RE: MD Disastrously naive indeed!

From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Sat Feb 22 2003 - 21:01:07 GMT

  • Next message: johnny moral: "Re: MD Making sense of it (levels)"

    Hi DMB, Sam and Platt, too.

    I'll go further out on the limb in my email Platt before responding to
    Platt's critiques, which I want to think about a little more. My assertion
    was that the levels can be differentiated mainly by the physical scale that
    the patterns exist at, as opposed to by whether we think they are cool or
    not, or whether we consider something an idea as opposed to an instinctual
    thought.

    Sam said:
    Good point about celebrity though - that's an aspect of the social level
    which doesn't fall naturally into a description of ritual. There must be
    others, also centring on social roles.

    I humbly assert:
    Using my scale concept (which I don't believe is to be found in Lila),
    celebrity acts on a large scale, and the larger the scale, the more the
    celebrity. When people across the country all start gooning out over
    someone, that is a large scale pattern. On a person to person to basis,
    people lose their celebrity. To truly interact with Robert Redford
    socially, you have to stop treating him as a celebrity. Social interactions
    are at a small, person-to-person, scale, whereas intellectual patterns occur
    as patterns on top of people who may have never even met and don't even
    speak the same language.

    DMB says:
    Exactly. The Giant, the city or the nation as a superorganism capable of
    exploitiation, war and genocide, isn't the kind of thing we'd usually
    associate with ritual. But surely this is part of the social level too.

    I'd say surely the Giant is an intellectual pattern. It is a pattern that
    uses society to exist the same way society uses human animals to exist. To
    the extent that society is seen as "the giant" with habits and patterns of
    its own, and we aren't just talking about the inner workings of society
    itself, it is clearly an intellectual pattern. A tendency or habit of
    society that intellectuals have noticed on a wide scale through time and
    space. And to the extent that the Giant can be controlled or steered, it
    would have to be done with Intellectual oversight. Even if the intellectual
    idea is that society is a Giant can't be controlled or steered, the Giant is
    still an intellectual pattern.

    I think these are both attempts to take "bad" things and say "these can't be
    intellectual, they must be social."

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