Hi Rog:
Just a couple of thoughts:
> PLATT:
> I agree with John that Roger's summary is bland and necessarily so.
> Nothing but blandness ever comes out of committees, unless it's a
> camel. To believe we can come up with an extension of the MOQ by
> attempting to mediate all views is a Utopian dream based on the
> mistaken assumption that ten minds are better than one.
> ROG:
> But 10 minds can be better than one. That is why societies are so much
> more productive and creative than lone feral individuals. That is why we
> communicate in this forum.
What I had in mind was the following from LILA, Chap.13:
"And beyond that is an even more compelling reason; societies and
thoughts and principles themselves are no more than sets of static
patterns. These patterns can't by themselves perceive or adjust to
Dynamic Quality. Only a living being can do that. The strongest moral
argument against capital punishment is that it weakens a society's
Dynamic capability-its capability for change and evolution."
And this from Chap. 9:
"A tribe can change its values only person by person and someone
has to be first. Whoever is first obviously is going to be in conflict with
everybody else."
My point being that it is an individual responding intuitively to DQ that
determines potentially useful higher patterns of quality rather than a
group. Thus, those who emphasized a personal PATH to address the
issue seemed to me more in line with the MOQ than solutions
involving some form of static intellectual criteria.
Secondly, your emphasis on "harmony" reminded me of the following
from Chap. 24:
"What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth-century
intellectual faith in man's basic goodness as spontaneous and natural
is disastrously naive. The ideal of a harmonious society in which
everyone without coercion cooperates happily with everyone else for
the mutual good of all is a devastating fiction."
It's that little word "coercion" that suggests that harmony across levels
is difficult to achieve without using some form of coercion to keep the
competing forces from overwheleming one another. The current "war
on terrorism" is perhaps a good example.
Having said that, the term "harmony" is indeed central to my
understanding of the MOQ, but from an aesthetic rather than a
cooperative point of view.
Platt
P.S. Your revised SUMMARY passes the Nazi test with flying colors.
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