[MD] Another parallel

[Arlo Bensinger]

[John]
But all things considered, I don't judge 
[returning to the last static latch] as the right 
place to go...  I say we need something new.

[Arlo]
Although Platt serves up nothing but the expected 
anti-hippie drumbeats of the conservatives 
whenever its mentioned, I think its very valuable 
to consider that, according to Pirsig, the 
"Hippie Revolution" WAS the new, moral direction we should have gone.

Yes, yes... the Hippies got bogged down in 
confusing Dynamic with biological quality. But 
for where to go, or where we should have gone, 
its a worthwhile dialogue to go back to the 
beginnings of the so-called Hippie Revolution and 
see where they should have gone.

Some thoughts...

"From World War I until World War II the 
intellectuals dominated unchallenged. From World 
War II until the seventies the intellectuals 
continued to dominate, but with an increasing 
challenge-call it the "Hippie revolution" -which 
failed. And from the early seventies on there has 
been a slow confused mindless drift back to a 
kind of pseudo­Victorian moral posture 
accompanied by an unprecedented and unexplained growth in crime.

Of these periods, the last two seem the most 
misunderstood. 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." (LILA)

"The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a 
moral revolution against both society and intellectuality." (LILA)

Pirsig's Catch-22 about this continues to define where we are today.

"If [intellectualism] continued to advocate more 
freedom from Victorian social restraint, all it 
would get was more Hippies, who were really just 
carrying its anti-Victorianism to an extreme. If, 
on the other hand, it advocated more constructive 
social conformity in opposition to the Hippies, 
all it would get was more Victorians, in the form 
of the reactionary right." (LILA)

"... more Victorians, in the form of the reactionary right"... worth noting.

"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..." (LILA)

"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." (LILA)

Although Pirsig doesn't give year-cutoffs as to 
when on the calendar the Hippie movement went 
astray, we can at the least infer that the "good" 
Hippie time was likely from around the 
publication of "On the Road" in 1957 until the 
popularized Summer of Love in 1967.

In fact, Pirsig sort of alludes to the idea that 
Keroac is one of the voices of this early "good Hippie" stage.

"The culture-bearing book of the period, On the 
Road, by Jack Kerouac, was a running lecture 
against intellect. ". . . All my New York friends 
were in the negative nightmare position of 
putting down society and giving their tired 
bookish or political or psychoanalytic reasons," 
Kerouac wrote, "but Dean" (the hero of the book) 
"just raced in society, eager for bread and love; 
he didn't care one way or the other."" (LILA)

Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Ken Kesey and 
Tom Wolfe are other "good Hippies" (IMHO) whose 
ideas express this early "moral revolution" 
before the movement was derailed by indiscriminate biological degeneracy.

Pirsig's own Peyote Experience, that acted as a 
catalyst for his formulation of the MOQ, reflects 
the early Hippie ideas towards the use of 
mind-altering substances. As Pirsig points out, 
though, the language itself is clearly biased.

" The majority opposition to peyote reflected a 
cultural bias, the belief, unsupported by 
scientific or historical evidence, that 
"hallucinatory" experience is automatically bad. 
Since hallucinations are a form of insanity, the 
term, "hallucinogen," is clearly pejorative. Like 
early descriptions of Buddhism as a "heathen" 
religion and Islam as "barbaric," it begs some 
metaphysical questions. The Indians who use it as 
part of their ceremony  might with equal accuracy 
call it a "de-hallucinogen," since it's their 
claim that it removes the hallucinations of 
contemporary life and reveals the reality buried beneath them.

There is actually some scientific support for 
this Indian point of view. Experiments have shown 
that spiders fed LSD do not wander around doing 
purposeless things as one might expect a 
"hallucination" would cause them to do, but 
instead spin an abnormally perfect, symmetrical 
web. That would support the "de-hallucinogen" 
thesis. But politics seldom depends on facts for its decisions." (LILA)

It would also place Pirsig himself squarely in 
the "good Hippie" category, even though these 
books were not published until after 1967, the 
Peyote Experience with Dusenberry clearly shows 
Pirsig as a contemporary thinker to Kerouac and Wolfe and these others.

We likely can't recreate a failed revolution, the 
symbolism is too entrenched, too cliche, too 
"old" to serve as the new direction now.

As Campbell reminds us, "Only birth can conquer 
death; the birth, not of the old thing again, but 
of something new.  Within the soul, within the 
body social, there must be- if we are to 
experience long survival- a continuous 
“recurrence of birth”  to nullify the unremitting 
recurrences of death. ... Peace then is a snare; 
war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is 
a snare." (Campbell, Hero with a Thousand Faces)

But it is, I am convinced, a high quality 
endeavor to go back to the formations of the 
Hippie's moral revolution, see what it is they 
were trying to accomplish, what it was the early 
Hippies were saying, before the movement got 
derailed, and ask what about what they were 
saying made it "the next moral revolution".