[MD] Intellectual and Social

[Bruce Underwood]

Hi Steve,

Thank you for these gems! It is a confirmation on my thoughts in this area and gives me more to ponder.  Is this in "Lila's Child"?

Concerning struggles within levels... the easiest example that I can think of:  is biological against biological - virus attacking the human body and the immune defenses that the body has developed.  But there are millions of examples on every level.  Social Level: Church and State

Bruce

----------------------------------------
> Date: Fri, 8 Jan 2010 11:02:59 -0500
> From: peterson.steve at gmail.com
> To: moq_discuss at moqta lk.org
> Subject: Re: [MD] Intellectual and Social
>
> Hi Platt, Bruce,
>
> More Pirsig on the struggles:
>
>
> "If you compare the levels of static patterns that compose a human being to
> the ecology of a forest, and if you see the different patterns sometimes in
> competition with each other, sometimes in symbiotic support of each other,
> but always in a kind of tension that will shift one way or the other,
> depending on evolving circumstances, then you can also see that evolution
> doesn't take place only within societies, it takes place within individuals
> too. It's possible to see Lila as something much greater than a customary
> sociological or anthropological description would have her be. Lila then
> becomes a complex ecology of patterns moving toward Dynamic Quality. Lila
> individually, herself, is in an evolutionary battle against the static
> patterns of her own life."
>
> "That's why the absence of suffering last night seemed so ominous and her
> change to what looked like suffering today gave Phædrus a feeling she
> was getting better. If you eliminate suffering from this world you
> eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't
> suffer don't survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality
> that drives the whole process. All these battles between patterns of
> evolution go on within suffering individuals like Lila."
>
> "And Lila's battle is everybody's battle, you know? Sometimes the insane and
> the contrarians and the ones who are the closest to suicide are the most
> valuable people society has. They may be precursors of social change.
> They've taken the burdens of the culture onto themselves, and in their
> struggle to solve their own problems they're solving problems for the
> culture as well."
>
> Platt said:
>> Excellent. These "struggles" between and within moral levels is central to
>> understanding the MOQ. The one remaining question that I don't think anyone
>> has answered is: "Are moral values and their struggles empirical facts?
>
> Steve:
> I'm not sure what you mean by "empirical facts." If you are just
> asking if they are real, I don't know why anyone would doubt that
> these struggles were real so I wouldn't no where to begin in arguing
> that they are real.
>
> Best,
> Steve
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