[MD] a-theism and atheism

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[DMB]
But the anti-intellectual crowd turns that on it's head, as if Ant and I didn't
go to Oxford to put ourselves into heart of the lion's den.

[Arlo]
Right. And this is precisely the move to expand rationality rather than condemn
it that is the power of Pirsig's ideas.

A short while ago I saw an interview with one of the "Loose Change" proponents,
who was condemning the same "walls", criticizing the Academy for not including
its "interpretations" of 9/11 into history classes. Flat-earth proponents are
likely also offended by the "walls" that keep out their "theories" from the
Academy. Should we teach kids that JFK might still be alive? Or that he was
assassinated by the CIA?

We see the immune system as a problem when it slows down the adoption and
infusion of ideas like Pirsig's, but it is a necessary "wall" to ensure that
"cancer" and viruses don't paralyze or destroy the intellectual level.

On top of this, and this is just stating the obvious, there is an immune system
on the social level, and anti-intellectualism can be easily seen as a symptom
of this immune system. Intellect and damned interlictials are responsible for
every, single, malady in the world. War escalating in Korea? Intellectuals are
to blame. Recession? Intellectuals. Low performance in school? Intellectuals.
Bad roads? Intellectuals. Still no cancer cure? Intellectuals. Sprained ankle?
Intellectuals. Its rhetoric that is curious only in its absurdity, and in how a
social immune system relies on unrelenting demonization to squelch threats to
its power.

The "intellectual patterns" Platt condemns (in a perennial drumbeat) were not
thrust upon a utopic society by an evil guvmint. They were policies that were
adopted as a response to malignant and destructive social patterns. "Workplace
Safety Laws", for one example, only exist because of the conditions that an
unregulated industry were able to subject its workforce too. While some want a
return to the 1890's, I remember the stories my grandfather told me about his
life in the early 1900's as part of a mining family. Seeing, for example,
bodies dumped onto the porch of the shack where a family of upwards of ten
people were living, and while one person was dropping the body on the floor,
another was nailing an eviction notice to the door. Pollution laws have your
liberty-lovin' nads all in jumble? Far be it from me to point out that the
Chicago RIVER caught on fire (and it was not the only river to burn).

Of course, reasoned discourse is outside the walls of the social level immune
system.