From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Thu Feb 27 2003 - 19:35:14 GMT
Platt said to me:
>do-gooders are always suspicious characters in my book.
Do-gooders to me are people who have torn apart "should". People who think
there is a difference between what we ought to do, and what we probably will
do if just left to ourselves. Now, that doesn't mean I think things should
never change, but there are static patterns that overlay other static
patterns and change them "within the Tao" as CS Lewis says. There are
mechanisms for change that are in themselves expected patterns.
Pirsig says that the social level comes down to the policeman preventing
biological crimes. But I don't think that is exactly right. I think the
idea that society needs police to enforce laws is an intellectual idea,
because it is obviously about society. Someone had to think on a slightly
larger scale before anyone became a policeman, looking both further into the
future and further down the street. Vigilantism on the other hand is social
idea, it is done on a person to person scale, right here and right now.
Pirsig puts murder in the biolgical, but I see murder, along with deciding
not to murder someone, as social. 'Thou Shalt Not Kill' is intellectual, as
it is about society (and note that it only DESCRIBES an existing propensity
to not murder). The hunger that drives a murderer is biological, but not
the murder itself.
Now, by saying social is person-to-person patterns, I would seem to be
putting sex into the social level, when reproduction is clearly biological.
But individuals are really only half-human, as we each represent only half
of our sexual species, and a man-woman pairing is really the smallest single
unit of humanity. So understood that way, sex becomes not a
person-to-person pattern, but a pattern that takes place in one unit of
humanity and therefore stays in the biological realm. An individual doesn't
reproduce, after all, a man-woman unit does, creating children that are half
father and half mother.
Johnny
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