[MD] Teachings from the American Earth (Part I)

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Bo]
I am the one who has moved beyond intellect and insist on seeing 
things from MOQ's meta-level where intellect is a STATIC level, while 
you  seem stuck at intellect and try to make the MOQ some New Age 
spiritual nonsense.

[Arlo]
While, as I've said, its easy for me to see why some adhere to the 
notion that "intellect" is a "gift of the white man" (e.g., it plays 
nicely into the neocon message that our enemies are always, by 
definition, less moral (or even immoral) than us), it just doesn't 
fly. There is a curious reasoning here, that goes something like, 
"western european intellect is S/O, intellect is exclusive to western 
european culture, therefore all intellect is S/O".  Rather than face 
up to the notion that intellect does emerge, in non-S/O form, from 
other cultural patterns, we "hack" intellect into two levels, to show 
not only that intellect is exclusively "ours", but that the "fixed" 
intellect, or MOQ-intellect as Platt calls it, is also exclusively "ours".

If you start off defining intellect as S/O, then of course you'll be 
left with the finding that intellect is exclusive to Western European 
culture. But that self-fulfilling prophecy (and the "glorious us" 
superiority that some get from it) is short-sighted, blinded by our 
need to promote Western Superiority and warp the MOQ into an 
apologist doctrine for modern-Western status quoism.

But it wasn't intellect itself that was born in Ancient Greece, but 
S/O intellect. And the two are not the same thing.

Chinese philosophy, to use a ZMM example, is a intellectual pattern 
not dominated by S/O, as was Western Philosophy. "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."

As if to drive the point home, Pirsig writes, ""My own opinion is 
that the intellect of modern man isn't that superior. IQs aren't that 
much different. Those Indians and medieval men were just as 
intelligent as we are, but the context in which they thought was 
completely different. Within that context of thought, ghosts and 
spirits are quite as real as atoms, particles, photons and quants are 
to a modern man. In that sense I believe in ghosts. Modern man has 
his ghosts and spirits too, you know."

Context.

In LILA, Pirsig writes, "And, as anthropologists know so well, what a 
mind thinks is as dominated by social patterns as social patterns are 
dominated by biological patterns and as biological patterns are 
dominated by inorganic patterns. There is no direct scientific 
connection between mind and matter. As the atomic physicist, Niels 
Bohr, said, "We are suspended in language." Our intellectual 
description of nature is always culturally derived." (LILA). 
Certainly, the Amerindians (to take one example) had an intellectual 
description of nature. Now, what they did not have was a S/O-derived 
intellectual description of nature.

But what everyone also had, and where "we" stand unique, was in our 
elevating "intellect" OVER "society". "The new culture that has 
emerged is the first in history to believe that patterns of society 
must be subordinate to patterns of intellect." (LILA). Trouble was, 
as Pirsig asked, our intellect, which we raised above society, was/is 
flawed. "Now that intellect was in command of society for the first 
time in history, was this the intellectual pattern it was going to 
run society with?" (LILA)

Pirsig describes this further. "A scientific, intellectual culture 
had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying 
in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to talk to 
one another, really, and unable to judge one another because 
scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. ... Sometime after 
the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing 
that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended 
upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility 
had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian 
"virtue" ever was." (LILA)

The same sentiment was echoed in ZMM. "I know what it is! We've 
arrived at the West Coast! We're all strangers again! Folks, I just 
forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The 
one everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style 
of life that thinks it owns this country. We've been out of it for so 
long I'd forgotten all about it." (ZMM)

And it is into this situation that Pirsig offers us insight into 
non-Western, non-S/O intellect by which to gauge where ours S/O 
intellect has failed, and to reappraise the situation we find 
ourselves in. The goal is not to resubordinate intellect to society, 
but to consider a better intellect to elevate over society. And in 
creating such as synthesis we move from an S/O intellect to a MOQ-intellect.