From: Arlo Bensinger (ajb102@psu.edu)
Date: Thu Dec 09 2004 - 17:21:36 GMT
At 08:53 AM 12/9/2004, you wrote:
>Arlo:
>
>You asked, "What is biological about terrorism?" Pirsig answers,
Platt replied:
>"The instrument of conversation between society and biology has always
>been a policeman or a soldier and his gun." (Lila, 24)
>
>You don't need soldiers to control sex or alcohol and drug abuse. You need
>soldiers to kill those who threaten society with physical and
>psychological destruction by using biological patterns of physical
>violence.
I'm still not quite sure I follow your reasons. The police are certainly
used to "control" drug use and sex (prostitution, for example). And they
certainly use guns. The fact that we call them "officers" and not
"soldiers" is an arbitrary use of language, isn't it?
Also, I don't see how terrorists are threatening to "destroy society" in
toto? I could see the argument being made that what they are threatening to
do is to destroy our static social patterns and replace them with others
(or somewhat more appropriately, to remove the impact of our static social
patterns from their static social patterns). But I have never felt that the
goal of terrorism was to destroy "society", and revert back to individuals
roaming the wilderness. They WANT society, just one different than exists
now, right? So they are not advocating destruction of the social layer from
human existence, or do you feel they are?
But I'm not sure you answered my biggest question? How does participating
in terrorism increase biological quality? Every other "biological" level
issue I can think of (that society represses) is repressed simply because
if it weren't repressed its high biological quality would threaten the
social fabric. Without the social level repressing terrorism, are you
saying we'd all become suicide bombers because it has high biological quality?
I may be missing something here, but I still think this is more of a
conflict of static social patterns than biological-social. Using your words
above... this is a conflict between opposing static social patterns, with
each side using physical and psychological destruction by using biological
patterns of physical violence. How do you disagree with this?
Arlo
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