Hi Ian and Group:
Ian put his finger on a problem that's also bothered me about Pirsig's
metaphysics. Ian quoted Pirsig as follows:
> In chapter 17 of Lila, Pirsig writes,
>
> 'When societies and cultures are seen not as inventions of man but as
> higher organisms than bilogical man, the phenomena of war and genocide and
> all the other forms of human exploitation become more intelligible. Mankind
> has never been interested in getting itself killed. But the superorganism,
> the giant, who is a pattern of values superimposed on top of bilogical human
> bodies, doesn't mind losing a few bodies to protect his greater interests.'
>
> Then in chapter 24 he writes,
>
> 'What the metaphysics of quality indicates is that the twentieth century
> intellectual faith in mans basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is
> disastrously naive. The ideal of harmonious society in which everyone
> without coercian co-operates appily with everyone else for the mutual good
> of all is devestating fiction.
> It isn't consistent with scientific fact. Studies of bones left by the
> cavemen indicate that cannibalism, not co-operation was a pre-society norm.
> Primitive tribes such as the American indians have no record of sweetness
> and co-operation with other tribes. They ambushed them, tortured them,
> dashed their childrens brains out on the rocks. If man is basically good,
> then maybe it is man's basic goodness which invented social institutions to
> repress this kind of bilogical savagery in the first place.'
>
> I reakon that these quotes contradict one another. The first to says to me
> that mankind has been corrupted by society whilst the second says that
> society has saved mankind from itself. Or in other words, man is basically
> good contrasted to man is bad. (O.K, so maybe my interpretation is a bit
> indulgent.)
In a similar puzzling, seeming contradiction, Pirsig wrote in Chapter 13:
“An evolutionary morality would at first seem to say yes, a society has a
right to murder people to prevent its own destruction. A primitive isolated
village threatened by brigands has a moral right and obligation to kill them
in self-defense since a village is a higher form of evolution. When the
United States drafted troops for the Civil War everyone knew that
innocent people would be murdered. The North could have permitted the
slave states to become independent and saved hundreds and thousands
of lives. But an evolutionary morality argues that the North was right in
pursuing that war because a nation is a higher form of evolution than a
human body, and the principle of human equality is an even higher form
than a nation. John Brown’s truth was never an abstraction. It still keeps
marching on.
“When a society is not itself threatened, as in the execution of individual
criminals, the issue becomes more complex. In the case of treason or
insurrection or war a criminal's threat to a society can be very real. But if
an established social structure is not seriously threatened by a criminal,
then an evolutionary morality would argue that there is no moral
justification for killing him.
“What makes killing him immoral is that a criminal is not just a biological
organism. He is not even just a defective unit of society. Whenever you
kill a human being you are killing a source of thought too. A human being
is a collection of ideas, and these ideas take moral precedence over a
society. Ideas are patterns of value. They are at a higher level of
evolution that social patterns of value. Just as it is more moral for a
doctor to kill a germ than a patient, so it is more moral for an idea to kill a
society than it is for a society to kill an idea.”
Here's the problem. In Chapter 17, Pirsig says its OK for society to kill
people to save itself. In Chapter 24, he says people aren’t basically good.
In Chapter 13 he says people have good ideas like “equality” so it’s
wrong to kill them.
So we’re faced with Pirsig’s Paradox:
It’s OK for a nation to kill people on behalf of an idea that can only come
from people who it's wrong for a nation to kill.
Something here doesn't compute. I guess it depends on whose side
you’re on and whose ideas you’re willing to kill (or die) for.
The liberal vs. conservative arguments that have captured many of the
posts recently are a reflection of the basic moral questions that Pirsig
raises in the above passages from Lila. Like Ian, I'm confused, not only
about original human nature as Pirsig sees it (does original human nature
have good ideas?), but also about how Pirsig views the role of the state
and how Pirsig's evolutionary morality can help settle many of the
individual vs. state issues we’ve been arguing about.
Platt
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