[MD] anti-intellectualism

[X Acto]

Phaedrus thought the reason this movement has been so hard to understand is that 'understanding' itself, 
static intellect, was its enemy. The culture-bearing book of the period, On the Road by Jack Kerouac, 
was a running lecture against intellect, '... All my New York friends were in the negative nightmare 
position of putting down society and giving their tired bookish or political or psychoanalytic reasons,' 
Kerouac wrote, 'but Dean' (the hero of the book) 'just raced in society, eager for bread and love; 
he didn't care one way or the other.'
In the twenties it had been thought that society was the cause of man's unhappiness and that intellect 
would cure it, but in the sixties it was thought that both society and intellect together were the 
cause of all the unhappiness and that transcendence of both society and intellect would cure it. 
Whatever the intellectuals of the twenties had fought to create, the flower children of the sixties 
fought to destroy. Contempt for rules, for material possessions, for war, for police, for science, 
for technology were standard repertoire. The 'blowing' of the mind was important. Drugs that destroyed 
one's ability to reason were almost a sacrament. Oriental religions such as Zen and Vedanta that 
promised release from the prison of intellect were taken up as gospel. The cultural values of blacks 
and Indians, to the extent that they were anti-intellectual, were mimicked. Anarchy became the most 
popular politics and squalor and poverty and chaos became the most popular lifestyles. Degeneracy 
was practiced for degeneracy's sake. Anything was good that shook off the paralyzing intellectual 
grip of the social-intellectual Establishment.
By the end of the sixties the intellectualism of the twenties found itself in an impossible trap. 
If it continued to advocate more freedom from Victorian social restraint, all it would get was more 
Hippies, who were really just carrying its anti-Victorianism to an extreme. If, on the other hand, 
it advocated more constructive social conformity in opposition to the Hippies, all it would get was 
more Victorians, in the form of the reactionary right.
This political whip-saw was invincible, and in 1968 it cut down one of the last of the great 
intellectual liberal leaders of the New Deal period, Hubert Humphrey, the Democratic candidate 
for president.
'I've seen enough of this,' Humphrey exclaimed at the disastrous 1968 Democratic convention, '
I've seen far too much of it!' But he had no explanation for it and no remedy and neither did 
anyone else. The great intellectual revolution of the first half of the twentieth century, the 
dream of a 'Great Society' made humane by man's intellect, was killed, hoist on its own petard 
of freedom from social restraint.
Phaedrus thought that this Hippie revolution could have been almost as much an advance over the
 intellectual twenties as the twenties had been over the social 1890s, but his analysis showed 
that this 'Dynamic' sixties revolution made a disastrous mistake that destroyed it before it 
really got started.
The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two directions to go: 
toward biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality. The revolutionaries of the sixties 
thought that since both are antisocial, and since both are anti-intellectual, why then they 
must both be the same. That was the mistake.
Lila ch23


American writing on Zen during this period showed this confusion. Zen was often thought to be a sort of 
innocent 'anything goes.' If you did anything you pleased, without regard for social restraint, at the 
exact moment you pleased to do it, that would express your Buddha-nature. To Japanese Zen masters coming 
to this country this must have seemed really strange. Japanese Zen is attached to social disciplines so 
meticulous they make the Puritans look almost degenerate.
Back in the fifties and sixties Phaedrus had shared this confusion of biological quality and Dynamic 
Quality, but the Metaphysics of Quality seemed to help clear it up. When biological quality and Dynamic 
Quality are confused the result isn't an increase in Dynamic Quality. It's an extremely destructive 
form of degeneracy of the sort seen in the Manson murders, the Jonestown madness, and the increase of 
crime and drug addiction throughout the country. In the early seventies, as people began to see this, 
they dropped away from the movement, and the Hippie revolution, like the intellectual revolution of 
the twenties, became a moral rebellion that failed.
Today, it seemed to Phaedrus, the overall picture is one of moral movements gone bankrupt. Just as 
the intellectual revolution undermined social patterns,
the Hippies undermined both static and intellectual patterns. Nothing better has been introduced 
to replace them. The result has been a drop in both social and intellectual quality. In the United 
States the national intelligence level shown in SAT scores has gone down. Organized crime has grown 
more powerful and more sinister. Urban ghettos have grown larger and more dangerous. The end of the 
twentieth century in America seems to be an intellectual, social, and economic rust-belt, a whole 
society that has given up on Dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back to Victorianism, 
the last static ratchet-latch. More Dynamic foreign cultures are overtaking it and actually invading 
it because it's now incapable of competing. 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 ch23

Phaedrus thought that a Metaphysics of Quality could be a replacement for the paralyzing intellectual 
system that is allowing all this destruction to go unchecked. The paralysis of America is a paralysis 
of moral patterns. Morals can't function normally because morals have been declared intellectually 
illegal by the subject-object metaphysics that dominates present social thought. These subject-object 
patterns were never designed for the job of governing society. They're not doing it. When they're 
put in the position of controlling society, of setting moral standards and declaring values, and 
when they then declare that there are no values and no morals, the result isn't progress. The 
result is social catastrophe.
It's this intellectual pattern of amoral 'objectivity' that is to blame for the social deterioration 
of America, because it has undermined the static social values necessary to prevent deterioration. 
In its condemnation of social repression as the enemy of liberty, it has never come forth with a 
single moral principle that distinguishes a Galileo fighting social repression from a common 
criminal fighting social repression. It has, as a result, been the champion of both. That's 
the root of the problem.
Lila ch23