[MD] Biological Quality & Social Conservatism

[Keith A. Gillette]

-----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