[MD] Fw: Food for Thought

[david buchanan]

DMB quoted from Lila:
"Society exists primarily to free people from these biological chains. It 
has done that job so stunningly well intellectual forget the fact and turn 
upon society with a shameful ingratitude for what society has done. Today we 
are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and 
social nightmare because the intellectual level of evolution, in its 
struggle to become free of the social level, has ignored the social level's 
role in keeping the biological level under control. Intellectuals have 
failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly 
being suppressed by social order." (307-8)

DM replied:
I ask: what is this trying to say? I think we all understand that society 
imposes rules & customs on us as individuals to suppress violent means to 
resolve conflicts, helping us to co-operate better, share out resources 
jointly created, and find mates in more complex ways, etc. Then along come 
the intellectuals. They do a number of things, they challenge the social 
order and who has authority, they challenge the church and the aristocrats, 
they want more individual freedom, they champion repressed minorities, they 
say sex can be good and fun and is not a sin in itself, they champion 
democracy and liberty and equality. So intellectuals want to make the rules 
of society different and less oppressive. But Pirsig thinks they went too 
far. Did they? Maybe when they got rid of the old repressions, and the old 
rulers, there was a bit of a gap, a confusion about values, but would we 
want to go backwards? Is the problem not our failure of nerve and a real 
pressing forward with democracy and our liberal values?

dmb says:
Pirsig's complaint does not suggest we go backwards. It simply says that we 
have to realize that the social leve is supposed to keep a lid on biology 
but has to stay out of the business of suppressing the intellect. See, the 
whole point in making a distinction between the levels is to sort these 
thing out. Pressing forward with democracy and liberal values is much more 
difficult without those distinctions because without them we can't tell the 
difference between free speech and pornography, between freedom of human 
rights and free love. Pirsig is saying that intellectuals are right to try 
to prevent social codes from encroaching in freedom of conscience and 
thought but they are wrong to the extent that biological quality is allowed 
to get out of the bottle.

This is one of those areas of the MOQ that might make liberal intellectuals 
feel a bit uncomfortable. Its one of those area where Pirsig changed my 
mind. We could even say that it is a conservative idea or at least an idea 
that traditionalist would tend to like. Pirsig is saying that this should 
not be seen as merely arbitrary authority but as a evolutionary advance, one 
worth preserving for the sake of further evolutionary movement. He's saying 
we should dust off those old traditons to see what it is they've 
accomplished, to comprehend the point and purpose of these forms of social 
control. Of course we don't have to buy them all lock, stock and barrel but 
its foolish to toss these into the trash. He's saying saying that these 
forms of "repression" should be carefully re-examined.

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