[MD] Biological Quality & Social Conservatism

[MarshaV]

Hmmmm

Do you suppose learning to tango would be considered a biological 
pleasure?  Or a 360 degree shift?  For in his November 19th, 2006 
interview, Mr. Pirsig stated he was planning a trip to Argentina to 
do just that.

Marsha


At 09:36 AM 8/2/2007, you wrote:
>-----1975 interview of RMP in *Oui*-----
>P: Anyway, I think we're moving back to a puritan thing.
>Q. What makes you think that?
>P: Wishful thinking, perhaps. Or perhaps it's old age coming on.
>-----
>
>I thought this wishful thinking was very telling. (And mostly wishful, not
>to mention incredibly ironic, given the magazine in which it was published!)
>I had somewhat forgotten that part of Pirsig's project in *Lila* was saving
>some Puritan social forms while discarding the dogmatic religious
>assumptions on which they were based. From Chapter 24:
>
>"Suddenly we have come full circle at the American culture's founders, the
>Puritans, and their overwhelming concern with "original sin" and release
>from it. The mythology by which they explained this original sin seems no
>longer useful in a scientific world, but when we look at the things in their
>contemporary society they identified with this original sin we see something
>remarkable. Drinking, dancing, sex, playing the fiddle, gambling, idleness:
>these are biological pleasures. Early Puritan morals were largely a
>suppression of biological quality. In the Metaphysics of Quality the old
>Puritan dogma is gone but its practical moral pronouncements are explained
>in a way that makes sense.
>
>The Victorians didn't really believe in those old Puritan biological
>restraints the way the Puritans did. They were in the process of breaking
>away from them. But they paid them lip-service and the old "spare the rod
>and spoil the child" school of biological repression was still in fashion.
>And what one notices, when one reads the works of the children of those
>traditions, is how much more decent and socially mature they seemed than
>people do today. The 1920s intellectuals strove to break down the old social
>codes, but they had these codes built into them from childhood and so were
>unaffected by the breakdown they produced. But their descendants, raised
>without the codes, have suffered.
>
>What the Metaphysics of Quality concludes is that the old Puritan and
>Victorian social codes should not be followed blindly, but should not be
>attacked blindly either. They should be dusted off and reexamined, fairly
>and impartially, to see what they were trying to accomplish and what they
>actually did accomplish toward building a stronger society. We must
>understand that when a society undermines intellectual freedom for its own
>purposes it is absolutely morally bad, but when it represses biological
>freedom for its own purposes it is absolutely morally good. These moral bads
>and goods are not just "customs." They are as real as rocks and trees. The
>destructive sympathy by intellectuals toward lawlessness in the sixties and
>since is derived, no doubt, from what is perceived to be a common enemy, the
>social system. But the Metaphysics of Quality concludes that this sympathy
>was really stupid. The decades since the sixties have borne this out."
>
>
>Apropos of this line of reasoning, I just listened to a lecture by Roger
>Scruton, a British intellectual prominent especially during the Thatcher
>administration, discussing his view of the impact of sexual license on
>social stability in the context of classical liberalism ala J.S. Mill. The
>lecture was recorded 6-January-2007 and will play on TV Ontario's *Big
>Ideas* program this Saturday, 4-August-2008. It's available as an MP3 at:
><http://www.tvo.org/TVOsites/WebObjects/TvoMicrosite.woa?bigideas>.
>
>While I think Scruton makes a number of unfounded assertions in this lecture
>and doesn't arrive at definite policy recommendations which one may take up
>for debate, his perspective is erudite, informed, and consistent with
>Pirsig's views. I found his speech thought-provoking.
>
>Cheers,
>Keith
>
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