[MD] The MoQ.org STRANGLES Creativity

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Steve]
I think that Pirsig's analysis in part says that intellectual freedom has 
undermined important social patterns.

[Arlo]
Careful here, amigo. You are treading into Platt's murky water. It is not 
that intellectual FREEDOM has undermined social PATTERNS (when they do, it 
is moral), but that intellectual PATTERNS have inadvertently supported 
biological PATTERNS against social PATTERNS (which is immoral). Be careful 
to avoid the vile rhetoric that proposes the intellectual level is "free" 
and the social level "is not". From there, you are a hair's breadth from 
the Moral War of the Free Individual Against the Evil Collective.

Intellectual patterns versus social patterns is not a matter of "freedom" 
versus "order", it is a battle of morally superior static intellectual 
patterns versus morally inferior static social patterns. Remember that it 
is completely moral, according to the MOQ, for intellectual patterns to 
dominate social patterns. And, if an "idea" destroys a society, then this 
is a moral outcome. It is when biological patterns destroy a society that 
we tread into immorality.

The "freedom" versus "order" battle is fought on all MOQ levels, as DQ and 
SQ seek harmony. Static intellectual patterns can be as restrictive of 
"freedom" on the intellectual level, as static social patterns can be on 
the social level.

[Steve]
Any thoughts on the spiritual blankness, loneliness, and ugliness of modernity?

[Arlo]
Pirsig talks about this in both books. In ZMM, in addition to the "funeral 
procession" passage, Pirsig writes...

"We see much more of this loneliness now. It’s paradoxical that where 
people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East 
and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread 
out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you’d think the 
loneliness would have been greater, but we didn’t see it so much."

In ZMM, he continues the theme of "frontier" versus "urban" as "Indian" 
versus "Victorian", and writes...

"A depression always came over him when he came East like this, but the 
oldness and abandonment weren't the only reasons for it. He was a 
Midwesterner and he shared the prejudices of many Midwesterners against 
this region of the country. He didn't like the way everything gets more 
stratified here. The rich start looking richer and the poor start looking 
poorer. What was worse, they looked as though they thought this was the way 
things ought to be. They had settled for this. There was no sign it was 
going to change.

In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin you can be poor and still feel some 
sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and you keep your 
eye on the future. But here in New York it seemed as if when you're poor 
you're just poor. And that means you're nobody. Really nobody. And if 
you're rich you're really somebody. And that fact seemed to explain 
ninety-five percent of everything else that went on in this region.

Maybe he was just noticing it more because he'd been thinking about 
Indians. Some of these differences are just urban-rural differences, and 
the East is more urban. But some of these differences reflected European 
values too. Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting 
more formal and impersonal and. . . crafty. Exploitative. European. And 
petty too, and ungenerous."

I'm convinced that a fundamental problem here is that the SOMist firmament 
described in ZMM has NOT been overcome. It is why I consider ZMM to be the 
more immediately important book. Only after people appreciate what Pirsig 
meant by Quality, can applying his analytical divisions have any meaning. 
Platt, for example, has turned around and made the MOQ an apologist 
doctrine for the very system Pirsig describes as built on faulty 
foundations in ZMM.

A while back, I pointed out that over the past 30 years we have slowly but 
surely moved the majority of our interactions from public to private space. 
This because the undergirding dialogue in this country has been built on 
the mercantilistic distinction that devalues "public" and overvalues 
"private". This is but one symptom of the modern problem. Consumerism has 
stepped in to fill the psychic void created by our retreat from public 
spheres. In ZMM, Pirsig nails it on the head.

"Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see 
anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried 
within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will 
convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style 
and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by 
the vendors of substance. He thinks of them at night alone with their 
advertised glamorous shoes and stockings and underclothes off, staring 
through the sooty windows at the grotesque shells revealed beyond them, 
when the poses weaken and the truth creeps in, the only truth that exists 
here, crying to heaven, God, there is nothing here but dead neon and cement 
and brick."

Recently, I read an article that talked about the "return of the front 
porch". For many decades, a front porch was a stable feature of American 
homes. It was a public face (albeit on private property), where a family 
would go seeking public interactions with neighbors, passerbys and others. 
Then, in the 80s, we saw a steady and quick decline of the front porch in 
favor of the "rear deck". Families would instead seek solace and seclusion 
in their leisure moments. Today, it seems, as if more people are going back 
to the front porch, and dropping the notion of a rear deck. I see this as a 
good trend. Perhaps people realized that by shutting out others, they were 
voluntarily imprisoning themselves.

"Phædrus remembered a line from Thoreau: "You never gain something but that 
you lose something." And now he began to see for the first time the 
unbelievable magnitude of what man, when he gained power to understand and 
rule the world in terms of dialectic truths, had lost. He had built empires 
of scientific capability to manipulate the phenomena of nature into 
enormous manifestations of his own dreams of power and wealth...but for 
this he had exchanged an empire of understanding of equal magnitude: an 
understanding of what it is to be a part of the world, and not an enemy of it."

 From Lila, "A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of 
millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic 
solitary confinement, unable to talk to one another ... They had lost some 
of their realness. They were living in some kind of movie projected by this 
intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their 
happiness, saying: PARADISE -> PARADISE -> PARADISE -> but which had 
inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself-and from 
each other."

Yep.

Arlo