Hi Jonathan, Kevin and Group:
Again I have searched through LILA in vain to find references to
"collective responsibility." The closest thing I could find to the idea was
said by Richard Rigel in his tirade against the author in Chapter 6:
“. . . neither you or Lila or anyone else can just go acting as you please
in disregard of everyone else, deciding what does and what does not
have 'Quality.' You *do* have a moral and legal obligation to obey the
same rules others do."
A little later in Chapter 7, Pirsig says about Rigel:
"All that Rigel was referring to about sacred duties and home and family
went out fifty years ago."
That's the way I feel about "collective responsibility.” When someone
starts talking about collective duties and responsibilities I think of a Rigel-
like person who is "full of great ways for others to improve without any
expense to themselves," usually a politician or priest who demands that
some group (like the rich) give up something that they have for the
benefit of another group (like the poor).
Also, I’ve seen collective responsibility used as a means of intimidation,
as when entire villages were wiped out by the Nazis in reprisal for an act
of sabotage.
On a less fatal scale, collective responsibility for slavery has been
cynically used by politicians in the U.S. to vote in such discriminatory
programs as Affirmative Action.
And woe unto those who don't buy the notion of collective responsibility.
They're attacked as selfish, mean-spirited Neanderthals, hardly worthy of
the name "human" . . a phenomena symptomatic of the "Giant" hard at
work to preserve his top status against the incursion of intellect. (Anyone
familiar with political correctness?)
For such reasons, I balk at the notion of collective responsibility. Both
Jonathan and Kevin argue that responsibilities and duties are "implicit" in
Pirsig's metaphysics. After all, it's about morals is it not? And don't morals
automatically imply duties and responsibilities?
I answer, "not necessarily." Otherwise Pirsig would have spent a lot more
time on spelling out what those duties and responsibilities were at each
level. Instead, he mentions duties hardly at all except to put them in
Rigel's head as foil to his own philosophy where the highest morals are
matters of individual free choice towards Quality.
I won't argue that a group doesn't need to have an agreed upon set of
rules and practices in order to function effectively. But I will argue that
the MOQ, in placing morality at the center of the universe, goes far
beyond the Rigel-like notion of morality being primarily about social
obligation.
Platt
MOQ Homepage - http://www.moq.org
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