[MD] Biological Quality & Social Conservatism

[David M]

Hi Keith

Yes but we must beware those people who want to
stop us enjoying any biological pleasure at all.
Question of balance again.

I've read quite a bit of Scruton and he bashes the Left
where they need bashing at times but then often goes too far.

David M

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Keith A. Gillette" <Keith.Gillette at Detling.org>
To: <moq_discuss at moqtalk.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 2:36 PM
Subject: [MD] Biological Quality & Social Conservatism


> -----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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