[MD] The Quality/MOQ meta-metaphysics

[david buchanan]

Ian said:
... As I said the more important point is to get a grip on the "Kill Intellect" interpreters, out of their rhetorical context ... you listening DMB ? The "metaphysics" point is a non-argument for me (and you, it seems).


dmb says:
Kill intellect while sustaining social and biological patterns? As Marsha reads it, Buddha and Hitler had the same agenda. That's one of the reasons I just hate this anti-intellectual nonsense, as if mysticism were an excuse to be to reject science and philosophy and democratic principles. As if Buddhism was an excuse to be ignorant. As I understand the MOQ, this anti-intellectualism is a form of evil. Plus it's incorrect and it creeps me out, big time.  


The idea is simply to quiet the left brain chatter so as to come closer to reality. The mystics get off the stove first because their awareness is not dominated by intellect. See, the true a species of the Good. It's not opposed to the Good. It is a kind of good. It's the highest level of static quality, second only to DQ itself. To be against intellect is to be opposed to Pirsig's solution, to be opposed to the MOQ's central aim, which is to expand rationality by way of these ideas about intellect. 

Marsha wants to kill the thing of highest value, the most evolved static quality. Obviously, I feel a great deal of contempt for that sort of thing. American culture has an anti-intellectual streak that goes all the way back and at the moment they are quite vigorous. The militia movement and the John Birchers are overlapping with the tea baggers and the whole thing is highly amplified in churches, on talk radio and FOX, etc.. Does any of that serve the cause of integrating DQ into our modes of rationality? No, of course not. It's just heavily coded white supremacy and the glorification of social authority, of God, guns and money. Especially money. Somehow, they got the white working class to believe that capitalism and freedom are the same thing. In Pirsig's formulation, political freedom is freedom of the mind. Freedom of speech, of religion, of expression and the other freedoms named in the Bill of Rights (the U.S. Constitution) are all about protecting the freedom of the intellect. It's not about the freedom to shop, you know? Not that we should regulate the malls. I'm just saying that these free-market cheerleaders have a very shallow and distorted notion of what freedom is. I mean, anti-intellectualism is not just a stance some MOQers hold. It's a regressive, reactionary, anti-evolutionary force in the culture. Our fundamentalists are every bit as bad as the Islamic extremist that they love to hate. That poison leaks in from a wider world, you know?  		 	   		  
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