Hullo Sam and all,
Congratulations on a worthy post, Sam. I found it stimulating at a number of
levels. Wittgenstein was little more than a name to me, so I have learnt a
lot about him from you, and discovered I owe him a debt in my understanding
of language, which is not greatly different from his. Do you also find
Pirsig a little over-impressed with the need for definition at times, even
while resisting the imposition of definitions on his core value of Quality?
As an ex-Christian, I am perhaps less enthusiastic about the value of the
major religions in educating us in love. My disenchantment was crystalised
by M. Scott Peck's 'A Different Drum', in which he contrasts pseudocommunity
with real community. To quote Scott Peck "We cannot be truly ourselves until
we are able to share freely the things we have most in common: our weakness,
our incompleteness, our imperfection, our inadequacy, our sins, our lack of
wholeness and self sufficiency." Such sharing creates a "soft individualism"
that makes real community possible.
Scott Peck goes on, "The great enemy of community is exclusivity ... in
community, instead of being ignored, denied, hidden or changed, human
differences are celebrated as gifts." "Community is a safe place precisely
because no one is attempting to heal or convert you, to fix you, to change
you. Instead, the members accept you as you are. A community is a group that
can fight gracefully. A community is a group of all leaders. The spirit of
community is inevitably the spirit of peace and love. The vast majority of
people are capable of learning the rules of communication and
community-building and are willing to follow them. Virtually any group of
people can form themselves into a genuine community."
I should make clear at once that I am not a great fan of Scott Peck's, and
disagree quite strongly with much else that he writes, but pseudocommunity
certainly was the best word I had found to describe my experience of the
church, and his description of community came close to what I was seeking
for myself at the time. Having attended a community building workshop run on
his lines, I joined a small group that has continued to meet weekly for over
seven years, and which continues to provide me with the most profound
community I have experienced. The main change in the group over that period
has been the ability to deal with the 'shame' level of our experience, which
requires much trust and support, and almost as difficult, the ability to
deal with our successes and growth, which is missing from the list Scott
Peck gives above. I would agree that almost anyone can use the communication
and community-building rules to experience community - it is quite another
thing to suggest that all people are prepared to make the effort to build
community. In my experience it is the rare few who do. And while the
intention of the community may not be therapeutic as such, in practice the
outcomes tend to be therapeutic. It is interesting that all the members of
the small group I attend have also chosen to enter therapy groups to further
their own growth.
While churches, mosques, synagogues, and so on, no doubt vary greatly in
their education for love, my experience suggests that the unhealthy aspects
of most main stream religious education (dare I say indoctrination) are the
creation of guilt, (as in 'original sin' in the Christian tradition,) the
often intense promotion of conformity, and the branding of those who are
openly different as heathen or deviant. Two couples whom I regard as
friends, and who have lived committed lives as Christians, demonstrating
what I perceive as healthy love and concern for others, each have a son who
has taken on a fanatical and fundamentalist Christian belief that seems
actually to work against the tolerance and vision of their parents. I find
it hard to see how the same family and education that produced sane and
tolerant siblings also produced such extremism, but that is what occurred.
If we knew why, perhaps we would be able to start to deal with the type of
fundamentalist terrorism that has exercised our minds in recent weeks.
I am not quite convinced of your suggestion that the value of truth is
subordinate to the values of beauty and the good. If truth is narrowly
defined as an 'academic virtue', then I have to agree, but I see truth used
much more broadly, to refer to what might be termed the 'truth of
experience', in which case I would argue that it is a concern for the truth
that marks out the terrain of 'spirituality'. The word I prefer to use for
the highest level concerns of man is 'meaning', though it too seems partial
and inadequate, and can be narrowly restricted to making definitions. While
I have many issues with Pirsig's MOQ, I find his use of 'quality' an
inspired one, insofar as it clearly points to value, without at the same
time getting mired in social level morality.
One of my constant criticisms of Pirsig has been his reification of quality,
as demonstrated by his use of the capital Q. I argue that in many places in
his books 'Quality' could be replaced by 'God' without significant change.
Others have generally downplayed this criticism. Tony McWatt says in
response to this very point, "importantly, Quality is non theistic". But
this is where I find your elaboration of Wittgenstein helpful, "to see what
language is actually doing in a given situation." (As you put it.) If God
and Quality are interchangeable I tend to assume that labelling one as
theistic and the other as non-theistic is not very helpful, and the same
sorts of reservations I have against using God as the fundamental term for
reality may well apply to Quality used in the same way.
As "a description of something that actually takes place in human life",
quality is a great term, but all too often Quality seems to have become a
deus ex machina. This is where Pirsig risks entering himself into a form of
scientism, with his useful evolutionary arguments becoming a new version of
fundamental law. Perhaps this is the unavoidable risk with a metaphysics. I
find it unhelpful and annoying.
Pirsig clearly identifies loneliness as a significant part of the malaise of
the 20th century, yet offers in my view almost no perspective on how to
build community. Indeed, his apocalyptic vision of the Giant seems to imply
the powerlessness and insignificance of the individual in modern society,
with little hope that significance might be regained. The human being is
presented as the plaything of the dynamic outworking of 'Quality' in
regimented societies required to maintain our production and distribution
systems. This I see as the dark side of Pirsig's vision, which in many other
respects is indeed helpful in restoring value to the aridity of the modern
scientific outlook.
I have ranged broadly in my response to your post, and hope that I have not
been too chaotic in seeking to build it into my thought processes. I would
like to find out how you understand religion as 'education for love' relates
to mysticism, but that must wait for another occasion as this is already too
long.
Regards,
John B
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:01:33 BST