[MD] From each... to each

[david buchanan]

Arlo, Marsha, Craig, Platt and all MOQers:

Arlo said:
In short, we each determine our own needs, but we do so within the context 
of a cultural frame, and at present that frame is completely SOMist and 
based on the Victorian value of "social superiority" and mercantilistic 
elevation of "wealth". This is why in ZMM, Pirsig wrote, "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." ...And, "Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put 
the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern 
American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized 
typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with 
stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys 
for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with 
their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get 
sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological 
ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty 
and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because 
no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this
world and it's real, not style. Quality isn't something you lay on top of 
subjects and objects like tinsel on a Christmas tree. Real Quality must be 
the source of the subjects and objects, the cone from which the tree must 
start."

dmb says:
This quote paints a pretty bleak picture. It depicts the problem, the 
real-life effects of living in an SOM world. Words like dull, depressing, 
phony, ugly, syruped over, grosteque, twisted, dead are mixed in with good 
old fashioned lust and the desire to strike a "stylish" pose, to at least 
appear to have the qualtiy that is missing from this spiritually empty, 
aesthetically hollow, emotionally meaningless worldview. As I understand it, 
this problem is so big and deep that all "sides" suffer from it and 
perpetuate it. Marxists and Randians, hippies and bible-thumpers, liberal 
intellectuals and Straussian neocons. They are all SOMers. I don't mean that 
Karl or Ayn anyone else explicitly asserts these metaphysical assumptions, 
but they were all trying to work things out within SOM. Neither "side" saw a 
way out or even that there was a need to get out. The emptiness of amoral 
scientific materialism is a cultural disease from which no partisan cause is 
immune, not even the religious types who reject it in favor of a regression 
to mythical thinking. I mean, I agree with Arlo here. There is a context in 
which all these rivalries take place. Pirisg is offering a way out because 
the problem can't be solved within that context simply because that context 
IS the problem. Notice how Karl Marx and a Chicago-based philosophy student 
can both complain about alienation despite their being from different 
countries and different centuries? And aren't the fundamentalist and 
patriots also rejecting this sense of meaninglessness in their own way? 
Slipping backward is a cure worse than the disease, but its not very hard to 
understand their motivation, eh? This problem is so wide and pervasive in 
the West, that Pirsig would go back 25 centuries to find the source of it...

Arlo quoted Pirsig:
"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."

dmb says:
If Patricia Curd, my old philosopher professor, was right then answers and 
solutions are only about 10% of it. The vast majority of the task in 
philosophy consists in understanding the problem. The last 10% might be very 
important and it might be the goal and the point and the object of the game, 
but that game simply can NOT be won until and unless the problem is well 
understood. And these quotes work to indentify it. To be an enemy of the 
world instead of being a part of it. This stance toward the world is 
reflected in all our standard options from Thomas Aquinas to the Vienna 
Cirlcle. We're talking about a disease that has infected nearly every corner 
of Western civilization, with just a few exceptions. Theism and materialism 
in the West both have a world-hating streak and they're both part of this 
problem. Capitalist and Communist are just two sides of the same 
materialistic coin insofar as wealth and power are the central realities and 
the central concern.

Ken Wilber's take on this is illuminating. He spends quite a lot of time 
describing how the debate repeatedly failed and the rivalries were never 
resolved. I mean, within SOM, which he calls "flatland", there were two main 
camps, two broad categories with he describes as EGO and ECO. I think this 
roughly translates into Pirsig's classic and romantic. And Wilber's 
explanations really get at the futility of both positions. As you know, 
Pirsig dropped the classic romantic distinction in favor of the static 
dynamic split and Wilber helped me see why that was such a good move. See, 
if we have a worldview in which man is alienated from nature then it seems 
like the only option is to take sides with one or the other. The hippies, 
greens, noblesavage idealist and other romantic types basically take sides 
with nature while Randians, Victorians are all about self and Ego. And there 
is an interesting connection between materialism and sensuality too. I mean, 
if material reality is the only really real reality, then the only real good 
is physical pleasure or the possession of material things. From within SOM, 
there can never be anything more or anything higher than the world of "its". 
Then you get inane slogans from the hippies such as "make love, not war" and 
from the faithful we get inane sentiments that could be made into a slogan 
such as "make love, not sense". Hedonism or delusion. That's a helluva 
choice, eh? And of course the sad thing is that neither side understands 
what the problem is, let alone how to solve it.

Can you tell that I'm struggling here? It probably comes off like I'm just 
condeming everyone in the West, but what I'm really trying to get at is the 
idea that the MOQ addresses all these isms. Depite what some might say, 
Pirsig's solution does NOT consist in picking one of these isms over the 
others. He's trying to get us out of the box in which they all exist. Its an 
historical, cultural problem. Something is dying and something is being 
born. They're fighting it out to see who wins and if I understand the 
problem, we will lose no matter who wins. I mean, if its a titanic battle 
between meaningless objectivity and mythical thinking, then we are seriously 
screwed. Hippies hate greed and victorians hate lust, but this kind of 
rivalry suggests that greed and lust are the only choices, as if going 
backward and self indulgence were the only choices. Its a horrible trap 
where every choice sucks big time. And if Pirsig is right, the thing that's 
missing is quality. And I think its important to realize that all "sides" 
think they are defending what's good. And everybody is right in some respect 
insofar as money and sex are both good in some sense, on some level. Nature 
and intellect and ego and strict moral codes are all good in different ways. 
The problem is that all these forms of the good are being pushed by people 
who are trying to find a genuine sort of quality from within a worldview 
that rules it out. All these rival views are bound to fail because they are 
held by people who "don't know where to start because no one has ever told 
them there's such a thing as Quality in this world". Its not that Quality 
with a capital "Q" is going to suddenly settle all the debates. It only 
starts newer, better debates, I suppose. But I think the idea here is that 
the kinds of rival goods we witness in these specific social and political 
conflicts are symptomatic of a disease that has infected the West in 
general. It like the style and the tinsel and the poses are all desperate 
attempts to get at the missing Quality. Its like we can't have the real 
thing, so we have to find some unsatisfying second choice. People can't have 
DQ so they cling to smaller, static goods. And I think this is what Pirsig 
means when he talks about chasing mechanical rabbits and trying to drink 
life through a straw.

When I look around that what it looks like to me. See, trying to get out 
from under subject object metaphysics and scientific materialism might seem 
like an academic, philosophical problem. And it is that too. But I think the 
problem is that life just ain't much good under these circumstances. There 
are way too many desperately empty people. You look around and see people 
trying to fill their empty souls with money, sex, ideology, religion, booze 
and drugs and piety and posturing and ego God knows what else. And, for a 
lucky few of us, all of this in a single weekend.

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