From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sun Mar 20 2005 - 14:13:46 GMT
Arlo wrote:
> Then Pirsig is a denegerate. I seem to recall him enjoying a very sexual
> song in a bar, dancing with a bar whore, banging her on his boat, and then
> writing about it in a book on metaphysics. He was not ashamed, never
> expresses it was "wrong". Indeed, I'd much rather hang out at a bar with
> Pirsig (philosophy aside) than Rigel.
Your blessing of Pirsig's ruttish escapade with Lila reflects the high
value you place on promiscuous sex which rock n' roll encourages, whether
the lyrics are explicit or not. Rock wouldn't be anything without its beat
of sexual intercourse.
As for degeneracy and whether Pirsig considered his dalliance "wrong," I
suggest you ponder his explication of intellect's siding with biology as
the cause of the sorry state of American culture. A few excerpts from
Chp. 24 of Lila make the point:
"What had happened since the end of World War I was that the intellectual
level had entered the picture and had taken over everything. It was this
intellectual level that was screwing everything up. The question of
whether promiscuity is moral had been resolved from prehistoric times to
the end of the Victorian era, but suddenly everything was upended by this
new intellectual supremacy that said sexual promiscuity is neither moral
nor immoral, it is just amoral human behavior. In the battle of society
against biology, the new twentieth-century intellectuals have taken
biology's side. Society can handle biology alone by means of prisons and
guns and police and the military. But when the intellectuals in control of
society take biology's side against society then society is caught in a
cross fire from which it has no protection."
"Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a
moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in
its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social
level's role in keeping the biological level under control. Intellectuals
have failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is
constantly being suppressed by social order."
And from Chp. 29:
"Sometimes the contrary anti-static drive becomes a static pattern of its
own. This contrary stuff can become a tiger-ride where you can't get off
and you have to keep riding and riding until the tiger finally throws you
and devours you. The degenerative contrarian stuff usually goes that way.
Drugs, illicit sex, alcohol and the like."
Finally, while it's always great sport for today's amoral intellectuals to
bash Rigel and other so-called Victorians, it's well to remember Pirsig's
advice " . . . that the old Puritan and Victorian social codes should not
be followed blindly, but should not be attacked blindly either. They
should be dusted off and re-examined, fairly and impartially, to see what
they were trying to accomplish and what they actually did accomplish
toward building a stronger society."
Platt
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