From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat Jul 12 2003 - 21:49:10 BST
Steve, Bo and all MOQers:
...the social level is NEITHER instinct NOR intellect....
Bo quoted PIRSIG:
"Phaedrus remembered now that it had bothered him a little that in
the Odyssey, Homer seemed at times to be equating quality with
celebrity. Perhaps in Homer's time, when evolution had not yet
transcended the social level into the intellectual, the two were
the same."
Steve replied:
I think the transition he's talking about in ancient Greece is when the
first people began to become dominated by intellectual patterns of value and
the transition exemplified in Wilson after WWI was about the bulk of
American society becoming dominated by intellectual patterns. In neither
case do I think he is talking about when we might board a time machine to go
back and observe the first intellectual pattern evolving. That happened
much earlier than Homer.
dmb says:
I'm with Bo here. In the time of Homer the social level had not yet been
transcended. The quote is quite clear on this point. Pirsig re-asserts this
point in his discussion of the intellect's dependence on the social level as
a kind of pre-requisite...
PIRSIG
"Philosophers usually present their ideas as sprung from "nature" or
sometimes from "God," but Phadreus thought neither of these was completely
accurate. The logical order of things which the philosophers study is
derived from the "mythos". The mythos is the social culture and the rhetoric
which the culture must invent before philosophy becomes possible. Most of
this religious talk is nonsense, of course, but nonsense or not, it is the
PARENT of our modern scientific talk. This "mythos over logos" thesis agreed
with the MOQ's assertion that intellectual static patterns of quality are
built up out of social static quality. Digging back into ancient Greek
history, to the time when this mythos-to-logos transition was taking
place...."
dmb continues:
I think Steve in buying into this "ideas as sprung from nature" position in
a subtle way and has thereby misunderstood what Pirsig is saying about the
birth of the intellectual level. Lots of posters share this misconception.
The only reason I've singled you out, Steve, is because you've expressed
this bad idea quite well. :-) Here's what I mean...
Steve said:
I do think of societies as existing before the intellectual level. It would
be interesting and probably astounding to think about exactly what such
societies were capable of using only biological instinct and socially copied
behavior just as it is astounding to see the complex emergent behavior in
bees though they presumably have no social patterns.
dmb says:
We built societies "using only biological instinct and socially copied
behavior"?! I suppose the great civilizations that produced Babylon and the
pyramids were really just a series of urges and grunts? :-) But seriously,
the notion that our intellectual values are a property of our biological
selves is one of those SOM problems Pirsig is trying to solve. He insists
that there is a middle term between biology and intellect. He says the
ususally unrecognized social level in NEITHER instinct NOR intellect, but
something that is different from both. SOM, as a part of the same mistake,
lumps the two levels together, does not make a qualitative distinction
between them. There are just good ideas and bad ideas, old ideas and new
ideas and no real way to sort them out. Pirsig's MOQ, by contrast, draws
that line and thereby clears up the personal, political and historical
conflicts of our time. It expalins alot. It works. Trust me. I'm was a
history major, have always been a news junkie. I use it all the time.
Steve:
Unbelievable as it may seem to think of people building physical structures,
having social structures, perhaps farming, and using tools and forming
families without intellectual patterns and only through copied behavior, it
is also amazing to think that the value that results in a bee hive or a six
foot tall termite mound built by tiny insects over many generations is
somehow latched in DNA, though I think it is.
dmb says:
Yes. To achieve all that "only through copied behavior" is totally,
entirely, and quite clearly "unbelievable". Yes, something quite important
happened back in ancient Greece, but Pirsig is not saying we were mindless
animals before that. The social level has an astonishing level of knowledge,
wisdom, creativity, meaning, and 3rd level societies employed all sorts of
uniquely human cognitive skills. If we add up all the terms, references and
examples provided in Lila, surely we can see what the social level is all
about. Just to begin a list...
Homer. The Odyssey. Celebrity. The quest for fame and fortune. The mythos.
Social culture and rhetoric. Language. The giant. God and kings and heros.
Hitler. The Victorians. The Puritans. High school popularity contests.
Douglas McArthur. Fundamentalism. Armies and economies. Cops and priests.
Ritual and creation stories. War and genocide. Myths, legends, fairy tales
and religions. Payday. Movies. Patriotism. Nationalism. Fascism. Tribalism.
The social level values even include such standard roles as we are all
likely to assume in our personal lives; as productive members of society, as
parents, as buyers and sellers of things and all the other roles that
constitute our conventional identities. There's a tendency to believe that
we make rational choices about our lives, that we assume social roles as a
matter of rational choice and so we imagine that since we can "think" about
it and talk about it, well then it must be intellectual. (sound effects;
Game show buzzer and descending trombone notes.) But that's just not so.
Most of who and what we think we are is our social identity. (Let's not
flatter ourselves at the expense of intellectual accuracy.) If the social
level has been evolving for 160,00 years and the intellectual level for less
than 3,000 years, then it only stands to reason. :-)
Thanks.
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