[MD] Was Pirsig prescient or what?

[Platt Holden]

Hi All, 

Theodore Dairymple, writing in the Clarement Review of Books, began
his review of three new books (While Europe Slept, Menace in Europe, 
and Londonistan) as follows:

"That Western Europe suffers from a state of general paralysis is a 
truth too universally acknowledged to require much reiteration. Slow 
growth and high unemployment; an aging and shrinking population; 
scientific and cultural irrelevance to the rest of the world; a large, 
unassimilated alien population much of which is hostile to the very 
countries into which it has immigrated—these are just a few of the 
problems that Western Europe not only fails to solve, but even properly 
to recognize."

Pirsig wrote in Chapter 24 of Lila:

"What seemed to allow this deadly night to descend was that the 
intellectual patterns that were supposed to be in charge of things, 
that should comprehend the threat and lead the fight against it, were 
paralyzed. They were paralyzed, not by any external force, but by their 
own internal construction, which made them unable to comprehend what 
was happening.

"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."

Was Pirsig prescient or what?

Best,
Platt