From: hampday@earthlink.net
Date: Wed Aug 17 2005 - 18:47:06 BST
Hi Platt --
I'm pleased to know that you're not really Bob Pirsig playing devil's
advocate and that you're here to stay. I can't imagine why there is such
animosity to your postings, except that a majority of the MD are obviously
left-wingers who want to replace individualism and national pride with an
elitist social order.
Personally, I've seen nothing unreasonable in your responses which are
invariably well articulated and appropriately referenced. Your responses to
the most innane accusations are always graceful and congenial, and you have
somehow managed to humor your accusers far beyond my capacity to do so.
Let's hope that the diatribe over conservative politics is over for now, and
that we can focus on the issues that make the MoQ such a watershed of
philosophical ideas.
> Thanks very much for taking the time and trouble to list all those fine
> references. As for capturing the notice of publishers, you never know
> what's going to intrigue the eye and imagination. There's a little book
> out entitled "On Bullshit" by Harry G. Frankfurt, a retired Princeton
> professor of philosophy that's on the NY Times bestseller list. I bought a
> copy. IMO it's pure bullshit, proving once again it takes one to know one,
> or as we as kids use to say, "A fox smells his own hole first."
I read a review of Frankfurt's "thesis" in the Philadelphia Inquirer not
long ago, which could have spared you the effort. But it does go to show
that, while you can't judge a book by its title, a book will always sell
better with a controversial title. In this case, apparently, the book lived
up to its name.
In my research for an op-ed introduction to multiculturalism, I ran across
this article by Robert Locke which I thought might be of particular interest
you. I'm quoting several paragraphs here, but the entire text (in pdf
format) is accessible at
http://www.suomensisu.fi/kukkiakriittisille/realproblem.html under the title
"The Realm Problem with Multicultualism". To me, it demonstrates that
esthetic values when conceived multicultually (i.e., in the collective
sense) deprive us of the individual freedom that makes art and beauty
"appreciable" in the first place. I see this as an alternative perspective
on Quality that inverts Pirsig's Fourth Level concept. What do you think?
"First used in its present sense by philosopher Immanuel Kant, *Kultur* in
the German is ultimately derived from the same root as the English
agriculture. In its original meaning, it meant what we would now call
self-cultivation, i.e. the cultivation of the individual consciousness
through exposure to the arts. It presumes the idea that the consciousness is
just as worthy of cultivation and perfection as the body. This is why we
insist on a hierarchy of culture, as higher forms of art impart a greater
refinement to the consciousness and give it objects of higher quality on
which to form itself. "Shaping taste" is an extremely superficial way of
describing it, but not misguided. The concept of taste is the tip of a far
more important iceberg, the question what objects this consciousness has
formed itself on and come to be moved by. What attracts it? Garbage, or
things of real quality? This is all motivated, ultimately, by a sense that
what a man's consciousness amounts to is an essential component of what he
amounts to as a human being, what he is worth.
"That this cultivation requires culture, i.e. the property of a community
and not just an individual, is caused by the fact that individuals on their
own cannot sustain culture, one of whose essential attributes is
communication. Therefore culture tends to be the property of groups of
people who communicate with each other, i.e. societies. Nietzsche said a
culture was a group of people who understand each other. Because it takes
time to build up a culture, cultures tend to be the property of groups of
people who have done this for some time, i.e. nations grounded in history.
Because it takes time to learn and requires real, not virtual,
circumstances, individuals tend to belong to only one culture. Because the
upper rungs are hard to reach without the lower, this is especially true in
the case of high culture. The objective of culture is the cultivated person,
what the Germans used to call the gebildete Mensch, the first word having a
root related to "build," also to the German word for education.
"Multiculturalism makes a mockery of this. It asks people who haven't even
learned their own culture yet to learn another. How are students supposed to
learn someone else's culture when they don't yet know what it is to learn a
culture or even to have a culture? It is hard enough to learn one's own, and
probably harder today than it used to be, now that high culture lacks the
authority it once commanded and low culture has exploded in technical
sophistication and ubiquity. More likely, they will learn neither, and their
culture will in fact be the same child-centered commercial pop culture they
came to college with-which is to say, they will have learned nothing, and
probably wasted their only serious chance of a lifetime to do so.
Multiculturalism therefore produces what we can call the default to the
lowest common denominator. It is not a philosophy of freedom of choice; it
is a philosophy that imposes the lowest common denominator on people who
have no choice in the matter.
"Multiculturalism also favors the lowest common denominator because it
throws together people who have no culture or any quality in common. If
everyone is encouraged to embrace wildly different cultures, the common
conversation of culture, that conversation in which people experience the
highest elements of their common humanity through their common experience of
the highest products of human creativity, is broken. People share nothing
but pop-cultural junk. There can be no community of experience, no shared
critical standards, no common memory, no common aspiration. There are just
dozens, if not hundreds, of ghettoes, and it makes no difference if some of
them are gilded."
Essentially yours,
Ham
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