[MD] Reading & Comprehension

[david buchanan]

Arlo said to Platt:
... I could, of course, try to dumb things down for just you, but given that everyone else understands me just fine, I'll decline...  If you can't "effortlessly understand" what someone writes, maybe the problem is with YOU? Naaaahhh... must be those big bad intellectuals... So in a philosophy forum, who is the "average reader" you feel can't keep up with the "academic" talk?  ... Just how "dumb" do you think the "average reader" is here?



dmb says:

If you read or hear something that's understood effortlessly, then you're not reading or hearing anything new. If you understand it right away, it's trivial or you already knew it. But learning takes time and effort.

The complaint is strange because of the context. I mean, why would anti-intellectuals even show up to discuss philosophy in first place? It doesn't make sense to complain about incomprehension or blame it on the writer because all you have to do is ask the other guys what he means. And so what if you have to look up a word? I look up words all the time. Only takes a few seconds at a time and after you do that a bunch of times your vocabulary has been expanded. Are afraid that you might learn something? Are books, ideas and thinkers your enemies? Even though this anti-intellectualism is as common as the rain, I think it's a bizarre attitude. Again, it's the context. We're hear to discuss the philosophy of a college professor, a philosophy in which intellectual values are the most evolved, most moral of all static patterns. We're talking about a system of thought that has the expansion of rationality itself as one of its central aims. 

I mean, I don't think it is within the range of valid interpretations to read the MOQ as anti-intellectual. Pirsig's critique of SOM can be selected out and made to seem anti-intellectual. Pirsig's distinctions between static conceptualizations and dynamic reality can be made to seem anti-intellectual too. So it's not exactly crazy or invented out of thin air. It just doesn't make sense in the big picture. Pirsig is against SOM because it's too narrow. It constricts our modes of rationality and he wants to expand them. He wants to expand empiricism in a similar and compatible way. His aim is to improve the intellect and our way of doing philosophy, not to bad-mouth it or trash it. He's a critic, not a hater. His criticism of the intellectual level is constructive. Literally. He explains its origins, purposes and limits. 

But then there is just plain old-fashioned know-nothingism. 
As Wikipedia puts it, "Nativism (politics) or political nativism, a term used by scholars to refer to ethnocentric beliefs relating to immigration and nationalism. In particular, it may refer to 19th and 20th century political movements in the United States, especially the Know Nothings in the 1850s and the KKK in the 1920s."

This streak in American culture is quite recognizable in today's right-wing conservatives and it's basically a less virulent version of the anti-intellectualism of German fascism. Pirsig describes this right-wing fascism as anti-intellectual in every way. He describes it as a reactionary re-assertion of social level values against the newly empowered intellectual values. These kinds of political movements and the attitudes that give them energy and power are very far from a constructive critique of rationality or the limits of intellect. It's mostly just hate and fear. You know what "arrogant" and "elitist" REALLY means? That's just what you call a guy when he makes you feel stupid. It's a lot like junior high school, when "stuck up" really meant "she won't go out with me". I mean, anti-intellectualism isn't a set of ideas so much as a general attitude that takes different shapes in different places.


For my own part, I think it's more than appropriate to discuss James and other pragmatists here because the MOQ is in the mainstream of American pragmatism. Pirsig puts it in those terms on the last page of chapter 29. And he says that this is very good news, politically, because he doesn't want his work to be taken as some far out, cult favorite. It's good news, because then the MOQ can hang there in the gallery mainstream academic thought and then it can be positioned next to similar visions, whether they come out of pragmatism or not. One doesn't need to have a personal hotline to Pirsig to know this stuff. It's in the book. 






 



   		 	   		  
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