Re: MD secular humanism and dynamic quality

From: David Morey (us@divadeus.freeserve.co.uk)
Date: Tue Apr 06 2004 - 19:56:08 BST

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    Hi DMB

    Glad you liked that, if you fancy reading my novel that
    looks at a possible way of science itself closing up
    some of this alienation let me know.

    regards
    David M

    ----- Original Message -----
    From: "David Buchanan" <DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org>
    To: <moq_discuss@moq.org>
    Sent: Monday, April 05, 2004 12:07 AM
    Subject: RE: MD secular humanism and dynamic quality

    > David M said:
    > I also suspect that part of the problem that allows
    > fundamentalism is the withdrawal from the conversation
    > of meaning that secularism represents. The urgent thing for
    > me is to have a single conversation that can somehow
    > integrate politics, religion, science, education. The post-modernist
    > aversion to this leave us with a social crisis.
    >
    > dmb says:
    > Exactly. Prior to the rise of Modernity art, morals and science were all
    > integrated into a single world view. This rise of Modernity is marked by a
    > differentiation of "the big three", as Wilber likes to call them. And it
    was
    > good for science to get out from under the church and all that. Each of
    > these domians needed to mature and become independent before a modern
    > intellectually guided soceity could become possible. The problem is that
    > each of these domains has gone past the point of gaining its independence
    > and have instead become dis-associated with each other. So what we need as
    a
    > next step is to begin a re-integration of things. I think this is exactly
    > what Pirsig's MOQ tries to do. Thnik about his criticism of the way SOM
    > undermines the subjective with the common phrase, "just subjective" and
    his
    > complaints about the inability of the metaphysics of substance to explain
    > values - and then look again at what Wilber and friends say about this
    kind
    > of materialism...
    >
    > "But the inherent downsides of this approach are perhaps obvious: All
    > subjective truths (introspection, consciousneess, art, beauty) and all
    > intersubjective truths (morals, justice, substantive values) were
    collapsed
    > into exterior, empirical, sensorimotor occasions. Collapsed, that is, into
    > dirt. Literally. The great nightmare of scientific materialism was upon us
    > (Whitehead), the nightmare of one-dimensional man (Marcuse), the
    > disqualified universe (Mumford), the colonization of art and morals by
    > science (Habermas), the disenchantment of the world (Weber) - a nightmare
    I
    > have also called
    > flatland. ...when modernity pledged allegiance to sensory science, and
    > then promptly decided that the entire world contained nothing but matter,
    > period. The bleakness of the modern scientific proclamation is chilling."
    >
    > dmb says:
    > I think the "withdrawl from the conversation of meaning that secularism
    > represents" is one of the main problems with the "disenchantment of the
    > world" And that is also why I find myself so disenchanted with the kind of
    > postmodernism that Matt has presented. Its part of that same problem, a
    cure
    > that is worse than the disease. It doesn't exactly fail to recognize the
    > loss of meaning, but it fails to recognize the seriousness of the problem
    > and instead offers up reassurances that we don't need meaning and could
    > never have it anyway because there is no such thing. It breaks my heart
    that
    > anyone finds value in a thing so cold and empty as that.
    >
    >
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