[MD] Social Imposition ?

[ian glendinning]

Hi DMB ..

You said
"The amount of enforcement used to maintain a set of beliefs isn't a good way
to judge the quality of belief. In some cases, it might even be totally
irrelevant. It will tell you lots about the values of the enforcer, but not
the quality of his values. I already addressed this in the "Food for
Thought" thread, where ..."

I noticed you'd addressed it there ... I was just picking out one
"paraphrase" of things Arlo and I appeared to have said in that thread
- for confirmation with Arlo primarily.(Just to reduce the number of
points in a single discussion .... but I would like to come back to
what you said too.)

I think you mis the "inverse" relationship I was trying to express,
but you are right, it may say more about the enforcer .... though I
don't see those as entirely independent anyway.

I will come back to the rest (in the other thread too), but when you say ..

"But, if I may take your point to simply mean that good ideas don't need to
be crammed down people's throats, we agree. Who wouldn't agree with that?"

Again, you may be right, being a no-brainer doesn't make it wrong. I
guess all I was suggesting is that maybe there is little more than
that to "social" values. They take social imposition to give them
value. (ie all I was doing was summarising that was perhaps all Arlo
and I had said.)

Ian

On 12/16/06, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Ian said and/or quoted someone who said:
> "The quality of an intellectual pattern is inversley proportional to the
> level of effort (needed to be) imposed by society to maintain that pattern,
> (but is proportional to how widespread it is believed by free thinkers)."
> ...Discuss.
>
> dmb says:
> The amount of enforcement used to maintain a set of beliefs isn't a good way
> to judge the quality of belief. In some cases, it might even be totally
> irrelevant. It will tell you lots about the values of the enforcer, but not
> the quality of his values. I already addressed this in the "Food for
> Thought" thread, where I pointed out that biological values need to be
> addressed by way of physical "communication", but that this method is
> immoral when directed at the content of belief, as was the case in the
> Inquistion of the McCarthy period. On the level of intellect, logic and
> empiricial evidence and such are the "forces" to be reckoned with. The
> stability of intellectual structures is held together by an entirely
> different set of values just like a glass of water is held together by a
> different level of values than the level that holds a nation together. You
> see?
>
> It seems that your question is misleading in the extreme, Ian. The notion
> that society uses its kind of authority to maintain beliefs pretty well
> describes the source of our historical nightmares. Everything from the
> Inquistion to the witch burning to the rise of fascism and fundamentalism in
> our own time is a result of the confusion between social authority and
> intellectual legitimacy. I mean, you seem to be using one of the major
> problematic misconceptions as a basis to judge the distinction that is
> supposed to address that same misconception. Again, have the key in your
> hand but you're putting it in upside down or something. I think
> intellectually guided societies will be less authoritarian and a happier
> place for free thinkers, but the merit of an idea will be determined by its
> ability to comply with intellectual values like rationality and agreement
> with experience and NOT by how well it comforms to social traditions or
> customs. Intellect doesn't play by those rules except when she's in the
> hands of an immoral sell-out type or otherwise distorted. See, its not that
> the intellectual level is amoral per se, its just that SOM has generated
> some confusion about that. As Pirsig says, the intellectual level has its
> own set of morals to be concerned with, its just that unconcerned with those
> social level moral codes, the ones that are aimed at meeting the demands of
> biology.
>
> But, if I may take your point to simply mean that good ideas don't need to
> be crammed down people's throats, we agree. Who wouldn't agree with that?
>
> Please, gents, consider this principle of oppostion. The details of this
> basic idea could be discussed forever, but at this point I'll just ask you
> to consider the basic idea itself. I'm only saying that the relationship
> between the 3rd and 4th levels is analogous to the relationship between the
> 2nd and 3rd. (As well as the relationship between the 1st and 2nd.) In each
> case, the newer level is discrete in terms of its independence of purpose
> and rests upon its parent in a taming, controlling, mollifying way in order
> to achieve that new purpose. I think this principle is the best way to get
> at the distinction between social and intellectual values.
>
> I think it might help to avoid the complications that come from introducing
> other sorts of distinctions. Science and religion, collective and
> individual, belief and object of belief all strike me as pretty good ways to
> confuse the issue rather than clear it up. Some people think creationism is
> bad science while others think its not science at all and religion isn't
> necessarily stupid or anti-intellectual. I would defy anyone here to
> conceive of any thing in the universe that is not BOTH an individual and
> also part of larger, collective entity. In fact, I hereby nominate that for
> the "most useless distinction of the year" award. Long story short, I think
> its good to examine the idea or belief in question. What does mean? What is
> its function? What sort of things hold it together and what sort of things
> does it hold together? What its the point and purpose? Answers to these
> sorts of questions will tell you what level of values you're dealing with.
> And of course with something as complex as a person or a culture, or even
> the concepts of God, we'd have to break it down a bit to something more
> specific. With things like people and nations, we can only talk about
> averages and centers of gravity and make some generalizations. But that's
> worth doing too, i think.
>
> dmb
>
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