To All:
For those wondering what Pirsig's view might be on the terrorist
attacks, a rereading of Chapters 22 and 24 of LILA will shed some
light. Here are a few relevant excerpts:
"From the hotel window, looking out across the park, it seemed as if
you could see from the north, from the ghetto areas there, a dreadful
night, an eclipse of social patterns by invading unchecked biological
patterns, closing in and gradually putting New York into a sleep from
which it might never recover. It isn't a war of races or cultures. It's a war
of society against patterns of reason and patterns of biology that have
been set loose by the mistakes of this century."
"What's coming out of the urban slums, where old Victorian social
moral codes are almost completely destroyed, isn't any new paradise
the revolutionaries hoped , but a reversion to rule by terror, violence
and gang death--the old biological might-makes-right morality of
prehistoric brigandage that primitive societies were set up to
overcome."
"Throughout this century we have seen over and over again that
intellectuals weren't blaming crime on man's biological nature but on
the social patterns that had repressed this biological nature. At every
opportunity, it seems, they derided, denounced, weakened and
undercut these Victorian social patterns of repression in the belief that
this would be the cure of man's criminal tendencies."
"In the battle of society against biology, the new twentieth-century
intellectuals have taken biology's side. Society can handle biology
alone by means of prisons and guns and police and the military. But
when the intellectuals in control of society take biology's side against
society then society is caught in a cross fire from which it has no
protection."
"The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that
you can talk crime to death, doesn't work. Intellectual patterns cannot
directly control biological patterns. Only social patterns can control
biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society
and biology is not words. The instrument of conversation between
society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his
gun."
"Where biological values are undermining social values, intellectuals
must identify social behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and
support it all the way without restraint. Intellectuals must find biological
behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and limit or destroy
destructive biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness, the
way a doctor destroys germs, before those biological patterns destroy
civilization itself."
I interpret the MOQ view to be that those who are terrorists and those
countries who support and/or tolerate terrorists have the moral
standing of germs and like germs must be deliberately and ruthlessly
annihilated by all means at our disposal. In the last century we did
precisely that to the terrorists of Germany, Italy and Japan. Now it is up
to a new generation to do that to Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine and all
other countries who harbor and support the new breed of international
criminals. Once again, civilization itself is at stake.
Platt
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