Hi John B:
I see in your response that you failed to answer my simple Yes, No
questions:
Do I, Roger and others who "defend" the U.S. "care" as much as you?
Do we also want to make the world a better place as much as you?
So I cannot but assume that you consider yourself to be more
advanced and at a higher level than we defenders. Further evidence of
your superiority is found in the following exchange:
P: You, of course, are at a higher level than me or Roger or others who
defend the U.S.
J: If I am defending 'intellectual morality' and you are defending a
'social pattern,' I would agree. At least that's what the MOQ says. "In
general, given a choice of two courses to follow and and all other
things being equal, that choice which is more Dynamic, that is, at a
higher level of evolution, is more moral. (Lila Ch 13).
Which is precisely why the U.S. is worth defending, as Pirsig patiently
explains in Chapter 17:
"The Metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary. A free market is a
Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in other
words what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual
formula. What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The
market is always changing and the direction of that change can never
be predetermined.
"The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody
richer-by preventing static economic patterns from setting in and
stagnating economic growth. That is the reason the major capitalist
economies of the world have done so much better since World War II
than the major socialist economies. It is not that Victorian social
economic patterns are more moral than socialist intellectual economic
patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less moral as static patterns go.
What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists,
reasoning intelligently and objectively, have inadvertently closed the
door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things. They closed
it because the metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them
Dynamic Quality exists.
"People, like everything else, work better in parallel than they do in
series, and that is what happens in this free enterprise city. When
things are organized socialistically in a bureaucratic series, any
increase in complexity increases the probability of failure. But when
they're organized in a free-enterprise parallel, an increase in complexity
becomes an increase in diversity more capable of responding to
Dynamic Quality, and thus an increase of the probability of success. It's
this diversity and parallelism that make this city work.
"And not just this city. Our greatest national economic success,
agriculture, is organized almost entirely in parallel. All life has
parallelism built into it. Cells work in parallel. Most body organs work in
parallel: eyes, brains, lungs. Species operate in parallel, democracies
operate in parallel; even science seems to operate best when it is
organized through the parallelism of the scientific societies."
I guess this defense of capitalism, free markets and free enterprise as
a social pattern puts Pirsig in the same category as the "painful" Roger
and the "unchangeable" Platt. Well, so be it. But it’s sad to see that to
reduce the "pain of your transition" you find it necessary to put others
down.
Platt
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