THE Q:
"What do the patterns of higher quality have that those of destruction,
decay and disorder don't?"
JOHN:
When you say, "However, we can live in harmony with each other by ensuring
our values do not contradict each other", I am not convinced. I agree that a
degree of harmony is possible, and that the way we argue makes a huge
difference, but at the end of the day, I cannot see how our values can be
harmonised - surely if Wilber and Pirsig are right, and there are higher and
lower levels, this implies that the values do not agree. Pirsig makes this
point often, where he claims the values of a higher level are often opposed
to the values of a lower level. I think he errs too far in this direction.
Wilber suggests that the Basic Moral Intuition, "Protect and promote the
greatest depth for the greatest span", is felt at all the levels that
concern us as humans, but can only be unwrapped in terms that make sense at
each person's level. But the outcomes will indeed be different, and in
practice tolerance usually extends only from higher to lower levels. That is
why fundamentalism is such a problem for me. Not only is it oblivious to
higher level visions, but it condemns them out of hand.
ROG:
Agreed. Harmony is the goal to which we can, and I believe will, progress
toward. Because that is what "progress" is -- greater quality across a
greater span and a greater depth. I agree that we may take centuries or
millenium to solve some of these problems, and each that we solve can tend to
generate new problems as well. But that is the pursuit of DQ.
Wilber does support that average conciousness has continuously progressed
over time. I believe our goal is to continue this progression. Devil of
course is in the details.
JOHN:
Meta-quality. Pirsig argues that we know quality when we see it. He also
argues that there is a hierarchy of static quality in which the intellectual
is superior to the social, which is superior to ... . If this was all, then
an intellectual apprehension of quality would be superior to a social
apprehension of quality. But Pirsig quickly saw that it is possible for
mental quality to go beserk, and in the process destroy the social
foundations of its freedom.... But he
also argues that the intellectual level must in some sense be in the service
of the social. And this opens up his metaphysics to some fatal objections.
What he seems to be saying is that there are intellectual insights that are
of high quality, only some of which support the social substructure, and
some of which subvert this substructure. The first are good and the latter
are bad. But all of them are by definition good, meaning of high quality.
Hence there is a meta-quality, a higher order judgement, which is over and
above the intellectual apprehension of quality in itself. And this is
precisely a moral judgement. It asks if an intellectual apprehension of
quality is 'good' for society, not just good in itself. So there are now two
competing standards of goodness, and no clear way of resolving the
differences that will inevitably come up.
ROG:
I would offer that the intellectual level is both expansive and self
referential. It can indeed be inclusive of the other levels. A pattern which
is high quality across all levels is, all other things being equal, superior
to one that is high quality intellectually but destructive socially or
biologically. In other words, the intellectual solution is to find patterns
that are in harmony across the greatest span and depth. With depth in this
case redefined in MOQ terms. The problem is solvable with the proper model.
(Which in our case is a combination of Pirsig's MOQ and Wilber's span/depth
idea)
This is morality.
Rog
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