declarations of Independence are nothing more than instructions to the
> military and police. If the military and police can't or don't follow
> these instructions properly they might as well have never been written.
> Phaedrus now thought that part of the professors paralysis was a
> commitment to the twentieth-century intellectual doctrines, in which his
> university has had a prominent role. A second part of the paralysis
> probably came from the fact that the CRIMINALS were black. If it had been
> a group of trash whites moving into the neighborhood, robbing and raping
> and KILLING, the response would have been much fiercer, but when whites
> denounced blacks for robbing and raping and KILLING they left themselves
> open to the charge of racism. In the atmosphere of public opinion of that
> time no intellectual dared to open himself to the charge of being a
> racist. Just the thought of it shut him up tight. Paralysis. (Lila, 24)
>
> Pirsig summed up what happened to the paradise liberal intellectuals
> hoped to create by excusing criminals as victims of society, deserving
> pity and understanding and even celebration, " . . . parties in the
> fifties and sixties full of liberal intellectuals like himself who
> actually admired the criminal types that sometimes showed up." (Lila, 24)
>
> "What's coming out of the urban slums, where old Victorian social moral
> codes are almost completely destroyed, isn't any new paradise the
> revolutionaries hoped for, but a reversion to rule by TERROR, VIOLENCE and
> gang death-the old BIOLOGICAL might-makes-right morality of prehistoric
> brigandage that primitive societies were set up to overcome." (Lila, 24)
>
> Now what was that you were saying about killing not being biological?
>
> As for those books I should read, I guess brother Pirsig should read them,
> too. :-)
>
> Best regards,
> Platt
>
> P.S. Caps added to make plain the connection between crime, killing,
> terror and the biological level in the MOQ.
>
>
>
>
>
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