[MD] Are we the people stupid?

[David M]

Arlo for president!

DM


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Arlo J. Bensinger" <ajb102 at psu.edu>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 20, 2006 5:14 PM
Subject: Re: [MD] Are we the people stupid?


> Although the analysis as presented is hopelessly dichotomistic and mired 
> in
> SOMist mindset, I'll bite. Why not? What better things have we to do but 
> combat
> political propaganda and distortion, eh?
>
> Are people stupid? I find it ironic that someone who's lambasted "the 
> folk" for
> being "undiscerning" when it comes to popular tastes, turns when it is
> politically expedient to trumpet their ability to discern. Which is it? 
> Are the
> folk "too stupid to know what good music is"? And yet "smart enough to 
> elect a
> president based on complex understandings of political enmeshing, 
> economics and
> sociology"?
>
> The answer is, of course, being "stupid" or "smart" pertains to skills or 
> bodies
> of knowledge. It also pulls us back to ZMM, when Pirsig discussed the
> "romantic" and "classical" modes of understanding. (I won't quote at 
> length,
> but I would suggest those who've dismissed ZMM as a "hippy, new age" book 
> to be
> more-or-less dismissed, go back and reread it).
>
> Also tied up in this analysis is the SOMist view of "individuals" and 
> "culture"
> as disparate, wholly unrelated entities, that are at odds, with one 
> seeking to
> enslave the other. The emergent, and dialogic, interrelatedness of
> individual-culture is once again missed in favor of the old "individual 
> against
> culture" rhetoric.
>
> Values are made salient by a cultural semiotic into which the biological
> individual emerges, and dialectically appropriates. Simplistically, we see
> through language (Pirsig's green flash, for example). In ZMM, Pirsig 
> writes of
> the "part of the landscape, inseparable from it, which must be understood, 
> is a
> figure in the middle of it, sorting sand into piles. To see the landscape
> without seeing this figure is not to see the landscape at all." This 
> "figure"
> is the analytic knife, which slices and dices based on the cultural 
> values, the
> static social patterns into which the individual is enculturated.
>
> Pirsig quotes Edward Sapir in Lila, saying "The fact of the matter is that 
> the
> "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language 
> habits
> of the group." Following this, he quotes Kluckhohn, saying...
>
> "Any language is more than an instrument of conveying ideas, more even 
> than an
> instrument for working upon the feelings of others and for 
> self-expression.
> Every language is also a means of categorizing experience. The events of 
> the
> "rear world are never felt or reported as a machine would do it. There is 
> a
> selection process and an interpretation in the very act of response. Some
> features of the external situation are highlighted, others are ignored or 
> not
> fully discriminated.
>
> Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals 
> pigeonhole
> their experiences. The language says, as it were, "notice this," "always
> consider this separate from that," "such and such things always belong
> together. " Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these 
> ways
> they take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable 
> stuff of
> life."
>
> Which is why when you write in your analysis, that "individuals' views of 
> human
> nature suggested they were shaped by political attitudes in general", 
> Pirsig
> would respond with "duh". Of course so, but not "just" political attidues, 
> also
> religious, hierarchic, sociologic, and many of the other fundamental 
> "beliefs"
> of the culture. Thus, a religious culture that viewed man as "born in sin" 
> will
> have a different view of human nature from one where man is "born divine".
>
> The mercantilistic language, which is an economic attitude, and which has
> greatly altered our view of "human nature", and has given us a 
> "profit-wealth"
> lens with which we derive the worth of the individual, is merely one 
> example of
> how language shapes our understandings of ourselves, our neighbors, and
> humanity.
>
> That said, there is little doubt that "political correctness", and indeed 
> all
> movements of censorship, have gone far too far in their idea that forcing 
> a
> change in the language can change the way we interrelate. It places 
> "language"
> as the top, rather than the metaphysical firmament by which a culture's
> language ultimately derives. The goal then, as Pirsig undertook, should 
> not be
> to restrict the use of words, but to attack the metaphysics from which 
> those
> words spring. To do the former would be like plugging a dam with one's 
> fingers,
> rather than rebuidling a broken dam from the ground up.
>
> Mentioned again is the notion that the people are wholly uneffected by
> advertising, and insinuates that a suggestion that they are is somehow
> "paternalistic". And yet year after year, the research journals of 
> consumer
> psychology and marketing and advertising demonstrate the exact opposite. A
> dirty little secret, perhaps, by those who hold the mercantilistic 
> appraisal of
> humanity and seek to continue profiting off the manipulation of others. 
> Whether
> seemingly innocous stuff like painting the walls of your restaurant red so 
> as
> to decrease lingering time and increase table turnover, or market studies 
> that
> find that the same product will differently based on the advertising 
> campaign
> it uses, the journals and trade magazines of the advertisers and 
> marketeers are
> open for any and all to see.
>
> Are people stupid? It has been remarked (to make a brief tangent) that 
> Goethe
> was the last man to know everything. This remark stretches back to the 
> notion
> of the "Renaissance Man", when a broad range of knowledge was encouraged 
> and
> valued. Pirsig remarked on this in ZMM (referring to Ancient Sparta), "He 
> is in
> fact an excellent all-rounder; he has surpassing areté. Areté implies a 
> respect
> for the wholeness or oneness of life, and a consequent dislike of
> specialization."
>
> In today's climate of specialization, and a public disdain for the 
> "liberal
> arts", such broad knowledge is not only not valued, but actively 
> discouraged.
> The Academy has buckled to the will of the market and has revamped degree
> requirements so as become really a large trade school, where the student 
> can
> pass on their way to a "job", asked only to acquire those skills and 
> knowledge
> directly related to the "job requirements".
>
> The point is that SOME depth of knowledge is required to make any type of
> "classical"-based discernment on any given topic. Whether in buying 
> popular
> music CDs or electing a president. I was continually amazed, and continue 
> to be
> amazed, that there are people who are basing their "feelings on Iran" on a
> completely ahistorical perspective that is informed ONLY by media 
> soundbites on
> the days news. Ask anyone in the streets why it is, for example, that Iran 
> is
> so far along in nuclear technology, and my guess is that few would know.
>
> Are people stupid? No. But that does not mean they have nothing to learn.
>
> Arlo
>
>


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