Dear Platt,
I also owe you a reply to an older posting: that of 11/10
13:32 -0400.
It is a pity you are not willing and/or able to leave Pirsig's
quotes and metaphors aside for awhile, as I asked you 10/10 22:45
+0200. That leaves me with the unpleasant task of laying bare the
errors of Pirsig Himself, of convincing you to follow Pirsig less
blindly and of tempting you to accept other sources of authority
on metaphysical matters besides Him.
You fear a softening of resolve to fight terrorism. I fear making
THE MoQ into a static system of ideas by founding it exclusively
on the Word of Pirsig.
To (try to) dispel your fear first: Let me assure you, that I
experience the biological, social and intellectual patterns of
value of the USA and of the West more generally as being of
higher quality than the biological, social and intellectual
patterns of value of terrorists that are attacking them. So in
the end the former will surely beat the latter. It remains to be
seen however to what extent that eventual victory will be
attributable to biological means (warfare), to social means
(tempting Afghans, Pakistani's etc. with aid, trade etc. to
conform to our social pattern of values) or to intellectual means
(disproving to potential suicidal terrorists the truth of an
afterlife that happier than the life in Middle-Eastern refugee
camps and urban slums). It is in the nature of things that
biological, social and intellectual patterns of value defend
themselves against lower quality biological, social and
intellectual patterns of value (and beat them) with respectively
biological, social and intellectual means.
Social patterns of value don't defend themselves with biological
means (warfare, police force, any threat or punishment), however,
as Pirsig stated. Social patterns of value only utilize social
means (tempting lower quality social patterns, labeled "criminal"
if the quality difference is very obvious, to dissolve and to
merge into its higher quality pattern of values; essentially by
promising higher status to elements of the criminal pattern if
they become elements of the higher quality pattern). Pirsig was
wrong when He stated in Lila ch. 24 that "The instrument of
conversation between society and biology has always been a
policeman or a soldier and his gun." Social patterns of value and
biological patterns of value don't converse at all, no more than
computer hardware and computer software do. Experiences/quality
events can be simultaneously part of a biological and a social
pattern of values (e.g. policemen/soldiers fighting criminals
being part of the kill-or-be-killed biological pattern of values
and of the
include-"us"-and-exclude-"them"-that-don't-conform-to-our-mores
social pattern of values), like a change of voltage level in a
flip-flop is both part of a hardware and a software phenomenon
(Lila ch. 12). Social patterns of value can only develop when
biological patterns of value are already there and they develop
because and to the extent that they make the biological pattern
of values called "homo sapiens" more successful in its
competition with other species by overcoming its (ecological)
limitations. That's about all there is to say about the
relationship between "society" and "biology".
In my opinion Pirsig's metaphor of "intellect" siding with either
"biology" or "society" in their fight with each other confuses
"things" and "patterns". In his efforts to gradually nudge his
readers from SOM-thinking to MoQ-experience, he had to start
explaining matters using Subject-Object-Metaphysics: anecdotes
about subjects experiencing objects (things like hot stoves).
After making plausible that value-experience comes first, he took
some time to make clear that value-experiences form patterns and
that these patterns have different levels. Language tempted him
to go on treating these patterns as "things" that "act", however,
whereas he should have made clear that once you think in
"patterns" even the "self" that "experiences" the patterns is not
a subject any more. It doesn't "act at (free) will" nor "behave
as determined". The "self" is just consciousness of experience of
patterns that are conformed to (experienced as static quality) or
not conformed to (experienced as Dynamic Quality). Once you
recognize that even an individual "self" should not be thought of
as "acting" or "behaving" like an animated "thing" (a subject),
it is obvious that you should not think of collective,
abstractive entities like "intellect", "society" and "biology" as
subjects either.
Do you let yourself be tempted to follow my thoughts and to allow
the MoQ to migrate towards Dynamic Quality or do you still want
to conform strictly to the static pattern as set by the Word of
Pirsig?
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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