[MD] MD 4th level - The more autonomous level

[Arlo J. Bensinger]

[Platt]
It's a fine day, Arlo:

[Arlo]
As Dr. Evil was fond of saying, "it's frickin' freezing up here, Mr.
Bigglesworth"... :-)

[Platt]
Since I don't believe there is such a thing as "collective consciousness" 
I'm not confused. Consciousness is only known by individuals, one person 
at a time. Likewise, there's no collective "mind."

[Arlo]
Pirsig think so. :-)

[Platt] 
Self-defense is to protect individual freedom. Changes benefiting the free 
market are to ensure individual opportunity. As for Walmart, I'm puzzled 
why you rant and rave against a firm that makes goods affordable to the 
poor and "disadvantaged" whom you worry about. 

[Arlo]
My point is that even our society has it's "in the public good" moments. And
many of them you support. The trouble, maybe you'd agree, is that each of us
think that "we know" what the "public good" is. When you support the war, it is
because "you know" what the "public good" is moreso than those who are against
it. When I suppport public libraries, it is out of a belief that "I know" what
the "public good" is.

Here is where we attempted before to bring the MOQ into the "public good"
discussion. How can (or should, to some) the MOQ be used to frame a dialogue on
what constitutes the "public good", and what constitutes "stifling". There is,
as you say, obviously a little of each in everything. Public libraries do
indeed rely on taxation, which could be argued to "stifle" business, but, the
free access to information (I believe) provides a greater good than harm. You
could say the same thing about the military.

My "rant and rave" against Walmart is based on a similiar look at balance. Yes,
on one hand Walmart provides "cheap" goods to poor families, but on the other
side, its labor practices convert local jobs into low-paying menial jobs that
reduce the ability of local economies to provide better paying jobs. Its a
snake swallowing it's own tail.

I also believe firmly in Pirsig's long talk on value and care in the labor
activities of individuals. Remember his bad experiences with "modern" garages?
The radio playing, the "disconnect" between "who the are" and "what they do"?
No identifying with the job? I think when you read ZMM, and pay close attention
to this thread of thought, the difference between the "funeral procession" of
commuters on the Interstate, and the "here and nowness" of the small towns, you
can get a lot of insight into "the way labor should be" and "the way it is".
"Identification" and "care" play greatly into what makes labor meaningful.

Sometimes you "conservatives" :-) really confuse me. There is so much talk about
the values of "entrepreneurship", and the glories of self-reliance, about how
the struggle to "own your own business" is great, but also the most rewarding
and fulfilling destiny man can achieve. And yet you back large corporations
that undersell and put these struggling entrepreneurs out of business, and turn
them into retail clerks, earning minimum wages at a job whose only real
function is to make SOMEONE ELES wealthy.

You speak jolly about saving $1 on your meat, while small entrepreneurs are
forced out of business and into becoming deli-clerks. I would think that
conservatives, such as yourself, would gladly support your local small business
man, whose efforts to be self-reliant are noble, and whose income feeds back
into the local community, enriching the lives of all in the area. I mean, isn't
this last part the conservative mantra?

[Platt]
You're confusing a society of cells with a society of people. Pirsig 
clearly distinguishes the two.

[Arlo]
No he doesn't, you revisionist, you. He says, "People look upon the social
patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer;
different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet
the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as
surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is
feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower
organism can accomplish alone."

The progression of the MOQ is always "emergence of a higher level (organism)
from the collective activity of individuals on the previous layer".

Collective activity by atoms on the inorganic level leads to the emergence of a
higher level, the biological. Collective activity of biological individuals
leads to the emergence of a higher organism (in Pirsig's words, as I just
quoted) , the social layer. Collective activity on the social level (social
mediation, in Pirsig's words) leads to the emergence of the Intellectual level.
This is pretty straight-forward stuff. 

Pirsig goes on, "When societies and cultures and cities are seen not as
inventions of "man" but as higher organisms than biological man, the phenomena
of war and genocide and all the other forms of human exploitation become more
intelligible."... " From a Metaphysics of Quality's point of view this
devouring of human bodies is a moral activity because it's more moral for a
social pattern to devour a biological pattern than for a biological pattern to
devour a social pattern. A social pattern is a higher form of evolution. This
city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was creating something better
than any biological organism could by itself achieve."

And a little further down, he comments on the similiarity between the "society
of cells" and the "society of people" (as each give rise to a new level of
emergence)... "People, like everything else, work better in parallel than they
do in series, and that is what happens in this free enterprise city...  And not
just this city. Our greatest national economic success, agriculture, is
organized almost entirely in parallel. All life has parallelism built into it.
Cells work in parallel. Most body organs work in parallel: eyes, brains, lungs.
Species operate in parallel, democra­cies operate in parallel; even science
seems to operate best when it is organized through the parallelism of the
scientific societies."


[Platt]
Rather than "collective consciousness" I would say that I "came into 
being" in an environment consisting of various patterns ranging from the 
inorganic to the intellectual plus a dynamic moral element.. 

[Arlo]
And Pirsig would likely respond, "What keeps the world from reverting to the
Neanderthal with each generation is the continuing, ongoing mythos, transformed
into logos but still mythos, the huge body of common knowledge that unites our
minds as cells are united in the body of man. To feel that one is not so
united, that one can accept or discard this mythos as one pleases, is not to
understand what the mythos is."

[Platt]
You call them "structures," while I prefer "patterns" Same difference.
They make up the total environment. (By the way, you're included.)

[Arlo]
Agree. In my use (just to clarify), I'd say that I consider a "structure" to be
a pattern that is so "entrenched" or "solidified" as to not have much change
over generations. And also to emphasize that these entrenched patterns have
significant power of the potentiality of human agency (while, of course, also
being the source of that agency), hence the word "structuration". 

[Platt]
You have to ask of every attempt to use coercion to alleviate natural 
constraints "At what cost?" and "Where's the evidence?" For all the 
billions taxed from others to alleviate poverty, poverty is still as 
widespread as ever.  

[Arlo]
I agree. One must always be critical of actions undertaken in this regard. As
Pirsig said of Truman, "Harry Truman, of all people, comes to mind, when he
said, concerning his administration’s programs, "We’ll just try them—and if
they don’t work—why then we’ll just try something else." That may not be an
exact quote, but it’s close."

Let me ask you, though. Do you think poverty is a natural condition of man in
any society? That is, should we just accept it as a "necessary evil"? When you
are enjoying your Christmas ham this year (a pagan tradition, by the way), and
there are people likely a few miles away who have no food, is it really your
contention that "that's not my problem"? Indeed, that it's not really a
"problem" at all, but a necassary "thinning of the herd", to separate those
with value from those without?

Let me preempt this by saying that I don't think it's possible to eradicate
"poverty" in a monetary-based society. To me, that's actually a metaphorical
oxymoron. "Poverty", as we commonly use the term, is a "relative" index. I am
"too poor" to afford a Ferrari. The whole IDEA of fixing a high-cost to a
Ferrari is to limit its access to only those in the extreme upper percentiles
of wealth. But, while I agree that attempts to equalize wealth are always
doomed to failure (because of the structure of our society), I also strongly
believe that there are some social programs that are not only "just", but quite
"moral". Taxation funds, while they should not be used to "give everyone a
Ferrari", should indeed be used to provide basic nutrition and sustinence to
those who, for one reason or another, are without capital means to acquire
themselves. Prenatal and postnatal care for families lacking capital income I
also have no problem supporting (although I would like, in all cases, reception
of social support to be tied to social activity, as we discussed... for
example, that mother who received socially supported prenatal care could, at
some point, volunteer in a soup kitchen, or teaching kids how to read, or
delivering meals to shutins... or using whatver valuable skills she has to
repay society in kind).

Arlo