[MD] Flying Spagetti Monsters

[pholden at davtv.com]

Quoting Arlo Bensinger <ajb102 at psu.edu>:


> [Arlo]
> I'm a little hurt, Platt. You praise Ben for his civility in discourse with 
> me, but I get no praise for my civility towards him. What's the implication?

No offense intended I assure you. Just given that Ben is a relative newcomer
I thought a bit of well-deserved praise would be in order. As for what you've
written below, it will take some time to think about. 

PLatt


> 
> As to the above, I'd say the mythos is the collective sum of intellectual 
> level patterns we use to make sense of the world. "You know something and 
> then the Quality stimulus hits and then you try to define the Quality 
> stimulus, but to define it all you've got to work with is what you know. So 
> your definition is made up of what you know. It's an analogue to what you 
> already know. It has to be. It can't be anything else. And the mythos grows 
> this way. By analogies to what is known before. The mythos is a building of 
> analogues upon analogues upon analogues. These fill the collective 
> consciousness of all communicating mankind. Every last bit of it. The 
> Quality is the track that directs the train. What is outside the train, to 
> either side...that is the terra incognita of the insane."
> 
> In his condemnation of SOM, Pirsig writes of the modern "mythos", "The 
> mythos that says the forms of this world are real but the Quality of this 
> world is unreal, that is insane!" Here  is a clear indication that the 
> "mythos" represent the foundational intellectual level framework that 
> informs our understanding of the world. The "mythos" arises, and evolves, 
> through historical-dialectic activity of individuals in collective engagement.
> 
> Notice that the mythos is clearly dialectical in its emergence "the mythos 
> is a building of analogues upon analogues upon analogues" and in its 
> reciprocal informative nature "the mythos that says the forms of this world 
> are real". If that's not enough, consider Pirsig said this shortly 
> thereafter, "the villains who had so shaped the mythos as to cause us to 
> accept this insanity as reality", and also, "the ancient Greeks, whose 
> mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of 
> our technology, the tendency to do what is "reasonable" even when it isn't 
> any good."
> 
> The "state" or "nation" can, and often does, function in its moral role, 
> checking biological quality while providing a greater level of freedom than 
> existed on the biological level. However, its interests are only to itself, 
> and like Pirsig describes in LILA about the Nazi regime, "it [the 
> Holocaust] was a quality dictated by low level static social and biological 
> patterns whose overall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and 
> Dynamic Quality." The same could be said of the Indian Wars, the Cambodian 
> killing fields, the Inquisition or what is going on in Darfur or happened 
> in Serbia.
> 
> Its also wise to heed Pirsig's caution, in LILA, "This solution is to 
> dissolve all static patterns, both sane and insane, and find the base of 
> reality, Dynamic Quality, that is independent of all of them. The 
> Metaphysics of Quality says that it is immoral for sane people to force 
> cultural conformity by suppressing the Dynamic drives that produce 
> insanity. Such suppression is a lower form of evolution trying to devour a 
> higher one. Static social and intellectual patterns are only an 
> intermediate level of evolution. They are good servants of the process of 
> life but if allowed to turn into masters they destroy it."
> 
> Furthermore, that the "state" can behave immorally is evidenced by Pirsig's 
> placing the modern crisis as a war between intellect and society for 
> dominance. "A value metaphysics makes it possible to see that there's a 
> conflict between intellect and society that's just as fierce as the 
> conflict between society and biology or the conflict between biology and 
> death. Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology 
> thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it 
> out, and that is the key to an understanding of both the Victorians and the 
> twentieth century.... [T]he Victorians were the last people to believe that 
> patterns of intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. What held the 
> Victorian pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual one. They 
> called it morals, but really it was just a social code. As a code it was 
> just like their ornamental cast-iron furniture: expensive looking, cheaply 
> made, brittle, cold, and uncomfortable. The new culture that has emerged is 
> the first in history to believe that patterns of society must be 
> subordinate to patterns of intellect. The one dominating question of this 
> century has been, "Are the social patterns of our world going to run our 
> intellectual life, or is our intellectual life going to run the social 
> patterns?" And in that battle, the intellectual patterns have won."
> 
> As to the "national consciousness", I offer one more Pirsig quote. "[T]he 
> essence of the Victorian value pattern was an elevation of society above 
> everything else, then all sorts of things fall into place. What we today 
> call Victorian hypocrisy was not regarded as hypocrisy. It was a virtuous 
> effort to keep one's thoughts within the limits of social propriety. In the 
> Victorian's mind quality and intellectuality were not related to one 
> another in such a way that quality had to stand the test of intellectual 
> meaning. The test of anything in the Victorian mind was, "Does society 
> approve?""





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