[MD] Intellectuals will tell you

[david buchanan]

John said to Adrie, Krimel, Platt and dmb:
... I think its religious ideas that are responsible for the mess we're in, and heading for worse.  One specific idea in particular, covers a whole host of evils - the doctrine of original sin. This doctrine says that man is inherently evil.  That because of the fall, man has sin encoded into his dna.  Because of sin, all nature is fallen and evil.  Because of sin, there is only one possible solution - acceptance of Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour. Even though this idea might be a clever marketing ploy and helped fill the pews with backsides, it's had disastrous effects on the church and the world.


dmb says:

Well,  as I see it, the MOQ sheds a lot of light on the doctrine of original sin. It explains the doctrine as a matter of social level values putting restraints on biological values. Interestingly, this doctrine has also found expression at the intellectual level. As the Freudians paint it, for example, the ego's job is to negotiate the differences between our primal instincts toward sex and violence and society's demands for civilized behavior. Darwinism can be taken this way as well, as when the survival of the fittest is construed as a brutal struggle with tooth and claw. Somehow, we get the same dark view of man's nature from Genesis, psychology and biology. No matter which version you prefer, they all amount to the same thing. We're b-b-b-bad to the bone. 


I think Pirsig wants to push back against this idea to the extent that it denigrates and/or dismisses our feelings and intuitions. On the other hand, he says that 20th century intellectuals failed to appreciate what an important task the social level has preformed in keeping the biological values under restraint. The enlightenment belief in man's inherent goodness, he says, was pretty naive. We're not g-g-g-good to the bone either. It's more complicated than either of those views would have it. Our notions of good and evil are better understood in terms of conflicting levels of value. Obviously, none of us would be here if it weren't for the fact the people have sex and biologically speaking, sex is as good as it gets and it's totally necessary as well as fun. But it's also nice to be liberated from the laws of the jungle too. Without civilization, nookie is hard won and every meal entails some kind of fight. No thanks. I'll take pious priests and vice cops over that any day. 


On a more personal note, yea, the doctrine of original sin is real good at making people feel like shit, at making people distrust their own feelings and instincts. It's misanthropic and alienating. It's the cornerstone of everything I hate about religion. It produces obedience through the installation of self-loathing. In fact, I think fundamentalism is not a religious attitude so much as a form of mental illness. How much pain does a person have to be in to find relief or refuge in a worldview like that? What could be more static or less conducive to personal growth? It's a problem politically and it needs to be opposed politically but it's also a heart-breaking humanitarian disaster. What does democratic freedom even mean in a country where tens of millions willingly submit themselves to unauthorized authority and unbelievable beliefs?


What's the difference between delusion and religion?


Volume.

 
John said:
... That this untenable metaphysical mess led science to adopt  a values-free philosophical stance is hardly surprising.  And practically admirable.   This lead then to another problem, which is in the modern era, the most moral interaction with nature is to leave it alone.  That is, instead of a creation which God pronounced "good" in Genesis, featuring  man as the tender and manager of gardens, the namer of things; we have scientists and politicians urging an almost Buddhist non-involvement between us and the environment.   A complete abnegation of stewardship which leaves man as the passive observer.  Preferably through some means of filming which leaves no trace.  What a travesty!  Nature suffers from the lack of man, and man suffers from the lack of nature.


dmb says:

Well, there are things like the Green party, global climate change, the wilderness society and America's national parks. In that sense there is a movement toward the preservation of nature as opposed to development or exploitation. But then you have the particle accelerators and genetically modified foods and a few thousand oil wells. Bacon's original metaphor for empirical, scientific investigation was one of torturing nature to make her give up her secrets. At the same time, the Church was torturing witches. It's just about enough to make you believe in God, so long as that God has a real flare for show business - especially dark comedies. 




> > "From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a
> > completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything.
> > Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like
> > machinery." (Lila, 22)
> >
> >
> > Pirsig's aim is to show that science is not value-free, not outside the
> > realm of morals or individual expression. Quite the opposite. Physicists are
> > artists and so is the motorcycle mechanic. Truth is a species of the Good,
> > the most moral level of static quality. The idea here is to improve and
> > expand both philosophy and science, to expand our notion of rationality by
> > incorporating Quality or Value as a central feature. And so the attack on
> > SOM is not only a rejection of the Cartesian self, the correspondence theory
> > of truth and a rejection of the old-school empiricism, it is also an attack
> > on our attitudes of objectivity and our basic cultural outlook. It's an
> > attack on scientism and reductionism and the pretense of an objective point
> > of view. James and Pirsig both say, basically, that philosophy is biography
> > and there is no such thing as an objective point of view, an objective
> > reality or a single exclusive truth. Perspective is everything and science
> > and philosophy have never been anything but works of art.