MARY, LITHIEN, PLATT, BO and the rest of the gang:
Platt: Thanks. I needed some wind in my sails.
Lithien: I'll respond to your comments in the next post and I'm looking
forward to lots of Campbell/Pirsig talk in the future. Love your web
site.
Bodvar: Please take a look at this.
Mary: ( Love YOUR web site too. ) and...
MARY SAYS; "It seems to me that the logos has indeed changed our
Western mythos profoundly and rather quickly too. Could you elaborate?"
I'm guessing we have different ideas about the meaning of the words
"mythos" and "logos" and your question arises from that. Do we agree
that they correspond to the social and intellectual levels respectively?
Its my assumtion that the mythos virtually defines the third level and
logos the fourth and its my position that the intellect produced the
quick and profound changes to which you refer.
Simply put, I think its beyond the power of the intellect to really
change the mythos. It seems to me that the three lowest levels can only
be changed "naturally", that is Dynamically. The only way those three
levels can evolve is through the action of Dynamic Quality. All change
at those levels occurs unconsciously, just as they did before the fourth
level evolved. The emergence of the fourth level did not change the
nature of the other three levels in this respect.
But there are several reasons why a person would think otherwise. The
intellect thinks it has the ability to change all things, to "conquer
nature". Or so it seems. But actually its ability to manipulate reality
is only in a localized sense and then only on the surface of things. In
the case of inorganic patterns of value, for example, we humans have
made flint knives, forged iron swords and detonated atomic bombs. We
have seemingly altered the rocks, the ore and the plutonium with the
intellect. But in all three cases the underlying patterns of value have
not been altered at all, merely exploited. Further we can only "change"
those specific and local patterns of value, but the nature of all flint,
iron ore, and plutonium in the universe. We can only change the shape of
the flint, not the nature of the molecules within it. We haven't really
changed the iron to make our sword, we've only purified the element and
re-arranged its molecular structure. And the bomb that splits the atom
only works because of the pre-existing attributes of the plutonium atom.
In each case the intellect was only moving patterns of values around,
not changing them. All the intellect can do is take advantage of the
inherent structure and qualities of the patterns of value.
At the biological level it works the same way. You can mix what nature
has produced, but we can never really change it. You can kill a dog. But
there you're just mixing the dogs patterns of values with the patterns
we call gun shots or poison. You can breed dogs, but all you've done is
mix the patterns we call DNA. But the intellect can't evolve a new dog,
all it can do is take advantage of those biological patterns that allow
things like death and sex to occur in the first place.
Like these first two, the social level changed and evolved strickly
through the action of Dynamic Quality. The underlying patterns of value
left in the wake of creation simply can't be altered by the intellect.
Just like the first two levels, these social patterns are the medium in
which intellect exists. Thats part of the reason its so hard to sort the
two out, the intellect is so close to the social. The mythos and the
logos face each other directly. The borderlands are the most difficult.
The "behavior" of organic molecules can seem an awful lot like an
inorganic chemical reaction, for example. This is further complicated at
the interface of the top two levels because the intellect is in its
infancy and only recently emerged from the social level. The intellect
is nearly all borderland. There is no distant and distinct country to
demonstate the differences as clearly we'd like.
The quick and profound changes in the Western world, as I understand it,
have taken place only on the intellectual level and included superficial
manipulations of social patterns. For example, the Buddha was said to
have been born straight out of his mothers' heart. They say she felt no
pain and the little Buddah could walk and talk immediately after being
born. There is a story about a Greek god who was said to have sprung
directly from his mothers' head. Of course you've heard about the god
who was born of a virgin. These apparently different stories of the
births of gods come from three different cultures who all share the same
mythos, they are all from Western cultures. The underlying mythos is the
same in all three stories. They are all the same myth. They all say
there is a new kind of being in the world, one not born in the usual
animal way. There is a new creature in the cosmos who is more than just
animal. It our contemporary mythology this motif has been reduced to
comic book superheros who usually achieve some superhuman power as the
result of an industrial accident or radiatrion exposure. Our gods return
to the animal realm to become spiders, bats, and teenage mutant ninja
turtles. Alien abduction stories are fascinating to me on the grounds
that they must be coming from the mythos, but they're so contemporarty
in their imagery. So many folks have reported it that it seems like it
must be a powerful and important part of the mythos. Something
unconscious is knocking on the door of consciousness and wants to be let
in.
Even the scientific revolution predicated on the discoveries of
Copernicus did not change the underlying mythos, but it was instead a
radical and nearly total change in our map of that mythos. Notice how
the astronomical position of the earth changed because of the telescope,
but at a different level we still think of ourselves as the center of
the universe. The mythos tells us that we are and the intellect creates
maps that reflect that intuition. Intellectual patterns changed and new
maps were being drawn. It was a very dynamic time for the fourth level.
It no accident that the scientific revoltion was accompanied by the age
of exploration, when people like Columbus were literally making new maps
of the earth. The impact of the scientific revolution and of the
discovery of the new world can hardly be overstated.
Another example that comes to mind is more overtly political and
historical. There must be something in the mythos that tells us that
peace and unity go together. The ancient Greeks did their best to unite
all the Hellenistic cities. The imperial Romans tried to unite to entire
known world under their authority, Christiandom was equally imperial in
its attempts to Christianize the world. Charles the bald tried it.
Napolean tried it. The sun used to never set on the English empire. Both
world wars represent competeing national efforts at global domination.
The United Nations is predicated on the notion that unity is peace and
most alien invasion stories include themes of human unity under fire.
There's something in the mythos that the intellect keeps dressing up in
different outfits, but its always the same guy under those clothes.
What do you think?
Love,
David B.
P.S. I talked to William Pierce and lots of other people like him when I
was a talk show producer during the Oaklahoma City bombing trial. He and
his cosmotheism is most decidedly neo-nazi fascism. I don't use those
words lightly. Lots of people will die if he has his way. Pirsig says
fascism is immoral because it is essentially the assertion of socal
values over intellectual values, a transgression of the fourth moral
code. This also describes the "culture wars" in the U.S. They are the
struggle between social and intellectual patterns of value, with the
left representing the latter.
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