[MD] From each... to each

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Steve]
These words are valued by our culture because we value communicating the ideas
behind them to other people.  If we were all objective observers, we wouldn't
value language in the first place because we wouldn't communicate ideas to each
other.

[Arlo]
You see one side of the dialectical relation, I think, but not the other. Pirsig
to Lila, "You may think everything you say and everything you think is just you
but actually the language you use and the values you have are the result of
thousands of years of cultural evolution." Then, quoting Kluckholn, "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."

In other words, we value communicating them because we assimilate a
linguaculture that values them. We "see" them, because our language tells us to
"notice them". Our assimiliation makes it appear that such valuations are
"inescapable stuff of life", but they are not. 

[Steve]
Obviously, we can have biased and obstructed experiences.  Shouldn't cultural
bias be equated with the "mythos" as described in ZAMM?  Isn't it this mythos
that influences logos, or "how to value reality"?

[Arlo]
Absolutely. From ZMM.

"Thus, in cultures whose ancestry includes ancient Greece, one invariably finds
a strong subject-object differentiation because the grammar of the old Greek
mythos presumed a sharp natural division of subjects and predicates. In
cultures such as the Chinese, where subject-predicate relationships are not
rigidly defined by grammar, one finds a corresponding absence of rigid
subject-object philosophy. One finds that in the Judeo-Christian culture in
which the Old Testament "Word" had an intrinsic sacredness of its own, men are
willing to sacrifice and live by and die for words. In this culture, a court of
law can ask a witness to tell "the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the
truth, so help me God," and expect the truth to be told. But one can transport
this court to India, as did the British, with no real success on the matter of
perjury because the Indian mythos is different and this sacredness of words is
not felt in the same way. Similar problems have occurred in this country among
minority groups with different cultural backgrounds. There are endless examples
of how mythos differences direct behavior differences and they’re all
fascinating.

The mythos-over-logos argument points to the fact that each child is born as
ignorant as any caveman. What keeps the world from reverting to the Neanderthal
with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed into logos
but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our minds as
cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so united, that
one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to understand what
the mythos is."

Arlo