Dear David B.,
You wrote 3/3 12:31 -0700:
'the main point of that epic post [of 2/3 20:19 -0700] was this: Pirsig's
description of the battle between social
and intellectual values is a great historic moment widely recognized by all
the best thinkers. Grasping the enormity and complexity of that moment
requires a careful examination of what we're leaving behind. And that the
social level is rich enough to be the parent of both SOM and the MOQ. And
even though I did not explicitly use it to dispute any specific claims made
by any MOQers, the contradictions are there.'
You go on to call observations like 'the social level is about social
interaction and working together and roles and status and division of labor'
'so superficial that they do not help us to understand anything at all about
the MOQ'.
I consider your writings about history very interesting. They show in what
social patterns of values (material cultures) mythologies and 'mythos'
originated. I don't like to describe this origin of intellectual patterns of
values (dated back by Pirsig 'maybe fifty or one hundred thousand years'
according to your quote from 'Lila' p386 of 23/2 16:51 -0700) as a 'battle
between social and intellectual values'. I don't think that intellectual
patterns of values were sufficiently independent from social patterns of
values so short after their 'birth' to 'fight' their parent level. They
rather gained their independence by being of use to social patterns of
values: a social pattern of values with an intellectual extra was more
succesful than a social pattern of values without.
In order to carefully examine the social level, I think we should start much
earlier, in the era in which it had not given birth yet to intellectual
patterns of values: the period between the split-off of early humans from
their non-human roots (from the ancestors they share with chimps) and the
moment when homo sapiens created 'this ritual-cosmos relationship' that
Pirsig describes.
The discussion in the 'Principles'-thread about the 'moral principle' that
describes the lowest level of Dynamic Quality that is secured by the social
level refers to that (earlier) period. Do you think that 'social interaction
and working together and roles and status and division of labor' AND
'preservation of practices that prove to work' is a too superficial
description of the social level IN THAT PERIOD?
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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 - 16:01:56 BST