From: johnny moral (johnnymoral@hotmail.com)
Date: Mon Mar 31 2003 - 21:45:37 BST
[part two]
>JOHNNY
>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.
>
>RICK
>Oh Johnny. You see, but you do not understand. I BEG you to read ch9
>again. What you're describing is EXACTLY the interplay of static and
>Dynamic forces Pirsig describes in the brujo story...
>
>PIRSIG (LILA ch9 p131)
> If you had asked the brujo what ethical principles he was following he
>probably wouldn't have been able to tell you. He wouldn't have understood
>what you were talking about. He was just following some vague sense of
>"betterness" that he couldn't have defined if he wanted to....
He "vaguely" understood that the whites would rescue him, that the white
culture was gong to replace the Zuni culture. Do you really think that
window-peeping is "better"?
> ...A tribe can change values only person by person and someone has to
>be
>first. Whoever is first obviously is going to be in conflict with
>everybody
>else. He didn't have to change his ways to conform to the culture only
>because the culture was changing its ways to conform to him. And that is
>what made him seem like such a leader. Probably he wasn't telling anyone
>to
>do this or to do that so much as he was just being himself. He may never
>have seen this struggle as anything but a personal one. But BECAUSE THE
>CULTURE WAS IN TRANSITION (emphasis added) many people saw this brujo's
>ways
>to be of higher Quality than those of the old priests and tried to become
>more like him. In this Dynamic sense, the brujo was good because he saw
>the
>new source of good and evil before the other members of the tribe did.
The moral is 'when the imperialists are going to win, learn to get along
with them.' That's a tried and true static pattern.
>PIRSIG (LILA ch26 p387 )
> Just as the biological immune system will destroy a life-saving skin
>graft with the same vigor with which it fights pneumonia, so will a
>cultural
>immune system fight off a beneficial new kind of understanding like that of
>the brujo in Zuni with the same kind of vigor is uses to destroy crime. It
>can't distinguish between them.
We can distinguish between good ideas and bad ideas.
>RICK
>Just as the cultural immune system would fight off a plague of public
>urination, it would fight off the civil-rights movement. But that doesn't
>mean that improvements in civil-rights are morally equivalent to urinating
>in the streets.
But my point is "DQ" would consider them both dymanic change. How are you
going to explain why one is better than the other without referring to
static morality?
>JOHNNY
> > 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.
>
>RICK
>A given set of settled static patterns will never conflict with itself.
>When
>Dynamic evolution pushes two static patterns into competition with each
>other, Dynamic change must occur. When the flock disagrees, the flock will
>have to choose between two courses. In a Metaphysics of Quality, all other
>things being equal, the more Dynamic choice is the more moral.
Here's a given set of two very well established static patterns: "Honor your
mother and father", and "Don't steal" So if a parent ever instructs their
child to steal, then the child will have to navigate the conflict between
static patterns. To do what is moral, he'll have to ask himself what he
thinks most people would do in that situation, given his circumstances.
What is expected of him? In other words, he'll compare his circumstancs to
OTHER static patterns he's aware of (vaguely or starkly), and figure out
what is expected of him.
For a flock, the moral choice is whatever the flock ends up choosing.
>JOHNNY
> > Being suspicious of a static pattern and demanding that it provide
> > justification instead of respecting static patterns, is the opposite of
> > morality.
>
>RICK
>Being suspicious of a static pattern and demanding that it provide
>justification instead of respecting static patterns, is the opposite of
>STATIC morality....
Which is ALL THERE IS.
JOHNNY
> 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.
>
>RICK
>...is subversive to STATIC morality.
Which is ALL THERE IS.
> JOHNNY
> 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?
>RICK
> I don't think so. You're still oscillating between saying either that
>change for the better or worse "just happens" or that it's just some sort
>of
>illusion. And you've pretty much abandoned the static/Dynamic split in all
>but your terminology.
> But ultimately, I'm just saying that I think you'll get more value out
>of the philosophy presented in LILA if you read it as a conflict between
>two
>different moral forces (sq/DQ) rather than a conflict between static
>morality and some immoral (or amoral) Dynamic force.
The conflict you describe is "what I want versus the world". I think
you'll get more value out of the MoQ if you respect morality and see that it
is all one big happy mess of static patterns that are not so much in
'conflict' with each other but just co-exist and do what they should till
they shouldn't anymore.
>thanks for the chat
>
>take care
>rick
You're welcome, and thank you too
Johnny
_________________________________________________________________
The new MSN 8: smart spam protection and 2 months FREE*
http://join.msn.com/?page=features/junkmail
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archives:
Aug '98 - Oct '02 - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
Nov '02 Onward - http://www.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/summary.html
MD Queries - horse@darkstar.uk.net
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Mon Mar 31 2003 - 21:48:58 BST