#intellectual patterns

[quotatorium]

Out of the nursery, into the college and back to the nursery; there's your intellectual pattern for the past five centuries or more.

Beatty,  Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury

[evokit-notes]

The new intellectualism of the twenties argued that if there are principles for right social conduct they are not to be discovered by social experiment to see what produces the greatest satisfaction. The greatest satisfaction of the greatest number, rather than social tradition, is what determines what is moral and what is not. The scientific test of a 'vice' should not be, 'Does society approve or disapprove?' The test should be, 'Is it rational or irrational?' For example, drinking that causes car accidents or loss of work or family problems is irrational. That kind of drinking is vice. It does not contribute to the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number. On the other hand, drinking is not irrational when it produces mere social or intellectual relaxation. That kind of drinking is not a vice. The same test can be applied to gambling, swearing, lying, slandering or any other 'vice'. It is the intellectual aspect not the social aspect that dictates the answer.

Lila | Robert M. Pirsig | p317

[evokit-notes]

[I]t should be stated at this point that the Metaphysics of Quality supports this dominance of intellect over society. It says intellect is a higher level of evolution that society; therefore, it is a more moral level than society. It is better to destroy a society than it is to destroy an idea. But having said this, the Metaphysics of Quality goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no objective reality. You can look through a microscope or telescope or oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a single moral. There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They exist only in your imagination. From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing is right and nothing is wrong. Everything just functions, like machinery. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy, nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, with murder, with genocide. There is nothing morally wrong because ether are no morals, just functions.

Lila | Robert M. Pirsig | p316-317

[evokit-notes]

What distinguishes the Victorian culture from the culture of today is that the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patterns of society. What held the Victorian pattern together was a social code, not just an intellectual code. ..... The new culture that has emerged is the first in history to believe that patterns of society must be subordinate to pattens of intellect. The one dominating question of this century has been, 'Are the social patterns of our world going to run our intellectual life, or is our intellectual life going to run the social patterns?' And in that battle, the intellectual patterns have won.

Lila | Robert M. Pirsig | p304