From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Tue Mar 25 2003 - 19:58:54 GMT
Hi Rick,
Very meaty response, thanks. You certainly do a good job of finding the
Pirsig quotes that are relevant to static quality and the mistakes I might
be making. I'm going to continue to be heretical, however, in my demand for
greater respect of static morality, and my put down of dynamic quality,
which I think Pirsig and you both personify as a moral spirit or god and put
in your service. I feel it is itself amoral, and in the service of Static
Quality, where all morality exists. Call me a brujo.
PIRSIG (LILA ch9 p131)
"But in addition there's a *Dynamic* good that is outside of any culture,
that cannot be contained by any system of precepts, but has to be
continually rediscovered as a culture evolves. Good and evil are not
*entirely* a matter of tribal custom.If they were, no tribal change would
be possible, since custom cannot change custom. There has to be another
source of good and evil outside the tribal customs that produces the tribal
change."
Where does he get the idea that custom cannot change custom? There are many
examples of customs that change customs, such as the custom of artists
basing new art and literature on old and bringing it up to date, the custom
of learning from different disciplines and applying them to other things,
the custom of making the world better for your children, the custom of being
fair to our fellow man, the custom of trying to discover what makes things
work, the custom of interacting with other cultures and applying what you
like about them to your own... You can see I could go on and on.
Those are all STATIC patterns, any attempt to remove them from SQ's domain
is simply unfair prejudice against SQ. We do those things because we
should. We don't like artists who make carbon copies of others' artwork, we
EXPECT artwork to be innovative in some way, or it isn't high quality. We
expect improvement, we expect to gain knowledge and apply it. There is no
invisible fairy, peekin' out from under a stairway, waving a wand and
supplying us with innovation from "outside any culture". The innovation
comes from static patterns interacting with other static patterns, all very
much inside culture (human culture as a whole). DQ is just the energy and
motive for the patterns to exert themselves into the future against other
patterns, it does not have a Tinkerbell-like role in making good patterns
appear out of nothing because it is its own goodness, it just changes things
according to how the static patterns dictate that it must.
RICK
"Under your view, static good is the only morality and Rosa Parks *was*
immoral from the perspective of static good. But from the perspective of
the Dynamic Morality, Rosa was rediscovering the good that is bigger than
any static pattern."
She was simply playing out static patterns that at that moment, were
stronger than the motive of the static pattern to give up her seat. You saw
Barbershop? According to that movie, blacks were dragged off to jail pretty
frequently for not giving up their seat, and Rosa Parks, tired and in no
mood to move, was in the place and time to become the symbolic catalyst
needed by the movement. But she was made so by all the players in the
sweeping change that was taking place, all the static patterns (intellectual
patterns mostly, but that's our irrelevant observation), that were changing
other patterns. Saying that she was "rediscovering the good" is just
religious mumbo jumbo, there were very strong static patterns underway.
Consider if, instead of bucking the static pattern of Jim Crow laws, she had
bucked the static pattern of waiting until you get home to urinate, and had
been dragged of to jail for that. Would that have been Good? It would have
been dynamic change, but it would have been a change that didn't find
sympathy and support of other static patterns, it would in fact have found a
lot of very static animosity in static morality. We would not say she had
"rediscovered the good", not because it isn't DQ, but because it wouldn't
fit our static patterns.
RICK
"All the action in a Metaphysics of Quality comes from the interplay and
friction between two different kinds of morality. To enthrone static
quality alone as morality is to oversimplify the whole thing and deprive
yourself of some of Pirsig's greatest insights."
I think pirsig overcomplicates it, creating a God to justify ourselves just
like religions do. How often do you disagree with DQ about what is Good?
You and your DQ are the same. All the action comes from competing static
patterns.
RICK
"If only static quality is moral than no argument would EVER be necessary,
it would always just be "stay with the flock, stay with the flock."
You seem to think that static quality is monolithic, that there are never
conflicts within static quality, that the flock behaves as one and always
agrees about where to go. Static Quality is infinitely complex, we can
never hope to understand all the patterns or even see but a small fraction
of them. Some social static patterns are changed by intellectual patterns
that have a wide influence over time and space, some social patterns are
changed by very small but very strong inorganic patterns. None are changed
by Tinkerbell.
RICK
"The most vexing part of your response was the assertion that somehow my
view is "the opposite of morality." I really had no idea what you could
mean."
Being suspicious of a static pattern and demanding that it provide
justification instead of respecting static patterns, is the opposite of
morality. The exhortation aspect of morality, the imperative, is respect
for static patterns. To disprespect them just slightly, to say that you
have a line on something called "Dynamic Quality" which is more truly moral
than static quality and completely independent of it, is subversive to
morality. If there is some static pattern that you feel ought* to change,
it is because some other static pattern is pressing its case on you. If
that pattern gets enough people to agree with it, then other patterns will
change. It has nothing to do with it being 'better' in some 'outside'
sense, we just call it better because it is expected that we would, we like
it better because it fits our currently vogue static patterns.
Did that get me anywhere?
Johnny
*ought means, "would be better in my opinion" and is unrelated to morality.
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