[MD] e: Reading & Comprehension

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Andre]
I apologize for having been abrupt and terse Marsha when you asked 
for full quotes plus explanation. A summary you will find in 
Anthony's PhD. More stuff, as said, in LILA and the LC.

[Arlo]
In the years I've been here, this impasse has been insurmountable. 
What I find interesting is that no other "level" is so assaulted, so 
denigrated, so demonized, as the "awful" intellectual level. By 
casting it as "just SOM", it is forever condemned as an "obstacle" in 
an otherwise clean trajectory to harmony. Rather than expanding 
rationality, as was Pirsig's goal, we have his highest moral (static) 
level reduced to a incurable disease in the silent, harmonic 
landscape of "inorganic-biological-social" bliss.

What has been interesting over the years is to witness the psychology 
behind this. At the risk of pointing out the obvious, Bo's SOLAQI 
seems to be an attempt to place "Western Culture" as the morally 
dominant worldview, and reduces all non-Western worldviews to 
"social". That is, "we" (Western cultures) are 
"intellect",  non-Western cultures are "just social", and so our 
superiority can be claimed. Platt, on the ironic other hand, demands 
intellect be reduced to SOM as a way of causally dismissing 
"intellect" as broken or inferior, it becomes just another 
"Boogeyman" in an otherwise tiring and cliche-ridden 
anti-intellectual crusade. Marsha, although this will likely draw her 
ire, has probably the best intentionality at dismissing "intellect" 
to promote a more artistic, "merry prankster" approach to life. What 
I think she misses is that it was the malady of a subject-object 
primacy within intellect that the MOQ was attempting to cure, it is 
an expansive philosophy, not a condemnational one. It is a uniting of 
classical/romantic approaches, not a dismissal of one and a 
championing of the other. The Buddha rests just as comfortably in 
semiotics as in gardening.

But then my own psychology says intellect is worth saving, there is a 
great value in it, and I think Pirsig's placement of it as the 
highest moral order shows he feels similarly. The MOQ is not a "burn 
down the universities" philosophy, it is a "reclaim the universities" 
philosophy. It does not condemn "science", it saves it. It does not 
dismiss rationality, but it expands its power. As DMB pointed out, 
the goal of the MOQ is beautiful science and intelligent art. The SOL 
view offers us neither.