From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 22:29:35 BST
Steve, Matt, Sam, Squonk and all MOQers:
Steve said:
See? I bet we're on the same page.
dmb says:
Yes. Now I see what you meant. You saved me tons of work. Thank you very
much. Excellent choice in quotes too....
Wilber: "In place of interior development, merely exterior development is
then recommended by the flatland liberal. Material improvement and economic
reshuffling become the major aims of governance--(re)distribute the material
wealth, provide physical healthcare for everybody, provide physical shelter
for everybody, provide physical food for everybody, provide physical
wellbeing for everybody. This leaves all values, all interiors, all meaning,
all depth, and all divinity to the conservatives, who represent a lower wave
of development but who at least haven't forgotten the interiors!
dmb says:
Maybe its too obvious, but I'd just like to point out how closely this
matches Pirsig's view. The "flatland liberal" here is what Pirsig would call
an SOM intellectual, which sadly describes most intellectuals. We can see
the bio-social moral code kind of conservative in Pirsig's Rigel.
More Wilber from Steve:
Interior talk --values talk, religion talk, character talk, meaning talk--is
thus left largely in the hands of the conservatives. The liberal then looks
at the typical ... conservative values--which are often ethnocentric and...
can easily slide into homophobia and gay bashing, sexism and misogyny,
militarism and imperialism--and says, 'If those are what we mean by
"instilling values," then I'm staying out of the values game
altogether!'--failing to see that its own worldcentric fairness is simply
the next wave of hierarchically unfolding values. It thus attempts to
escape ethnocentric values, not by transparently championing its own higher
worldcentric values, but by claiming to be value neutral and egalitarian,
whereas in fact it is championing the next wave of value structures, the
next wave of interiors, failing to see which it then succumbs to flatland
floundering. Instead of pioneering a new wave of interior talk--higher
values talk, higher religion talk, higher character talk, higher meaning
talk--it talks only of tepid egalitarianism, a plurality of authentic
ultimates, tractionless multiculturalism, no interior is better than
another, yada yada yada.... Whereupon every interior, no matter how lowly,
is accorded not just equal respect but equal value, period--and the
regressive nightmare is about to begin. Liberalism is much nobler than
that, much higher than that.... "
dmb says:
Here I think we see the latest form of "flatland liberalism" or "amoral
scientific materialism", as Pirsig might also call it. It seems to get at
the heart of what you have tried to show Matt; that the postmodern postition
that thinks it is neutral on values, insists there is no priviledged
position, is it self "championing the next wave of value strutures". This is
why preformative contradictions are nearly inevitable for flatlanders. SOM
intellectuals are, to put it in crude terms, so blinded to the interior that
they fail to see the moral dimension in their own views. He's saying they
hold a moral position even if they don't recognize it as such. Again it may
be too obvious, but I have to point out that the negative conservative
values listed in the Wilber quote here matches Pirsig's descriptions of the
social level "Victorians" beautifully. Clearly, they're both talking about
the same thing.
dmb quotes Wilber from his INTEGRAL PSYCHOLOGY: (emphasis is Wilber's)
"Each time the self's center of gravity identifies with a new and higher
basic wave of unfolding (level), it doesn't just have a new sense of
IDENTITY, it has a new and higher VIEW of the world, with a wider and more
encompassing set of MORALS and PERSPECTIVES. The pivotal figure here is
Lawrence Kohlberh, whose work, building on tht of Baldwin, Dewey, and
Piaget, demonstrated that moral development goes through six or seven
stages. The individual starts out amoral and egocentric ("whatever I want"
is what is right), moves to sociocentric ("whatever the group, tribe,
country wants" is what is right), to postconventional (what is fair for all
peoples, regardless of race, color creed).
dmb concludes:
Apparently, Steve and I pretty much reading Wilber the same way. But I hoped
Sam might see that morals and such are not necessarily excluded from the 4th
level, which Wilber calls "postconventional" here. I wanted to help make the
case the Matt, (Not that Steve really needs it) and to offer some warnings
about postmodernism, which seems to suffer from SOM every bit as much as
Modernism. Finally, I address this to Squonk too, but just to make him read
more Wilber quotes. Ha! ;-)
Thanks for your time,
DMB
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