From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Mon Jun 21 2004 - 00:25:37 BST
Anthony, Mark, and all MOQers:
On the question of a "racial" hierarchy in the MOQ, Vogel said:
"...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...."
dmb says:
As Anthony spelled out so well, nothing could be further from the truth.
Pirsig says explicitly that racism is immoral. (As if we needed metaphysics
to figure that out!) And the suggestion that Pirsig is a racist who only
lacks the courage to admit it, is nasty slander of criminal proportions. On
top of all that Vogel has apparently missed the point about "immoral
cultural characteristics" because he keeps exhibiting them. Mirror, mirror,
on the wall, who's the most infectious germ of all? Again, we don't need
anything so fancy as metaphysics to know that people aren't germs and that
such rhetoric is exactly the kind Hitler used on the road to six, eight, ten
million murders. More below...
Pirsig in CH 24:
'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. But 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.'
McWatt said:
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. ...There are internet articles by Derek Freeman and
Susan Wright for academic support for this view (as well as my own MOQ
Textbook). ...Paul Vogel should have actually addressed the numerous points
of the AAA statement and especially the conclusion in its last paragraph
which states:
McWatt quoted:
"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."
dmb says:
Thanks to Mark for the AAA statement on race. The tragic thing is not that
over-the-top right-wingers and racist neo-nazis would deny their conclusion,
the tragedy is that America's mainstream conservatives also deny it in
countless ways, most of them coded or oblique. This issue is absolutely HUGE
and central in American politics and it also puts the distinction between
social and intellectual values on vivid display. The mainstream denial
usually begins with a distorted version of the AAA's conclusion. They reduce
it to a weak-will whiner squealing that, "Society made me do it" and condemn
the idea for its disasterous moral implications. "Take responsibility for
your own actions.", they'd say, implying that low social status or a small
income is a character flaw. And even if there was slavery in the past,
that's just history and has nothing to do with today so just "Pull yourself
up by your own bootstraps" and don't pretend you're some "victim of
society", implying that the complaintant is not only a loser, but is also
defenseless as a little girl. And if the sociological, historical,
psychological and anthropological points are pressed inspite of that, then
come the screams "Class warfare", "marxism", "communism", "Socialism",
"elitism", "social engineering" and, when in the company of old world types,
"our inability to change the nature of man". In all these Republican slogans
there in a covert denial that inequality is created by social conditions.
Rather than than the forces of history and politics, they condescending and
self-righteously pretend its a moral problem on the part of these oppressed
groups. Its a grand historical case of adding insult to injury.
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