[MD] Another parallel

[david buchanan]

Ron said to Platt:
... my questions to you is, "how then is MoQ expected to make any difference? How is it to give value to a value-less intellectual pattern? I really have a hard time understanding how you can equate MoQ with anti-intellectualism.

Platt replied:
Do you have a hard time understanding this from Pirsig? "Remember that the central reality of the MOQ is not an object or a subject or anything else. It is understood by direct experience only and not by reasoning of any kind."


dmb says:That statement distinguishes the MOQ from SOM and it distinguishes "the central reality of mysticism, the reality that Phaedrus had called 'Quality' in his first book" from subject and objects. In the second book, this central reality is DQ while subjects and objects are sq. This distinguishes direct experience from conceptual reasoning. But this statement is anti-SOM, not anti-intellectual. He's only saying that direct experience is pre-intellectual, not anti-intellectual. May I remind you that static intellectual patterns are place at the top of the hierarchy of static patterns. According to the MOQ's evolutionary morality, only DQ is higher. In that sense, Ron is quite right. It's not just incorrect to construe the MOQ as anti-intellectual, it is also immoral.
"In the past empiricists have tried to keep science free from values. Values have been considered a pollution of the rational scientific process. But the MOQ makes it clear that the pollution is from threats to science by static lower levels of evolution: static BIOLOGICAL values such as the biological fear that threatened Jenner's small pox experiment; static SOCIAL values such as the religious censorship that threatened Galileo with the rack. The MOQ says that science's empirical rejection of biological and social values is not only rationally correct, it is also morally correct because the intellectual patterns of science are of a higher evolutionary order than the old biological and social patterns. But the MOQ also says that DQ - the value-force that chooses an elegant mathematical solution to a laborious one, or a brilliant experiment over a confusing, inconclusive one - is another matter altogether. DQ is a higher moral order than static scientific truth, and it is as immoral for philosophers of science to try to suppress DQ as it is for church authorities to suppress scientific method. Dynamic value is an integral part of science. It is the cutting edge of scientific progress itself. ... Through this identification of pure value with pure experience, the MOQ paves the way for an enlarged way of looking at experience which can resolve all sorts of anomalies that traditional empiricism has not been able to cope with."

Maybe Ron's anger (a feeling with which I totally sympathize) at Platt's anti-intellectualism isn't just a matter of disagreement. It is also a kind of moral outrage. In the twentieth century, anti-intellectual attitudes led directly to war and genocide and incalculable amounts of human misery. And Hitler was not a mystic. He was not trying to take over the world to promote a Zen-like peace of mind. His anti-intellectualism, like Platt's, is all about the glorification of social values. His fascism was "a program for the social control of intellect". It'll probably just come across as hyperbole and I'm quite sure Platt will see it as nothing but a personal attack but I'll say it anyway. Platt's position isn't just wrong, it's a form of evil. I think that calling this position stupid, as Ron did, is actually a little bit too kind. I think that stupidity (the lack of knowledge and intellectual skill) can only partially explain this anti-intellectual attitude. Rather than mere mindless blundering, there is also a lot of hate in it and since there have been years and years of attempted explanations, his ignorance seems quite deliberate and willful. His anti-intellectual interpretation of the quote above, for example, will not be altered in the slightest by this explanation or any other. 
I've learned that talking to the guy is really quite pointless. I'm not saying that Platt's attitude is wrong BECAUSE he is a shitty person. That's just a coincidence, not a causal relation.

 
 
    
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