[MD] Back to the last static latch

[Platt Holden]

To All:

Leniency for the lawlessness in France and on the borders of the U.S. 
are symptomatic of a breakdown of the social order in West, not to 
mention the inability of the civilized world to mount a coordinated 
defense against aggression from fundamentalist factions in the Middle 
East.

Pirsig blames this sad state of affairs on a "twentieth century 
collapse of morals," brought about by an objective, scientific view 
that has had a lethal defect:

"The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for morals. 
Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no 
objective reality. You can look through a microscope or telescope or 
oscilloscope for the rest of your life and you will never find a single 
moral. There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They exist 
only in your imagination." (Lila, 22)

In effect, the reigning SOM mindset says of everyone that "no matter 
how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that 
of an animal that lives and thinks like any other animal. He could 
invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial 
inventions." (Lila, 22)

With morality up for grabs by any individual or group who wishes to 
invent them, it's little wonder than French students riot over the lack 
of a guaranteed job, Congress considers granting amnesty to law 
breakers, and a majority in the West can’t agree to impose sanctions on 
a nation  that defines itself as a deadly enemy. 

In the absence of a moral framework, the watchword among intellectuals 
today is "tolerance" of all things, great and small. The result? Pirsig 
explains:

"It was like watching the spider waiting while the wasp gets ready to 
attack it. The spider can leave any time to save its life but it 
doesn't do so. It just waits there, paralyzed by some internal pattern 
of responses that make it unable to recognize its own danger. The wasp 
plants its eggs in the spiders body and the spider lives on while the 
wasp larvae slowly eat it and destroy it.

"Phaedrus thought that a Metaphysics of Quality could be a replacement 
for the paralyzing intellectual system that is allowing all this 
destruction to go unchecked. The paralysis of America is a paralysis of 
moral patterns. Morals can't function normally because morals have been 
declared intellectually illegal by the subject-object metaphysics that 
dominates present social thought. These subject-object patterns were 
never designed for the job of governing society. They're not doing it. 
When they're put in the position of controlling society, of setting 
moral standards and declaring values, and when they then declare that 
there are no values and no morals, the result isn't progress. The 
result is social catastrophe." (Lila, 24)

With social catastrophe becoming increasingly evident, it was not 
surprising to read the following headline in my local paper:

"College campuses see religious resurgence," followed by the subhead, 
"Oxford theologian Alister McGrath stresses that education affects both 
head and heart and this it is unwise to create two zones on campus - on 
spiritual and one academic." (A plea to return to campuses of the 
Victorian era when there was no split between the spiritual and 
academic zones.)

Among other things in the subsequent article was this observation:

"These days, even the most skeptical of scholars admit that traditional 
forms of religion are on the rise and that millions of spiritually 
hungry students are questioning the chilling, strictly rational creeds 
of secular modernity. Faith is making a comeback and the high priests 
of mainstream academia cannot understand why."

They cannot understand why because they haven't read "Lila" 

"The end of the twentieth century in America seems to be an 
intellectual, social, arid economic rust-belt, a whole society that has 
given up on Dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back to 
Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch." (Lila, 24)

"Faith of our fathers (is) living still, in spite of dungeon, fire and 
sword," and in spite of -- or because of -- the spiritual wasteland of  
scientific materialism that views you and me as no more than animals.

What did you expect?

Platt