From: SQUONKSTAIL@aol.com
Date: Sat Oct 12 2002 - 19:03:02 BST
Hi all,
I rarely take part in the debates on current issues, for numerous reasons,
but in today's batch of emails I received a petition, sent by a friend in
England, asking me to sign up against any US led war on Iraq.
Squonk: Hello Bo.
Current issues are most in need of debate so i am surprised you do not
contribute?
We can go on and on about the past, but the past's relevance is to current
issues.
To not wish to engage in current debates is to basically live in a bubble.
In the same mail is Pantophobic's little piece contrasting the concern for
victims of
9.11 with the vastly greater toll caused by the US in its many overt and
covert wars of recent years, followed by Platt's outrage that the US should
be singled out for causing atrocities in the Twentieth Century.
Sq: Social patterns appear to be dominated by individual celebrity status
seeking?
When celebrity status seeking becomes the goal of politics, as it arguably is
in the US, we have a problem worthy of debate?
These posts disconcert and unsettle me. I did not sign the petition since I
am of the view that war, terrible though it is, is not necessarily the worst
thing that can happen, and that Saddham's pursuit of chemical and biological
weapons needs to be stopped, as should the US's pursuit of the same. (If
'New Scientist' is to be believed, the anthrax released in the US had been
'weaponised' in a US lab, in a program in contravention of international
treaties that the US has signed.)
Sq: Saddahm is a celebrity, and so is Bush junior? Maybe we could examine why
it should be that government should have such a reliance upon aspirations of
those who wish to be revered?
I wonder if women politicians are driven by the same wish to be revered in
society?
Are they worse?
What may be done?
While I agree that much of the material in Pantophobic's piece is correct,
that most terrorist activity is initiated by states, and that the US has
been just as ruthless as any other in this regard, I can't see the benefit
of pushing biased and one-sided propaganda as a way of changing the world
for the better. Most countries have been ruthless when it suited them.
Sq: That is a social metaphor?
How is it that states may be ruthless?
Surely it is the social composition of an elite power base that is ruthless
in its capacity for self preservation?
Meanwhile Platt's response seems on a level with the morality that suggests
that making the world safe for Americans is about the most noble thing there
is.
Sq: If the US is the greatest democracy there has ever been then it follows
logically that the rest of the world must, if it is to be the best it can be,
follow the US lead?
So I ask, how does our understanding of the MOQ help? Does it throw any
light on how such issues might be viewed? Let's try.
Sq: The MOQ gives us the rules by which the game is played.
In this game, a hierarchy of values dictates the direction of evolution.
The direction of evolution will move in the direction it chooses regardless
of whether humanity blows itself off the face of the planet.
Some thousands of years ago there existed a race of primates that had brains
considerably larger than ours. Obviously they could not work things out so i
am rather afraid intelligence on its own is not going to do the trick?
It would suggest that while biological threats are indeed controlled by
social forces, those social forces in turn need appropriate intellectual
control. Saddham's threat is biological, social and intellectual. [Those who
see it as biological only can stop reading here. We cannot communicate, and
I am not interested in receiving your noxious responses.]
Sq: Saddham may not even be a threat?
He is mortal and will soon die as mortal do.
However, the cultural patterns that evolved him are the problem, and they are
social.
Those who find it hard to unravel the three levels - welcome. So do I. This
is one weakness of
the MOQ, that we need to categorize complex actions and interactions in
order to apply the moral hierarchy it supposedly incorporates. But the
moment I characterize Saddhem as a 'germ', or some such, I have lost the
plot.
Sq: I don't have a problem 'unravelling' these levels, for i do not feel they
are in a tangle.
Saddham is a biological entity that has organised matter into a living
process. The biological entity is capable of having social patterns imposed
upon it and these patterns are problematic on an inter-cultural level. His
intelligence is astonishing and he has put this to good use reinforcing his
social preservation. i.e. Saddham is cunning.
I have been struggling to remember the author of a book I read many years
ago, titled 'Moral man and Immoral Society', (Niebuhr?) in which the author
argued that while it made sense to expect man to be moral, it made little
sense to expect the same of nations. How much more difficult is it to make
sense of a dictatorship, where the nation is substantially controlled by one
man. And how are we to make sense of Western democracies, supposedly ruled
by their populace, yet generally managed by loose aggregations of business
interests with close links to the military?
Sq: The MOQ says biological patterns, (man) and social patterns, (society)
are essentially moral. You move away from an MOQ interpretation when you fail
to underline the social reinforcement of biological patterns, (greed, fear,
distrust, insecurity, self interest, etc.)
A society lead by intellectual values would be more moral.
So the MOQ seems to founder on the complexity of real life situations, that
are not so easily explained as biology dominating society, or some such.
Sq: Aux contrare. This is not the first time you have followed this pattern
of argumentation:
1: Misunderstand the MOQ.
2. Attribute your misunderstanding to the MOQ itself.
3. Dismiss the MOQ as inadequate.
Then we have the issue of how to determine the facts in any situation. Not
only which facts are true, but also which are pertinent.
Sq: Aristotle would be proud of you. Your rhetoric is rather reminiscent of
the chairmen in ZMM. That is not a provocation, it is an apposite reminder
that valueless rationalising will not help when the essence of the problem is
a discrimination of values.
If we accept that Saddhem has biological weapons, are they really a threat to
the US? If we accept that Saddhem controls large volumes of 'cheap to
produce' oil, is
this what really motivates US policy? We may live in an 'information age',
but when it comes to the crunch our information is generally second or third
hand, and intensely manipulated by vested interests, politicians seeking
re-election, and so on. Plus our own incorrigible final vocabularies have
closed our minds in advance to information and ideas that offend our value
systems.
Sq: The social manipulation of media was explored by Nazis and continued by
the US after WWII in order to help sell commodities. That is a fact.
The MOQ does not offer much help here. Pirsig pursues his own demons, be
they the issue of insanity or the death of his son Chris, through his books,
and all too often we sense that incorrigibility behind the 'rational'
facade. (The diatribe against biological values at the end of Ch 24 of Lila
is an example of this.)
Sq: You appear to feel that ZMM and Lila are Pirsig's way of treating
himself?
Are your post to this org your way of giving yourself a sense of purpose?
The diatribe you mention at the end of Ch 24 Lila? can't remember what this
is so will go and read it...
OK. Just reread it. If biological patterns threaten society then i can see no
problem with suppressing the biological pattern. Saddham is a threat but
drugs such as crack and cocaine are going to wreak havoc if not dealt with.
My friend in California tells me the most disgusting stories connected with
drugs and there social consequences. It is truly horrible.
One thing Pirsig does not doubt is that moral choices are to be made, and
that they matter. Hence his leaving Benares Hindu University, and his strong
views on many issues that are elaborated in Lila and ZMM. But his chief
opponents in formulating a MOQ, as he sees it, would be the mystics. And
their view of morality, as I see it, differs radically from Pirsig's.
Sk: Pirsig is a mystic.
Many claim to be mystic but that is usually a social celebrity status move
and not easily challenged. The point about mystics is that they benefit
humanity. A mystic that does not benefit humanity is not a good mystic.
On my reading, the mystic consensus would be that ultimately all is good.
This includes torture (Rorty), the biological taking precedence over the
social, or whatever. It is all part of the eternal lila, the play of
creative realisation of being.
Sq: Your reading does not correspond with any artistic view of reality. For
art to be there has to be moral order and direction. Your view does not
correspond with empirical observation either.
The only moral good to the mystic is to be wholly open to what is in the
moment, while 'evil' is to kill that immediacy with judgements and
projections based on the past. (I am not sure 'evil' is the appropriate word,
but there is certainly a preference for immediacy.)
This translates into a preference for dealing with 'what is' rather than with
'fantasy'.
Sq: Mystics of the, 'Hold on to immediacy' school cannot do that which they
wish to attempt. Immediacy is more than that trying to hold onto it and so
cannot be logically accomplished.
Having said that, there is no logical inconsistency with recognising one is
less than immediacy. It is better to use immediacy. I feel Pirsig has used
immediacy rather well? He's made my life far better than it once was for
pointing out to me that i may use immediacy also.
To the mystic all moral codes, including Pirsig's, are a kind of playing at
God, a presumption that we, as partial expressions of 'what is', are able to
judge the rest. And this relates to our egoic separation from the totality.
Sq: Being less than what is we can still remember that we are in fact less
than what is.
In this way, we can drop the ego illusion of self and open up to Dynamic
Quality. That is quite freeing.
(Our sense of isolation and loneliness, which Pirsig identifies and seems
unable to critique, stems from this same separation.)
Sq: The separation has been forced upon us and is not written in stone.
Wilber would have it that the mystic must return to the market place, and get
involved in
politics and social issues and so on, but this seems to be his view rather
than reflecting the mystic tradition.
Sq: Dear John! You are beginning to talk rubbish i am afraid. The mystic
tradition does indeed include a view that says the mystic returns to the
market place and Pirsig is one such mystic as he himself gave permission for
Disanto and Steele to state in A Guide to ZMM.
I was wondering when you would project Wilber into your post, and you have
done so making a huge blunder.
Bodhisattva's return to the market place to help men find salvation, not run
soup kitchens and organise political movements, though they are not actually
precluded from such
goings-on should they choose to become involved.
To the mystic, then, moral action is action spontaneously arising from
immediate experience. It is not calculated using the intellect, nor is it
driven by social values or biological values. It is perhaps best expressed
in the term "the wisdom of the organism", which operates as a whole. Unlike
Pirsig, who claims there is a hierarchy of values, which are quite different
from level to level, the mystic, while not denying that such values arise as
an outworking of lila, is content to let them be. They come and they go, and
influence us just as pleasure and pain influence us. The mistake we are
prone to is believing that these values and their clash is somehow
fundamental, important in itself.
Sq: You would not be giving us the exceptionally gratifying benefit of your
illuminating insightful and wondrously sagacious offerings if it were that
you are a mystic.
For pities sake man, anything less than a mystic may benefit from help from a
good mystic.
You have said this yourself above?
I find the mystic view foreign to my temperament, and almost alarming. It
assumes that all our social constructs which are predicated on making the
world a safer place for us all are fundamentally misguided. They are
insidious as fantasies, and not particularly important or interesting as
aspects of our existence. And they are based on fear.
Sq: Any mystic who baffles you with alarm is trying to jolt you into seeing
that which your static patterning is blocking you from seeing. Don't take it
too seriously! That would be a dreadful mistake John, a dreadful mistake!
(Almost as big a mistake as those you make in your interpretation of the
MOQ.)
But the alternatives are equally grim. Resting my faith in a system, even
one so enlightened as the MOQ, will not do. The other alternative seems to
be to live in existential angst, making decisions despite never having the
information to justify them, and living with the consequences in a world
where "Hell is other people". All things considered I find the mystic path
the most appealing.
Thanks for your time,
John B
Sq: Are you telling me you are a mystic?
All the best,
Squonk.
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