[MD] On silt and old tea.

[david buchanan]

In the "Speed of Lighting" thread, Krimel said:

Pirsig's real contribution could be taken as synthesizing Darwin and Lao Tsu. Much of my vitriol arises from the realization that he or at least his apologists don't quite seem to get either of them right.


dmb says:

Evolutionary Taoism? Okay. I guess that's roughly true the way it's roughly true to say Avatar is a synthesis of Star Trek Wars and Dances With Wolves. To suggest that your vitriol arises from a resistance to this notion isn't very plausible, however. I don't recall anyone ever even mentioning such a synthesis. If there was ever a struggle for its legitimacy in this forum, it snuck past me.

This reminds of all the times you've complained about the MOQ not addressing some piece of evolutionary science or another. I want to push back against this kind of complaint. As I see it, that kind of criticism is mostly just a result of inappropriate expectations or a basic misconception about the scope and focus of the MOQ. In Lila, for example, traces the etymology of his central term all the way back into the proto-Indo-European language and finds that he is not saying anything new and that in fact it's the oldest idea known to man. In ZAMM he traces the history of philosophy all the way back to the pre-Socratics and finds that the discredited Sophists were already saying then what he is saying now. The scope is very, very broad and the idea is not to be newest, hippest thing since bellbottoms. The idea is to be good.

"I would like not to cut any new channels of consciousness but simply dig deeper into old ones that have become silted in with the debris of thoughts grown stale and platitudes too often repeated. "What's new?" is an interesting and broadening eternal question, but one which, if pursued exclusively, results only in an endless parade of trivia and fashion, the silt of tomorrow. I would like, instead, to be concerned with the question "What is best?," a question which cuts deeply rather than broadly, a question whose answers tend to move the silt downstream. There are eras of human history in which the channels of thought have been too deeply cut and no change was possible, and nothing new ever happened, and "best" was a matter of dogma, but that is not the situation now. Now the stream of our common consciousness seems to be obliterating its own banks, losing its central direction and purpose, flooding the lowlands, disconnecting and isolating the highlands and to no particular purpose other than the wasteful fulfillment of its own internal momentum. Some channel deepening seems called for."

To criticize the MOQ for its failure to address this or that recent development in science always strikes me as oddly inappropriate, like criticizing Gandhi because he was a Luddite who failed to anticipate facebook. Sure, in some fantasy it would be nice if Mark Twain had a twitter account but as a realistic way to assess their relative success or failure it's very much beside the point. It's not quite that silly to expect the MOQ to address everything Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett has written lately, but almost. I think it's pretty safe to say that Pirsig is perfectly aware of the fact that the theory of evolution continues to evolve. This MOQ isn't supposed to be the last word on the theory, it simply agrees the theory. Same with Taoism, actually. In ZAMM he says that his notion of Quality is nothing for Taoism. It agrees with Taoism but the purpose of the MOQ is to improve and expand our modes of rationality. And the use of everything from Taoism to the Sophists is aimed at that. He's trying to deepen some very old, very silty channels, to freshen and revitalize some ancient, ancient stuff. I mean, think about the scope of the perennial philosophy, which says that all the world's great religions have an esoteric, mystical core and at that level they all agree with each other. That's how the MOQ can be a form of philosophical mysticism and agree with Taoism and agree with Zen Buddhism and agree with ... Well, you get the idea. 

The world's leading evolutionary biologist died today. He was replaced by a larger, stronger evolutionary biologist.