From: Steve Peterson (speterson@fast.net)
Date: Mon Jan 20 2003 - 18:53:12 GMT
DMB, Wim, Platt, all trying to make sense out of the levels,
> Steve asked DMB:
> Could you explain how you categorize patterns of value?
>
> DMB says:
> Are you asking how to distinguish one level
> from another? So it seems. It would be an unwise use of our time to discuss
> the nature of the first two levels because these are fairly obvious. Its
> safe to assume everybody knows the difference between rocks and animals, for
> example. There is little dispute about this. The trouble begins when we try
> to make distinctions between the social and intellectual patterns, no?
Steve: Yes, I think you understand what I am asking.
>DMB:
> One rule of thumb is to ask yourself about the age of the static patterns in
> question. If it existed before the ancient Greeks, it is extremely unlikely
> that we can rightly categorize it as an intellectual value. If anyone can
> think of an exception to this rule, I would be amazed. This rule of thumb
> emerges from the fact that the static levels represent an evolutionary
> sequence where each level depends upon the previous ones for its existence.
Steve:
This sounds like a useful rule of thumb.
>
> When using this rule, it is important to get a sense of the scale of things
> too. Think of the monkey dance, for example. (The very recent "mentality of
> apes" post isn't very long. If you havent seen it yet, I'd urge you to take
> a look.) There we are looking way, way back into pre-history. As Campbell
> paints it, we were dancing like that some 600,000 years ago. The social
> level began to evolve a very long time ago. And even if we stretch the birth
> date of the intellect back to 1000 BC, we're still talking about half of one
> percent of the total arch of human evolution! Intellect is something like
> the tip of the iceberg. Beyond our animal selves, something like 99.5
> percent of who and what we are is social. In historical terms, intellect is
> a brand spanking new, paper thin layer on top of the extremely ancient
> social level.
Steve: I read about the monkey "dance." Interesting. Note that I think
Wim's formulation would categorize it as "unconscious copying of behavior,"
thus as a social pattern.
> DMB:
> Another way to think about the difference between the social and
> intellectual level is to take in the many examples cited in Lila and add
> them up. Putting all these examples together creates a picture of two
> distinct categories. I find this method to be a little bit more complicated,
> but the examples are of actual historical events and actual people, so it
> gives us plenty of meat to sink our teeth into.
Steve:
I would be interested in any other rules. I don't like the idea of needing
to refer to the text to categorize a pattern of value.
I often think that the distinctions that you make between social and
intellectual are really social distinctions rather than moq distinctions.
As in the debate about whether Lila has a part in intellectual patterns of
value, and your claim that Hitler was not intellectual. I think you mean
that Hitler was not *an* intellectual which sounds to me like a social role.
Phaedrus was an intellectual, Rigel was a respectable gentelman, Lila was a
tramp. IMO these are social roles not metaphysical distinctions. I can't
understand how you could see them as categorically different things as a
rock differs from an animal or an idea differs from a person.
Steve
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