Focs: As a tip of the hat to Diana's request, I'd like to address this
month's topic by way of my latest favorite book. Roger recommended it. So
far, it's a huge kick in the head. I love it. On page 129 of Ken Wilber's "A
BRIEF HISTORY OF EVERYTHING" he describes SOM in other terms....
"...this negative legacy of the Enlightenment... what Mumford called the
disqualified universe. It-language is essentially value-free, neutral. It
has QUANTITY, but no QUALITY whatsoever. So if you describe everything in
terms of quantities and objective exteriors and network processes and
systems variables, then you get no qualitative distinctions whatsoever - you
get the DISQUALIFIED universe. ... which can be bigger or smaller, but never
BETTER or WORSE. Open-mindedness is better than narrow minded bigotry, but a
rock is not better than a planet. You get amounts, not morals. And while
seven might be larger than three, it is not BETTER. And thus, if you start
treating the entire world as an object - holisitic or otherwise - you strip
all value, guaranteed. You have disqualified the Kosmos.
"And when you are done with that, and you pause to look around, you
find to your utter horror thaty your are standing in a flat and faded
universe, with no meaning, no depth, no interpetation, no beauty, no
goodness, no virtue, and nothing sublime. Just a bunch of wholistic its in
functional fit."
Whitehead's famous remark: " a dull affair, soundless, scentless,
colorless; merely the hurrying of material, endlessly, meaninglessly. ..
Thereby, modern philosophy has been ruined."
There are lots of contemporary high-powered thinkers and philosophers who've
attacked this same problem and called it by many names. (Pirsig's "amoral
scientific objectivity" is an alternative moniker even within the MOQ.) This
rational materialism has quite a few critics. Maybe a few of them would be
willing to tesitify as to the actual existence of the object of their
criticism. (If there were such a thing as a COURT OF PHILOSOPHY.) But it is
as Diana put it, SOM is the last latch. Now its not just a matter of
speculation for intellectuals, its our culture's world-view and its
protected by the cultural immune system. SOM is how WE think, even if many
individuals are already thinking in ways that transcend it. And even those
who are working on ways to "expand our rationality" must first be rational
and speak the same language, which is nothing but subjects and objects.
DMB
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
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