[MD] a-theism and atheism

[Platt Holden]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 8:26 PM, david buchanan <dmbuchanan at hotmail.com>wrote:

>
> dmb says:
>
> The most primitive tribe is intellectually guided? Not the way Pirsig uses
> the word. As you may recall from Lila, he thinks socially guided societies
> would include Victorian America, which still hasn't quite given up the fight
> for control. To say that a culture is socially guided is NOT to say it is
> meaningless or stupid, although the Victorian culture was that too.


Platt
Victorian culture was meaningless and stupid? Far from it:

"What we tend to forget is that, unlike the European aristocrats they aped,
the American Victorians were a very creative people. The telephone, the
telegraph, the rail road, the transatlantic cable, the light bulb, the
radio, the phonograph, the motion pictures, and the techniques of mass
production—almost all the great technological changes that are associated
with the twentieth century are, in fact, American *Victorian* inventions.
This *city is composed* of their value patterns! It was their optimism,
their belief in the future, their codes of craftsmanship and labor and
thrift and self-discipline that really built twentieth-century America.
Since the Victorians disappeared the entire drift of this century has been
toward a dissipation of these values." (Lila, 17)

Since the morally bereft intellectuals took over the direction of society,
their ignorance of the creative force of Dynamic Quality has created the
economic disaster the West finds itself in today. Codes of thrift and
self-discipline disappeared years ago. Last time I looked, total debt in the
U.S. exceeded $50 trillion. Thanks, intellect. A fine mess you've gotten us
into.


>
>