From: Rudy (rudy_o_2000@yahoo.com)
Date: Wed Jan 15 2003 - 01:43:36 GMT
Thanks to everyone who commented on my "quality
decision" note. John W, you're still the man. I'll
probably stick around to post a few more thoughts
until my mind runs dry, which should be in about a
week or two. Matt, I appreciate your constructive
attitude. You and most of the other frequent posters
on the MD exchange thoughts on a high level of
abstraction, and it would take me months if not years
to catch up. But then again, I consider myself a
willing learner, and I'd venture to guess that most
people who are attracted to Pirsig's works are about
the same. So, if you and your peers can put up with
some occasional freshman-level banter, this list could
become a teaching tool as well as a meeting place for
the more seasoned philosophers. I in fact do hope to
learn a bit more about Rorty, as I've heard that he
says some valuable things on the nature of community
and the possibilities for positive, pragmatic
interaction regardless of whether there are knowable
ultimate truths or not.
Speaking of freshman level banter, I wonder if I could
muse a bit about Chapter 24 in Lila. To me, 24 is
probably the most interesting chapter, given my
penchant for practical application. Chapter 24 brings
the MOQ within the realm of social and political
issues. It's where the MOQ takes on the challenge of
the empirical. I take my hat off to Mr. Pirsig for
his his willingness to test his theories against the
world as it is. However, I sense a few soft spots in
the outcome.
Just what is the main topic of Chapter 24? At first,
Pirsig-Phaedrus focuses on Rigel's breakfast
soliloquy in Kingston, which Phaedrus interprets as an
accusation of soft-headed intellectualism, blind to
real-world nastiness. The rest of the chapter thus
goes on to prove that in fact, the MOQ takes no crap.
With the help of the meta-evolutionary ladder of value
ordering, Pirsig and the MOQ declare themselves ready
to dust off and rehabilitate certain Puritan and
Victorian social strictures. The MOQ has no illusion
about humankind's inherent goodness; we're vicious
animals that society has to keep in line with the
muzzle of a gun. The MOQ isn't some Hamlet crippled
by cultural relativism; it's out to kick butt! It
isn't about to be held hostage to academic political
correctness and fear of racist accusation. It's tough
on crime and doesn't like hippies (although it doesn't
seem terribly opposed to the sexual freedoms that were
their primary social legacy).
A time-out right here for some thoughts about RMP.
After reading chapter 24, one can argue that Pirsig
has many conservative sympathies, although I don't
think he can be accurately termed either a liberal or
a conservative. As to his affective side, I found the
Manhattan spider and wasp analogy to be quite
interesting. It sounds as though Mr. Pirsig suffers
from gothic nightmares, as if he has seen the Ring
video and hasn't died but never fully escapes the
madness .... Also, I wonder if the Phadreus - Rigel
interactions reflect Pirsig's relationship with his
father. There's something about that line in the
final chapter, the grudging admission that Rigel was
right as he usually is ....
Back to the core of 24: To be honest, I agree with Mr.
Pirsig's general thrust. Humans are more animal than
angel. The Woodlawn situation did call for strong
police intervention. At various points within the
past quarter century, there were some thinkers who
tried to justify black crime based upon cultural
differences and upon the racist sins of the white
culture (but given that blacks are the usual victims
of black crime, that line of thought didn't gain much
traction). If the MOQ says that such thinkers are
wrong in demanding sympathy for violent criminal
activity, then the MOQ appears to have come up with a
correct answer. But if chapter 24 is any indication
of the workings of the MOQ when applied to real-world
problems, it looks much like a Rube Goldberg device,
and not the eloquent, smoothly-oiled enlightening tool
that Pirsig presents it as. Admittedly, the US
Constitution also looks like such a device when
applied by the courts and legislatures; perhaps it
just can't be helped. But would the MOQ, as proposed
in Lila, have the staying power in the political arena
that the Bill of Rights has had?
Chapter 24 gives a little summary of the MOQ's main
features, which seem to be: 1.) generalization of the
psycho-social paradigm of "value" to all interactions
on all levels, including the scientific-inorganic; and
2.) generalization of the scientific paradigm of
species evolution to the development of social
organization and the mind. So, we have an
intellectual paradigm extended to the biological and
inorganic, and we have an inorganic-biological
paradigm extended to the social and intellectual. The
two work together in the MOQ, given that any valuation
scheme needs a measuring stick. So, even though
science and the theory of evolution are ultimately
based upon social values (as Pirsig points out), that
theory is used as the measuring tool used to rank
those values. Thus, the measuring stick is influenced
by the thing that it is measuring -- sort of like one
of those quantum physics problems. Pirsig arguably
gets around all this by citing another empirical
social-scientific value, i.e. the preference for a
theory with greater explanatory power. If it works
better, then so what if it ain't entirely consistent.
Continuing the chapter 24 summary, Pirsig presents the
rationale for his metric. I.e., in the beginning was
the inorganic; and the inorganic begat the biological
(for some obscure epistemological reason; more dynamic
quality, perhaps). The biological then begat the
social, so as to preserve and improve the situation of
biological entities. The social then begat the
intellectual, once again to preserve and improve that
from which it sprung.
One second, please, a freshman has his hand up. How
can Pirsig say that societies dynamically invented
intellectual knowledge? Isn't it more accurate to say
that self-awareness and critical reasoning were just
another biological innovation that was meant to help
preserve and improve the biological? Admittedly, the
biological beings that host intellectualism are
complex collections of biological sub-entities, and in
a way are societies in and of themselves. But it was
ultimately the same biological process of trial and
error mutation that was responsible for the emergence
of increased self-awareness and the process of input /
response / feedback / evaluation / memory behind the
intellect. Sure, there is a synergy between the social
innovations of biology and the intellectual
innovations, and perhaps the social innovations are a
necessary (but not sufficient) condition for the
intellectual innovations. Nevertheless, I'm still not
convinced that the intellectual can be said to be
absolutely "higher" than the social. IMHO, the two
seem to continually interact over time; while the
social helps the intellectual to develop, the
intellect arguably also helps the social to evolve
into higher, more complex and more responsive forms.
Well, maybe, anyway. Perhaps despite my reservations
about human goodness, I'm still an old socialist at
heart. And history hasn't been kind to old socialists
lately.
But nevertheless, back to the nitty-gritty. Pirsig
puts an eye opener in chapter 24, with his observation
about the reason (or at least a contributing reason)
why the Islamic cultures don't like America -- i.e.,
because our culture doesn't put as much effort into
regulating the biological influences as they do. OK,
in and of itself, that comment does have some value
(maybe even some "quality"). It doesn't quite help us
understand why places such as Indonesia and Pakistan
and Iran and Egypt and Tunisia put so much effort into
controlling biological influences, to the point that
women in some places are severely repressed. And it
stays away from judging those efforts, despite the
MOQ's fearless ability to judge cultures and to reject
soft-headed equivocation. But yes, that statement does
help us to accept the narrow fact that third-world
Islamic cultures do put more emphasis on
social-biological codes than we in America and Europe
do.
Then, Mr. P says that the MOQ is ready to judge
cultures based on their contribution to the evolution
of life. Assumedly, some cultures are going to get
A's, some C's, and some F's (such as the gradings that
the residents of Manhattan and its suburbs receive
from him). Robert Pirsig is putting a lot of faith in
his MOQ here. But then again, perhaps he isn't. He
didn't even give out one grade. What would the Puerto
Rican culture get? How about the Russian culture?
The British? Philippine? Middle-class America?
Southern American Black? And just how would the
Islamic cultures have done, given that he had brought
them up earlier in the chapter? Yes, my questions are
rhetorical. I am indeed expressing doubt that Pirsig
and the MOQ are ready for this rather risky task.
Cultural relativism, despite threats, walks away from
chapter 24 unscathed.
Back to Woodlawn, Illinois for a moment, and the "war"
of biological blacks and whites versus social blacks
and whites. Mr. P says that the intellectual has to
pick a side and stick with it. When biological values
undermine social values, the intellect must defend the
social, as it is higher on the meta-evolutionary
scale. OK, despite my problems with this scale being
a bit rubbery, I will agree that society needs to keep
biological urges in line; i.e. the police have to stop
robberies and break-ins even if the perps have their
reasons. But then again, sometimes the intellect
might chastise society for arguably over-constraining
the biological; that's pretty much what the hippies
were doing with regard to sex back in the 60's, and I
don't recall Pirsig having Phadreus tell Lila, "sorry
mam, but lots of people still think that promiscuous
sex is wrong, and I'm going to follow that social
code". Didn't even think about HIV ...
For now, though, let's forget about Pirsig's confusing
signals on free love and get back to crime. Woodlawn
allegedly fell apart because the intellectuals tried
to discuss the biological urges of some of their new
neighbors, assumedly to make off with their richer
neighbor's goods. Instead, they should have directly
called for increased police protection. But wait a
minute. Police usually take a neighborhood more
seriously when a majority welcome their efforts and
are willing to cooperate with them. And I suspect that
there was a problem in that regard in Woodlawn. The
new neighbors were assumedly a mix of working class
and non-working blacks, who typically have had a
variety of experiences with whites, some not very
welcoming.
Unfortunately, then, there was probably another
biological dynamic going on in Woodlawn, one that
prevented a unified effort that could have maximized
the effectiveness of police intervention. This
dynamic is called tribalism. On the bio-social level,
the default presumption, given a clearly
distinguishing physical feature and lack of any other
information, appears to be that you will be more
comfortable with someone with a similar physical
feature than with someone with a clearly different
physical feature. It takes the effort of the intellect
to gather and process the information necessary to
realize that tribalism is a canard, that it doesn't
have to be that way. The whites in Woodlawn probably
knew they needed the police. Most of the blacks there
also knew this and probably wanted more police
protection. But unfortunately, there were bio-tribal
barriers and suspicions that kept these groups from
working together to get such protection -- there most
likely was tribalism on the part of both old and new
residents, and on the part of the largely white
Chicago Police Department. The UC intellectuals may
have been trying -- quite reasonably -- to use their
intellects and talking skills to foster a
community-building process, so as to overcome the
tribal instincts on all sides so as to gain the
necessary police cooperation needed to effectively
deal with the criminal element. That they eventually
gave up from exhaustion doesn't necessarily mean that
they were wrong, or completely wrong, anyway.
I'm not trying to throw Mr. P and his MOQ out the
window; that would be like an ant trying to hurl a
gorilla. But I'm not convinced by chapter 24, or by
Lila as a whole, that the MOQ has been shown to
provide consistently superior results in illuminating
reality and helping us to decide how to live our
lives. It does indeed provide insight in some places,
but seems to fall flat in others. I regret that Robert
Pirsig retreated to eremitism after Lila (although
that is kind of cool in a way, as it adds to his
mystique). It's too bad that he didn't stick around to
direct (and suffer) the MOQ through a long-term public
discussion / interaction process that would have
benefited both the public and the MOQ. I think it
would have been a stronger and more powerful tool had
Pirsig guided it through a long-term thesis /
antithesis / synthesis process.
OK, you've probably heard this already. I'll stop
here. Rudy over and out.
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