[MD] Another parallel

[plattholden at gmail.com]

Hi Ron,

Thanks for the quotes. There was plenty about the Victorian era not to 
admire, as Pirsig vividly describes. But remember his observation about 
the social result of the revolution that resulted in dominance of the 
intellectual level:

"What's coming out of the urban slums, where old Victorian social moral 
codes are almost completely destroyed, isn't any new paradise the 
revolutionaries hoped for, but a reversion to rule by terror, violence and 
gang death-the old biological might-makes-right morality of prehistoric 
brigandage that primitive societies were set up to overcome." (Lila,24)

Not to mention other negative results of the destruction of Victorian 
social codes such as the descent upon the land of a "secret loneliness" 
and the recent glorification in death of Wacko Jacko.

Platt


On 9 Jul 2009 at 18:26, X Acto wrote:

> more quotes for Platt
> 
> 
>  
> "What distinguishes the Victorian culture from the culture of today is
>  that the 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."
> 
> "If one realizes that the 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?'"
> 
> "All this explains why Victorian robber barons in America aped European aristocracy 
> in ways that seem so ludicrous to us today. It explains why it was so fashionable 
> for Victorian nabobs to pay large sums to be included in biographies of 'distinguished
>  citizens.' It explains why Victorians so despised the frontier part of the American 
> personality and went to ridiculous extremes to conceal it. They wanted to strike it 
> from their history, conceal it in every way possible.
> It explains why the Victorians were so vehement in their loathing of Indians. The 
> statement, The only good Indian is a dead Indian,' was a Victorian statement. The 
> idea of extermination of all Indians was not common before the nineteenth century.
>  Victorians wanted to destroy 'inferior' societies because inferior societies were 
> a form of evil. Colonialism, which before that time was an economic opportunity, 
> became with Victorians a moral course, a 'white man's burden' to spread their social 
> patterns and thus virtue throughout the world.
> Truth, knowledge, beauty, all the ideals of mankind, are passed on from generation 
> to generation like a flaming torch, the headmaster said, which each generation must 
> hold up high and protect with their very lives lest that torch go out. But what he 
> meant by that torch was a static Victorian social value pattern. And what he either 
> did not know, or found it convenient to ignore, was that the torch of Victorian 
> romantic idealism had gone out long before he spoke those words in the 1930s. Perhaps 
> he was just trying to relight it.
> 
> But there is no way to light that torch within a Victorian pattern of values. Once 
> intellect has been let out of the bottle of social restraint, it is almost impossible
>  to put it back in again. And it is immoral to try. A society that tries to restrain 
> the truth for its own purposes is a lower form of evolution than a truth that restrains
>  society for its own purposes.
> 
> Victorians repressed the truth whenever it seemed socially unacceptable, just as they 
> repressed thoughts about the powdery horse manure dust that floated about them as they 
> drove their carriages through this city. They knew it was there. They breathed it in 
> and out. But they didn't consider it socially proper to talk about it. To speak plainly 
> and openly was vulgar. They never did so unless forced by extreme social circumstances 
> because vulgarity was a form of evil.
> Because it was evil to speak the truth openly, their apparatus for social self-correction
>  became atrophied and paralyzed."
> 
> "Ultimately their minds became the same way. Their language became filled with ornamental 
> curlicues that never stopped proliferating until it was all but incomprehensible. And if
>  you didn't understand it you dared not show it because to show it meant you were vulgar 
> and ill-bred."
> 
> "With Victorian spirits atrophied and their minds hemmed in by social restraints, all 
> avenues to any quality other than social quality were closed. And so this social base 
> which had no intellectual meaning and no biological purpose slowly and helplessly 
> drifted toward its own stupid self-destruction: toward the senseless murder of millions
>  of its own children on the battlefields of the First World War."-lila ch21
>