Platt and all interested thinkers: Platt asked me (David B) if I could
point him to the reference used in claiming the pragmatic and
evolutionary moral value of leaders like Buddha, Jesus, Abe Lincoln,
Ghandi and Martin Luther King. I dont have page numbers, but the
following Lila exerpts come from http://www.enteleky.com/lila6.html .
"If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of history,
Dhrist, Lincoln, Gandi. You will see that that is what they were really
involved in. The cleansing of the world thru the absorbtion of Karmic
garbage. They didn't pass it on."
Pirsig does not mention MLK in this passage and I really don't know if
he is mentioned elsewhere or not. However, I happen to know that MLK was
inspired by Ghandi and his tactic of non-violent resistance and that
both men were big fans of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" in particular
and Transcendentalism in general. Further, on a pragmatic level their
aims and achievements were very similar. They both increased human
freedom.
ON THE KARMA DUMP VS. THE SAINTLY ABSORBTION Pirsig says...
"From an evolutionary point of view it is really a backward step, and
therefore immoral. You invent a devil group, Jews, or blacks or whites,
or capitalists or communists, it doesn't matter, and say that group is
responsable for all your suffering and then hate it and try to destroy
it." Bob Wallace out there?
"I say kill all the Karma dumpers! Its their fault! I hate them all!"
(irony intended)
"The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very
dangerous according to the MOQ. There are different kinds of
satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The holocaust
produced satisfaction among the Nazis, that was quality for them. They
considered it to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low
level static social and biological patterns whose averall purpose was to
retard the evolution of truth and dynamic quality."
I don't mean to just throw quotes around without any comment or
explaination, but the meaning is very obvious, isn't it?
As to the issue of Pirsig's stance in the battle between communism and
capitalism, I think he is neither. He says "...you can see them (free
enterprisers) struggling to put it into word but they don't have the
metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do." I
think he's saying that both economic systems suffer from the same error.
They are both grounded in the same scientific objectivity. They are both
materialistic and blind to the kind of value that would make them
acceptable. Both sides in the cold war are amoral in this sense. They
both worship material wealth and military might nearly to the exclusion
of everything else. They both understand the price of everything and the
value of nothing. Pirsig's arguments against amoral scientific
objectivity also can be seen as arguments against the economic theories
that it produced. In both fields, the social level mediation has been
ignored or by-passed in the name of this objectivity and they are
extremely unfriendly to social values as a result. We can see the
results of such cold calculations in the world and looks pretty ugly.
Ever notice how Hitler's concentration camps, Stalin's Gulag and the
West's public schools are all based on the factory model. Murder,
oppression and education are all based on efficient production?
David B.
MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html
MD Queries - horse@wasted.demon.nl
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:04 BST