From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Mon Dec 09 2002 - 15:46:05 GMT
Hi Rudy, DMB, All:
> Rudy said:
> I suppose that my biggest question is, where does all
> this bottom out? Just how would you implement all of
> this? How would you propose to teach the world to
> think in MOQ terms and abandon SOM? Wouldn't you have
> to change the nature of education from kindegarten to
> grad school? Wouldn't every textbook need to be
> translated and reprinted? Wouldn't our day-to-day
> language have to change? Wouldn't our governments...
>
> DMB says:
> I think its use is as a tool for explaining things. If that leads to
> reforms in education or government that's just gravy. But its main function
> is to serve as a coherent way to organize facts about the world. A
> metaphysical system can't be implemented like a social program or a
> business plan, but as an explanatory tool. It only tries to describe the
> world in a better way, not remake the world itself. And getting rid of SOM
> in favor of the MOQ isn't as weird as it seems. He gladly admits that his
> MOQ is based on "the oldest idea known to man". His MOQ describes the same
> mystical reality that has been described many times and in many ways. He
> says it like a liberal intellectual American midwesterner on a boat, so its
> one of my favorites, but the MOQ is only one description of this view.
I totally agree with DMB. Pirsig is not out to change the world but to
explain it. Although the mystic idea has been around for millennia,
Pirsig grabs hold of it in a new way, showing how a mystic moral force
called Dynamic Quality created a world of static moral patterns within
an evolutionary moral hierarchy.
On first reading Pirsig's claims, one is likely to dismiss them outright.
As Pirsig writes at the beginning of Chapter 8 in Lila:
"The idea that the world is composed of nothing but moral value sounds
impossible at first. Only objects are supposed to be real. 'Quality' is
supposed to be just a vague fringe word that tells what we think about
objects. The whole idea that Quality can create objects seems very
wrong."
The remainder of the book shows why his new idea seems very right.
Platt
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