From: ant.mcwatt@ntlworld.com
Date: Sat Jun 19 2004 - 14:52:37 BST
Mark Heyman asked June 18th 2004:
‘Has anyone read anything in Pirsig that might suggest that one "race"
of humans is higher or lower than another in the moral hierarchy?’
Paul Vogel replied June 18th 2004:
‘Yes, it is clear that Pirsig in Lila almost makes just such a suggestion and
then "chickens out" when his thoughts threaten to become "politically-
incorrect", when he is describing the problem of crime in NYC and the
"biologicals" that are like "germs" infecting the social body politic that
threaten the very survival of Western Civilization that such a great city
like NYC represents....’
Ant McWatt comments:
There are a number of substantive inaccuracies in the above paragraph concerning working class crime in New York.
Firstly, Pirsig states quite clearly in LILA (Chapter 24) that it is immoral to speak
against a person because of the colour of their skin or other biological characteristic:
‘It is immoral to speak against a people because of the color of their skin, or any other genetic characteristic because these are not changeable and don't matter anyway.’
Secondly, in the paragraph from which the above sentence is derived, Pirsig goes absolutely down the political line when discussing blacks in LILA i.e.
‘It is not immoral to speak against a person because of his cultural
characteristics if those cultural characteristics are immoral. These are
changeable and they do matter. Blacks have no right to violate social codes and call it "racism" when someone tries to stop them, if those codes are not racist codes. That is slander.’
As is clearly apparent, therefore, Pirsig is courageously dealing with the issue of black criminality from an impartial view on an intellectual basis, neither being swayed by supposedly ‘political correct’ intellectuals nor by socially-orientated racists.
That New York is such a Dynamic and therefore great place, is partly due to the myriad cultural influences it has absorbed over the last four centuries. If everyone who wasn’t culturally pure from NYC were now returned to their natural cultural background (Africa, Europe, China, etc) you’d be left with no-one at all or possibly just a few Native American Indians.
That racists are driven by social values is quite clearly seen in the American Anthological Association Statement on ‘Race’ of May 17, 1998 cited recently by Mark Heyman. The ad hominen dismissal of Mark Heyman’s citing of this article doesn’t wash as the American Anthological Association is the professional organization representing anthropology as an academic subject in the United States and could not possibly be perceived (despite its other failings) as a “social-marxist” or a “politically-correct dogmatic” organization. In fact, the work of Boas and his followers (such as Mead, Kluckhohn, Kroeber etc who established and dominated the AAA for much of its history) were, if anything too extreme the other way i.e. they attributed too much influence of social value patterns on human behaviour. There are internet articles by Derek Freeman and Susan Wright for academic support for this view (as well as my own MOQ Textbook).
Possibly, before continuing in his subsequent posts with his ad hominem remarks concerning Mark Heyman, Paul Vogel should have actually addressed the numerous points of the AAA statement and especially the conclusion in its last paragraph which states:
“How people have been accepted and treated within the context of a given society or culture has a direct impact on how they perform in that society and that the ‘racial’ worldview was invented to assign some groups to perpetual low status, while others were permitted access to privilege, power, and wealth. The tragedy in the United States has been that the policies and practices stemming from this worldview succeeded all too well in constructing unequal populations among Europeans, Native Americans, and peoples of African descent. Given what we know about the capacity of normal humans to achieve and function within any culture, we conclude that present-day inequalities between so-called "racial" groups are not consequences of their biological inheritance but products of historical and contemporary social, economic, educational, and political circumstances.”
Paul Vogel commented on June 18th 2004:
‘Perhaps, Pirsig only "chickened-out" because otherwise he just wouldn't have been ever published, as is seen by the case of such brave and honest authors like J. P. Rushton?’
Ant McWatt comments:
LILA was published seventeen years after ZMM so the above comment, in regard to Pirsig, is again just nonsense. As regards J. P. Rushton, it seems that he is pretty typical of the type of racist driven by materially orientated social values as noted in the above AAA article. Moreover, from examining Mark Heyman’s recent posts on the subject, it seems that Rushton has very low quality credentials to make any scientific comment concerning the relationship between biological value patterns and human behaviour. I also wonder what he’s spending all that “Pioneer Fund” money on.
Finally, Paul Vogel commented on June 16th 2004:
You [Mark Heyman] need to break the log-jam of social-marxist and politically-correct dogmatism that is clogging up your ability to reason and to think logically verses emotionally.
Ant McWatt comments:
“Social-Marxist.” Interesting terminology…
This rather unique combination of “social” and “Marxist” (rarely found in academic texts) could be shortened to another political term: possibly “socialist”? Now there was a famous dictator in the 1930s who led a socialist party in Germany called the Nazi party. So, as far as cosmotheism is concerned, thanks but no thanks. Platt Holden had it quite right on June 17th when he stated that cosmotheism ‘can only be described as a cult’. And, given the historical precedents, quite a dangerous one at that.
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