[MD] philosophy and education

[david buchanan]

Gav said to dmb:
 i guess our respective takes are not mutually exclusive, rather they are complementary. i am not talking about abandoning technology. i am talking about empowering the individual. it is lot more work to deprogram an adult than not fuck up a child in the first place. but i am not saying abandon adults either!!!
And previously, Gav had said:
 ...and of course it is not just education that suffers this treatment. but as dave said: got to go to the roots - no use holding on to something which is terminally ill. ...and this is where i perhaps deviate from pirsig and dave (oh my god!), at least a little. i do think that change will occur at the academic level, but it will be slow. people like ant and dave are pioneers here. but this isn't the root; these are the topmost branches.

dmb says:

I already replied to some of this but was thinking about it and wanted to add a point or two. I agree that it's easier to educate people properly when they're young than it is to de-program them later in life but I was thinking about what's at the roots in a different sense. In ZAMM, near the end of chapter 14, it says the root of the problem with rationality and technology is "a kind of a noncoalescence between reason and feeling" so that they're "not connected in any real way with matters of the spirit and of the heart" and now "people are asking if we must always suffer spiritually and esthetically in order to satisfy material needs". This noncoalescence between reason and feeling can't be fixed by adding some style on top of the existing forms forms of thought. You know, you can't just pretty it up after the fact. And, as Pirsig says, "It can't be solved by rational means because the rationality itself is the source of the problem". And so the idea, I think, is to "expand the nature of rationality" so that feeling is integrated with rationality from the ground up. Instead of having logic and reason on one side and spirit and heart on the other, this expanded rationality includes the affective domain. How does Pirsig put it, it's a rationality in which it is considered irrational to exclude that sense of quality, those feelings and values.

If we think of our educational institutions as part of the "system" and compare what he says about the "system" in chapter 8 to what he says about rationality in chapter 10, I think it's fairly clear why he thinks the change has to occur first within rationality itself. And I think this what what getting to the "root" of the problem is all about.
>From chapter 8 of ZAMM:
To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as "the system" is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There's no villain, no "mean guy" who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding. 


>From chapter 10 of ZAMM:

It's possible now to look back a little and see why it's important to talk about this person in relation to everything that's been said before concerning the division between classic and romantic realities and the irreconcilability of the two. Unlike the multitude of romantics who are disturbed about the chaotic changes science and technology force upon the human spirit, Phædrus, with his scientifically trained classic mind, was able to do more than just wring his hands with dismay, or run away, or condemn the whole situation broadside without offering any solutions.
As I've said, he did in the end offer a number of solutions, but the problem was so deep and so formidable and complex that no one really understood the gravity of what he was resolving, and so failed to understand or misunderstood what he said.
The cause of our current social crises, he would have said, is a genetic defect within the nature of reason itself. And until this genetic defect is cleared, the crises will continue. Our current modes of rationality are not moving society forward into a better world. They are taking it further and further from that better world. Since the Renaissance these modes have worked. As long as the need for food, clothing and shelter is dominant they will continue to work. But now that for huge masses of people these needs no longer overwhelm everything else, the whole structure of reason, handed down to us from ancient times, is no longer adequate. It begins to be seen for what it really is...emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty. That, today, is where it is at, and will continue to be at for a long time to come.
I've a vision of an angry continuing social crisis that no one really understands the depth of, let alone has solutions to. I see people like John and Sylvia living lost and alienated from the whole rational structure of civilized life, looking for solutions outside that structure, but finding none that are really satisfactory for long. And then I've a vision of Phædrus and his lone isolated abstractions in the laboratory...actually concerned with the same crisis but starting from another point, moving in the opposite direction...and what I'm trying to do here is put it all together. It's so big...that's why I seem to wander sometimes.



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