From: David Buchanan (DBuchanan@ClassicalRadio.org)
Date: Sat May 03 2003 - 17:49:33 BST
Phyllis and y'all:
Phyllis said:
I'm getting very confused about who said what, but it seems your ethical
relativism discussion might like a new voice - and a turn back to a more
Pirsigian channel.
dmb says:
As I see it, Phyllis, you are NOT the one who is confused here.
Phyllis said:
First, the beats were probably not the first. Look back at Frank Lloyd
Wright, Hemmingway, Henry Miller, Louis Bromfield; the Roaring Twenties had
quite a lot to say about nonconformity. Look farther back, in philosophy -
Nietzsche, Bentham, Mill, Socrates himself was fairly nonconformist for his
time - if only he'd taken money for his teaching, many would have thought
him more "normal."
dmb says:
Right on. Pirsig spends quite a bit of time explaining exactly why the
contrarians are the single most important element in the evolutionary
process. This is what the highest moral code, the "code of art", is all
about.
Pirsig:
"Whatever the personality traits that made him such a rebel... this man was
no mis-fit. He was intergral part of Zuni culture. The whole tribe was in a
state of evolution. He was an active catalytic agent in that tribe's social
evolution, and his personal conflicts were a part of that tribe's cultural
growth." P115 ( After months of thinking he makes the s/D split.)
"Contrarians sometimes just seem to savagely attack every kind of static
moral pattern they can find. It seems as though they're trying to destroy
morality as a kind of revenge. ... Its common to many cultures. That Brujo
was a contrarian." P358
"Once you see it in another culture like that and then come back to our own
you can see that in an unofficial way we have our contrarian societies too.
The Bohemians of the victorian era were contrarians. So, to some extent,
were the Hippies of the Sixites." "...when you add a concept of DQ to a
rational understanding of the world, you can add a lot to an understanding
of contrarians" "That's what drives the really creative people--the artists,
composers, revolutionaries and the like..." P359
dmb says:
These dynamic contrarians have always been with us and they've done a nice
job improving society. They're like genetic mutations at the social level.
But I think there's even more to it. Rights, it seems, are aimed precisely
at protecting contrarians. Rights protect the evolutionary process itself.
Rights open the doors to DQ. Its logical and rational and reasonable to
think that we ought not stand in the way of evolution, but beyond all that
it just seems right, doesn't it? It's moral in less expressable ways too.
Words like dignity, compassion and justice are intimately related to Rights.
Its a kind of spiritual truth, the fifth moral code loves contrarians.
Thanks for your time,
DMB
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