From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Thu Jun 12 2003 - 06:57:07 BST
Dear Sam,
23 Apr 2003 15:12:39 +0100 you tried to clear up our misunderstandings with
a concrete example:
'Tom Cruise is a celebrity - what is being celebrated through that process?'
The social level can be described as behavior of Tom and his fans expressing
status differences. Motivations for that behavior don't belong to the social
level, so nothing is being celebrated there.
The intellectual level can be described as the reasoning (or unreasonable
utterances) by which his fans rationalize their behavior. They invent
something to celebrate, some subjective characteristic of their idol. The
copying of that characteristic constitutes an intellectual pattern of value.
Both the choice of Tom (at the social level) and the choice of the
subjective characteristic to celebrate (at the intellectual level) are
arbitrary in my understanding of the MoQ. The 'value' that makes me speak of
'patterns of value' consists of the stability, versatility and harmony with
higher-level 'patterns of value' of these patterns of behavior and
reasoning.
You also wrote:
'I would say that the bare bellies' reproduction, compared to worship
reproduction, signifies the scale of
values that are dominant in the particular society (bare bellies being more
important for that society). Do you disagree with that?'
I disagree. It only signifies that now other media (i.e. mass media) are
available that weren't available (or to a lesser extent) before and that
lend themselves better to reproduce bare bellies than worship. Their
'importance for society' is an a posteriori rationalization that's part of
the 4th level. The fact that they're being copied (unthinkingly) is their
only value that's relevant for the 3rd level, the copying creating a society
of copiers.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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