[MD] The MoQ.org STRANGLES Creativity

[Steve Peterson]

Hi SA, Platt, Ham, all
>      Platt said to Ham:  "Gee Ham, if you aren't
> convinced that you are better off today than the
> caveman there's nothing I can say that will change
> your mind. I mean aren't you glad you live in the 21st
> century and not the 10,000 B.C.?"
Steve:
I certainly am.

The cave man had no intellectual patterns. To choose the life of the cave man over your own would be to say goodbye to the life of the mind, and doing so would be a partial suicide.

One reason we can say that your life is absolutely better than the cave man's is that you particpate in intellectual patterns and he doesn't. You are a higher level of awareness. Broader perspectives are better than more narrow ones.

SA:
>      Platt you really don't know if they had it better
> or we have it better or an Amazonian villager,
> presently, has it better than U.S. culture or not. 

Platt:
Try having an operation without anesthesia.
Steve:
Good point, Platt. There is much that is better about modernity, and the MOQ can help sort out what may be better and what may be worse about it.

There is no question that from a biological perspective, life here is better.

SA said:
> There are those in the world that think the U.S. is
> the Great Satan remember.

Platt commented irrelevantly:
Well, it seems there's little doubt where your political sympathies 
lie.

Steve:

Pirsig had a lot to say about our discontent with modernism despite all of our creature comforts. That's what ZAMM was all about, right? Pirsig's diagnosis is   that the underlying metaphysical assumptions of our culture are at the root of the problem, and he prescribes Quality as the solution.

To what extent do you think Quality is the solution? Has it helped you personally? Has this widely read book managed to influence our culture(s)?

The MOQ spelled out in Lila further nails down the problem:

"Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a
moral and social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in
its struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social
level's role in keeping the biological level under control.  Intellectuals
have failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is
constantly being suppressed by social order.
Biological quality is necessary to the survival of life. But when it
threatens to dominate and destroy society, biological quality becomes evil
itself, the "Great Satan" of twentieth century Western culture.  One reason
why fundamentalist Moslem cultures have become so fanatic in their hatred
of the West is that it has released the biological forces of evil that
Islam has fought for centuries to control."

(Platt, notice that Pirsig also refers to the "Great Satan," and I don't think that that means he hates America, either.)

I think that Pirsig's analysis in part says that intellectual freedom has undermined important social patterns. This is the conservative argument that has MOQ support. To show once again how wrong Platt is about the MOQ, note that he doesn't take this route to make his conservative case. Instead, he takes the important social values that intellect may be undermining and calls them intellectual (individual values). That's why it is so hard to discuss political issues with him in MOQ terms.

Well, back to ZAMM. Beyond undermining important social patterns, his other critique of the modern intellectual level is that it is dominanted by a value-free idea about what reason is, and correcting that problem may be the key to solving the first one as well:

"Phædrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that...a new spiritual rationality...in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be ``value free.'' Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is ``reasonable'' even when it isn't any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant. Reason and Quality had become separated and in
 conflict with each other and Quality had been forced under and reason made supreme somewhere back then.

Any thoughts on the spirtual blankness, loneliness, and ugliness of modernity?

Regards,
Steve






 			
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