[MD] MD 4th level - The more autonomous level

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

Good Morning Platt,

I'm not sure why you continue to claim I favor (what the reviewer of this
article calls) the "Great Mass" theory, in dichotomous opposition to your
support of the "Great Man" theory. Throughout our discussion I've tried to show
you how I value BOTH the individual and the collective, recognizing as Pirsig
did that intellectual patterns emerge through social mediation, and that only
individual beings can respond to DQ. You see these claims as contradictory,
dialogically at war in some great Man-Collective struggle. I see them as
complimentary, recognizing the mutual dependency for the emergence of all MOQ
levels on the collectivization of individuals and the agency of individuals to
act.

While you may have hoped to press me into support of the so-called "Great Mass"
theory, I think the reviewer's summation best articulates my point, as well as
proposes why your "Great Man" theory may be fundamentally incomplete.

"Writing like this doesn't do anybody any favors. The Great Man theory may not
make a good history of science, but neither does what you might call the Great
Mass theory. Not long ago, Sherwin B. Nuland, the doctor and writer, published
an essay titled "The Man or the Moment?" in The American Scholar. Nuland argued
that historians of science who write exclusively about the social forces that
shape a discovery while leaving individuals out of the equation miss half the
story, "because part of the process is the distinctive personality of the
discoverer." To understand each bit of scientific progress, he concluded, we
have to examine both social and personal factors. "The punishment for devaluing
the significance of any of them is the writing of bad history.""

"To understand each bit of scientific progress, he concluded, we have to examine
both social and personal factors." Absolutely. It is not the "either-or" war
you try to make it.

This balanced view suggests that Newton, for example, if born 100 years earlier
would not have been able to develop "the theory of gravity". The ability to do
so was (is) rooted in the potential, at any given socio-historical marker, in
the cultural dialogue, in the cultural institutions, in short, in the mediating
affordances of the culture. It is this that creates the potential, for
individuals who appropriate the voice of the collective, to act. It constrains
and affords individuals, but what Marx (and Bourdieu and Giddens, among others)
have shown is that these contraints and affordances are not "general" among the
population, but specificically related to socio-hierarchies within the culture.
This is not to say there is no overlap in agency between say a carpenter and
the hieress to fortune, but as social hierarchical standing spreads, agency
between individuals becomes more and more dissimilar.

Thus the numbers of laborers who create new sciences (like microbiology) are the
exceptions that prove the rule, because the affordances of their unique
individual lives do not include great potential for this. This stands in
contrast to the idea that "man is a free agent". He is, but not entirely. Man
is only so free as to act within the constraints and affordances of his birth,
which include global cultural structures (the Mythos), localized social
structures (the economic value of his birthright) and uniquie biological
structures (his physical attributes).

So, Great Man or Great Mass? I side with the reviewer. Both are
short-shortsighted. 

Arlo