[MD] Babylonian intellectuals

[david buchanan]

John said:
 I agree with Arlo, mostly.  It's a cultural prejudice which makes us portray all  cultures different from our own as inferior.  Whether we're talking Egyptians or Tea Partyers, an attitude of superiority gets us nowhere - it's basis is a strictly social phenomena of "my team is better than your team".   Which is really futile when you're trying to analyze a cultural system many millennia in the past, then especially  you have to use objective analysis where you try to own and transcend your own biases as much as possible.

dmb says:

Well, actually the issue of cultural superiority is raised in chapter 21 and 22, where Pirsig is talking about the conflict between social and intellectual values. But Pirsig attributes that particular problem to the advocates of social level values. On top of the obvious example (German Fascism), he also uses our own American Victorians.

"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."

"The end of the 20th 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-latch."

"Intellect and society are still fighting it out, and that's the key to an understanding of both the Victorians and the 20th century.  What distinguishes the patterns of values called Victorian from the post-WWI period that followed it is, according to the MOQ, a cataclysmic shift in levels of static value; an earthquake of such enormous consequences that we are still stunned by it, so stunned that we haven't yet figured out what has happened to us. The advent of both democratic and communistic socialism and the fascist reaction to them has been the consequence of this earthquake." 


"The gigantic power of socialism and fascism, which have overwhelmed this century, is explained by a conflict of levels of evolution. This conflict explains the driving force behind Hitler not as an insane search for power but as an all-consuming glorification of social authority and hatred of intellectualism. His anti-Semitism was fueled by anti-intellectualism. His hatred of communists was fueled by anti-intellectualism. His exaltation of the German volk was fueled by it. His fanatic persecution of any kind of intellectual freedom was driven by it."

"the MOQ goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for morals" (277)


Despite that flaw....

"a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not." (311)



My point? I'm not just saying hurray for my team. I'm talking about the MOQ's diagnosis and Pirsig is not shy about naming names with respect to political ideologies. The idea is to sort these things out, to make sense of the conflicts that continue up to this day. And yes, the tea party folks are obviously reactionary neo-Victorians and I think they can be very clearly seen as such in the light of the MOQ's analysis.

I think it's a real fight and it matters quite a lot who wins.


 

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