[MD] What "moral revolution" is called for by the MOQ?

[ARLO J BENSINGER JR]

[Platt]
It figures.

[Arlo]
What? That Arlo likes art? 

[Platt]
But, I never quite figured out what Pirsig meant by a moral revolution in
specific terms. Any different from Christian compassion and love thy neighbor?
Or, did he mean recognition and acceptance of the MOQ? Or more street
performances, as you seem to suggest?

[Arlo]
Whoa, I'm not suggesting Pirsig's view was that a moral revolution equates to
simply more street performers.

[Platt]
By a moral revolution I thought he meant a broader understanding of the role
social values played in keeping biological values like terrorism at bay. But, I
could be wrong.

[Arlo]
Ah, you mean like the Victorians and neoconservatives. I doubt that's what
Pirsig had in mind. Otherwise, he'd talk about the "drift backwards to
Victorianism" as a moral revolution. Which he doesn't.

We can start where Pirsig starts (with the hippies in LILA). "The Hippies have
been interpreted as frivolous spoiled children, and the period following their
departure as a "return to values," whatever that means. The Metaphysics of
Quality, however, says that's backward: the Hippie revolution was the moral
movement. The present period is the collapse of values. The Hippie revolution
of the eighties was a moral revolution against both society and
intellectuality."

Why was it moral? "Phaedrus thought that this Hippie revolution could have been
almost as much an advance over the intellectual twenties as the twenties had
been over the social 1890s, but his analysis showed that this "Dynamic" sixties
revolution made a disastrous mistake that destroyed it before it really got
started.

The Hippie rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two
directions to go: toward biological quality and toward Dynamic Quality. The
revolutionaries of the sixties thought that since both are anti-social, and
since both are anti-intellectual, why then they must both be the same. That was
the mistake."

"When biological quality and Dynamic Quality are confused the result isn't an
increase in Dynamic Quality. It's an extremely destructive form of degeneracy
of the sort seen in the Manson murders, the Jonestown madness, and the increase
of crime and drug addiction throughout the country. In the early seventies, as
people began to see this, they dropped away from the movement, and the Hippie
revolution, like the intellectual revolution of the twenties, became a moral
rebellion that failed."

The Hippies rejected both intellectual and social patterns, but confused
biological with Dynamic Quality. That's the place to start.

But I don't think tossing in a few lutes and drums would be a bad thing.