[MD] A fine mess

[skutvik at online.no]

Hi Platt

3 Dec. you wrote:

[Bo before] 
> > You alter between (agreeing with me regarding) SOM as the highest
> > static good and as the cause of social decay. I believe the
> > metaphysics issue is the fulcrum. Intellect is not SOM in a
> > metaphysical sense, merely the distinction in a - um - pragmatic
> > sense, and I believe that these two aspects can be kept apart. 

Platt: 
> Doesn't that distinction undercut the view of SOM as the
> Q-intellectual level?
 
You mean that S/O as intellect  undercuts SOM as intellect? Yes, it 
does and is supposed to, I take for granted that MOQ takes over the 
metaphysical "rank", leaving only the naked S/O. 

> > According to the MOQ intellect's purpose is to "tame" social
> > patterns (that have free rein under anti-intellect conditions. For
> > instance, Nazi Germany was a most law-abiding country only matched
> > by Iran these days) and as SOM it did  that job, but like the
> > sorcerer's apprentice it had learned the start formula but not to
> > stop and this was what Pirsig lamented in ZAMM. 
 
> Intellect may have "tamed" Nazism, but SOM communism slaughtered more
> people than the Nazis ever did. Not surprising considering that for
> SOM "There is nothing morally wrong with . . . murder, with genocide."
> (Lila, 22)

Marx lived in England and took its (intellectual in our lingo) patterns for 
granted and thought that a revolution simply would take them over, 
now run by "workers". But being transferred to the despotic Russia it 
was soon corrupted by social social forces and Marx' ideal schemes 
were used for the many mad "plans" (collectivization for instance) 
without implementing any of the said intellectual patterns. Freedom of 
press, speech ...ect.       

About "nothing morally wrong with murder" we must translate ZAMM 
(where SOM was regarded as a-morality taking over from the all-moral 
Aretê past) to moqish where it was intellectual morality emerging from 
social morality. In the SOL interpretation that is, orthodoxy however 
sees SOM a bad intellectual pattern taking over an already present 
intellectual level (that must have lurked under from times immemorial) 
to be replaced by the selfsame Aretê-as-MOQ. This makes a true 
mess of it all and the the MOQ a non-starter.

> Even socialism, a more benign form of SOM, has failed. "But what the
> socialists left out and what has all but killed their whole undertaking
> is an absence of a concept of indefinite Dynamic Quality." (Lila, 17) 

> SOM has also been blind to society's role in controlling biological
> forces. "In the battle of society against biology, the new
> twentieth-century intellectuals have taken biology's side." Result?
> "Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and
> a moral and social nightmare . . ." (Lila, 24) 

Yes, SOM=intellect (before the MOQ was bad for the said reasons, but 
remember that the intellectual patterns (freedom of speech, press, 
independent juries, parliamentarism,  human rights and worth) are all 
moral to the core, only when intellect came to be the "standard model" 
in the West it continued its crusade against social law & order, not 
having any means of knowing when enough is enough. This is what 
the MOQ provides  

But here's the crux. S/O (in our modern mind/matter form) have 
philosophically ramifications of creating paradoxes and these torment 
those who think like young Phaedrus did. He wasn't  bothered by the 
"aesthetic ugliness" that Andrè points to (this was the later Pirsig who 
wrote ZAMM) but was haunted by the inconsistencies he found in the 
mind/matter dualism, and - after many ordeals - the Quality Idea. 

> So on three counts, SOM intellect has not and can not regulate society
> with anything other than detrimental effect. The survey of students
> mentioned at the outset above reveals SOM's destruction of essential
> social constraints. But, that's just the tip of the iceberg. A much
> more significant outcome of SOM's damage to the general welfare in the
> name of the "public good" is the current economic crisis.   

Society is dominated by (controlled by) intellectual value in the 
Western culture, and this intellectual over-control will be checked 
when/if the MOQ comes to be "standard model".    

> Since SOM intellect is so damaging as I've outlined above and by going
> "too far" as you say, I cannot help but wonder why Pirsig didn't come
> out more strongly for less intellectual (government) control of
> society except to protect individual rights and promote free markets.
> But, nobody's perfect. :-) 

Well he does in your example 

    "In the battle of society against biology, the new twentieth-
    century intellectuals have taken biology's side." Result? "Today 
    we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a 
    moral and social nightmare . . ." (Lila, 24)  

but the ill-conceived intellectual level prevented the MOQ from being 
such a moderator

IMO

Bo