[MD] Sociability Re-examined

[david]

dmb had said:


...Pirsig is giving us his own version but the basic categories really shouldn't be contentious or confusing. Sorry, but all these weird questions and bizarre suggestions about defining levels, adding levels, putting levels between levels, it's all just a bunch of boring nonsense that never, ever goes anywhere. Yawn. Please wake me when it's over.


John said to dmb (apparently):


Well, not to be boring but the reason we continually re-think our categories is because that's what intellect does. Holding purely to the dogmatic  beliefs of yesterday is what religious thinking does. The static latches that we hold and pass on to our generations something only humans do. Quite a few animal species band together to hunt and for protection. Only we humans ask why, and how, and what, and then pass on our knowledge. Only we create mythic structures of explanation. To ignore the religious roots of intellect, is to miss a very big point.



dmb says:

Well, that's typical. To construe your "boring nonsense that never, ever goes anywhere" as intellectually respectable and to construe my refusal to deal with "a bunch of boring nonsense" as some kind of dogmatism is just more self-serving bullshit. This is how every ignorant crank defends his nonsense. People don't reject his ideas because they are bad ideas, he tells himself, but because the world isn't ready to accept his brilliant cutting-edge genius. This attitude is almost always (99.999% of the time) downright delusional. Of all the people who ever thought they were the next Einstein, only one of them was actually Einstein. I never knew the man but, dude, you are definitely not Einstein. If every informed voice is telling you that you're not making any sense, John, maybe it's time to consider the possibility that you're simply not making sense (instead of imagining there is a conspiracy to silence your brilliant ideas). To say, for example, that the ants and the bees "have social structures hard-wired into their DNA" only demonstrates a lack of comprehension of the basic categories. From Plato to Pirsig and everyone in between, nobody thinks that insects have social level values. That's simply the wrong idea. That's not what they meant and it doesn't make any sense. Maybe you could see this if you didn't spend so much time and energy flattering yourself. 


The question is not whether we're free to think but whether that thinking has any quality or merit. It's not about accepting or rejecting "dogma" but rather accepting or rejecting a bunch of boring non-sense.