[MD] The Greeks?

[Ian Glendinning]

Matt said
Spoken like someone that doesn't have to vote in the United
States.  (Which is to say, think strategically--i.e.
rhetorically--in this political environment.)

Ian says
Spoken like a US citizen who thinks the US is somehow supremely
different to everywhere else. You think the politics of governance in
Europe or Asia doesn't have personal, rhetorical, tactical and
strategic aspects, static and dynamic aspects, economic and moral
aspects .... etc ?

Again very un-Mattish, so I suspect an imposter or perhaps a limp joke ;-)

Anyway yes, laws are static patterns of (received / embodied) wisdom,
but (real) wisdom is in the dynamics of people (even in the legal and
umpiring professions).
Ian

On Wed, Jun 16, 2010 at 8:51 PM, Matt Kundert
<pirsigaffliction at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hey Ian,
>
> Ian said:
> I'm not prejudiced who I side with so long as they talk wisdom.
> (Yes, even Richard Nixon has got soul - Neil Young ?)
>
> Matt:
> Spoken like someone that doesn't have to vote in the United
> States.  (Which is to say, think strategically--i.e.
> rhetorically--in this political environment.)
>
> Sure, Dick Nixon has soul--it's just dark as night.
>
> Ian said:
> Rules ... OK, the meta-rule, that the umpire's decision rules,
> is much wiser than the particular rules of the game that the
> umpire is applying. Violent agreement. The authority of a
> legal system is more important than the laws they enforce.
>
> Matt:
> Maybe this is a better way of putting the point about
> fairness and rules (which I know you agree with if I could
> just put it the right way): rules are the embodiment of
> wisdom, but only people can be wise.  (Recall Pirsig's
> oft-forgotten assertion that only people can be Dynamic.)
> The difference between Platonism and Pirsigianism is: are
> we in service to the wisdom, or is the wisdom in service to
> us?
>
> In Pirsig's terms, you were rebelling against my formula that
> rules are fairness because of the nub of ZMM: "why do what
> is reasonable even when it isn't any good?"  Why follow the
> rules if they aren't any good?  Fair question, and there's no
> rule that can tell us, each and every time, when we should
> follow the rules and when not.  Platonism was the search for
> the co-incidence of Reason and Good.  At the far side of
> 2500 years of moral philosophy, we might say that we've
> learned to say this: we've learned that the publicity of
> reasons for action is better than hiding why you act.  We
> follow the rules to promote perspicuity in moral reasoning.
> We only break the rules when we have a better reason.
>
> Think of Bush adminstration's hidden intelligence for the
> Iraq War or McCarthy's assertion that there are
> Communists in the government that only he knew about,
> and pretty much every modern democracy's fight against
> letting the public know everything it knows.  The Sixth
> Amendment, giving the accused an absolute right to know
> what he's being accused of and how, was a huge step
> foward in political justice for the world, the Freedom of
> Information Act was a big step forward in the United
> States.  And the Bush Guantanamo Bay fiascos were a
> big step back.  We can see all of the political items as
> part of a larger movement in moral philosophy of letting
> _other people_ see your reasoning about why you act.
> _This_ was the Socratic Revolution--know thyself.  This
> is how we see Socrates and the creation of the modern
> notion of _evidence_ as of a piece (Ian Hacking's book
> The Emergence of Probability is instrumental to this story),
> and all about the Good.
>
> We have found, over the evolutionary course of history,
> that people are more likely to do good things if they have
> good reasons.  And this for the same reason that modern,
> experimental science is lauded--because actions are
> experiments in reasons (reasons being habits of action),
> and unveiling your reasons for public scrutiny, like in
> science, allows others to perhaps spot a _bad reason_
> which might create a _bad action_.  There's no perfect
> equation between reasons and actions, good or bad, but
> we've found that, overall, the more sunlight the better.
>
> How does that sound?
>
> Matt
>
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