From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 22:06:17 GMT
Dear Sam,
You asked 10 Mar 2003 11:15:06 -0000:
'Would you be happy with the idea that status and celebrity are the best way
to determine social values?'
No, not really. In my dialect of MoQish 'social value' is 'the static value
of social patterns of value', i.e. their stability and versatility. 'Status'
and 'celebrity' enter my picture only when I try to explain the stability
and versatility of social patterns of value: how are these patterns
maintained (latched) in competition with other social patterns of value and
under threat of degeneration into biological patterns of value?
I can't understand 'status' and 'celebrity' as attributes of (social)
patterns (of value), like 'stability' and 'versatility'. They are values in
a subject-object context: attributed by subjects to objects, by people to
other people. The 'fact' that people attribute (different) 'status' and
'celebrity' to (different) other people (as shown in their behavior towards
other people) explains why they copy behavior from some other people and not
from others. If people would copy behavior from whomever they see, stable
patterns of collective behavior couldn't develop. Any accidental or willful
deviation from a pattern would be copied just as much as the original, thus
destroying the pattern.
You wrote 12 Mar 2003 09:04:34 -0000:
'I like your definition of the social level very much (unconscious copying
of behaviour); on the fourth level, I still like my 'eudaimonic' or
'individualistic' conception.'
My definition of the way in which intellectual patterns of value are
maintained (copying of motivations for action) is related to an
'individualistic' understanding of the fourth level: motives define
individuals/persons. People participating in the 4th level are characterized
by the relative consistency of their actions (the behavior they consciously
'own') and by the relative consistency of their explanations (motivations)
for these actions.
I don't call the 4th level 'individual' however, because that would
strengthen the misunderstanding that the 4th level has no 'social' aspects
(in the SOMish sense of the word 'social', not referring to the 3th level).
It has, because motives must be recognized and shared by others to 'work',
to be experienced as 'valid'.
Individuals distinguish themselves from each other by a different choice (of
several items) from the available motivations for action (and thus by
different patterns of action, if they are consistent). Individuals that
choose unavailable ways of motivating their actions are insane and destroy
themselves. They then either 'recreate' a new 'individual' or -if they get
something out of it- they stay insane for some time.
You continued 12 March:
'I doubt it is possible to educate children in "logos" without also
educating them in a "mythos" - even if the mythos is as impoverished as the
Modernist drama of salvation by scientific reasoning. We tell our children
stories; we "show" them stories - and that is the mythos on which their
subsequent thinking is based, I would say.'
Would you call 'the Modernist drama of salvation by scientific reasoning' a
myth?? I thought it was (less tendentiously worded) a high-quality
intellectual pattern of value...
In my experience with my children we show them behavior, we make them copy
behavior, we ask them to motivate their behavior and we teach them how to do
so by motivating own behavior. They learn to think because at first it is
not obvious at all to them why some anwers to 'why do you do that?' are
acceptable to us and others aren't. They have to think to 'get' the pattern
in the way we motivate our behavior. Telling them stories (or at the age my
children are now at -9 and 10- making them read stories) broadens their
experience of behaviors and possible ways of motivating behavior. There is
no need to choose 'mythical' stories, not even 'mythical' depictions of the
achievements of science.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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