[MD] Fw: Food for Thought

[David M]

> DMB quoted the below:
>
>
>> "Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains. It
>> has done that job so stunningly well intellectual forget the fact and 
>> turn
>> upon society with a shameful ingratitude for what society has done. Today 
>> we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral 
>> and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its
>> struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social 
>> level's role in keeping the biological level under control. Intellectuals 
>> have
>> failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly
>> being suppressed by social order." (307-8)


DM: I ask: what is this trying to say? I think we all understand that 
society
imposes rules & customs on us as individuals to suppress violent means to 
resolve
conflicts, helping us to co-operate better, share out resources jointly
created, and find mates in more complex ways, etc. Then along come the
intellectuals. They do a number of things, they challenge the social order
and who has authority, they challenge the church and the aristocrats,
they want more individual freedom, they champion repressed minorities,
they say sex can be good and fun and is not a sin in itself, they champion
democracy and liberty and equality.So intellectuals want to make the rules 
of
society different and less oppressive. But Pirsig thinks they went too far.
Did they? Maybe when they got rid of the old repressions, and the old 
rulers,
there was a bit of a gap, a confusion about values, but would we want to
go backwards? Is the problem not our failure of nerve and a real pressing
forward with democracy and our liberal values?