[MD] Spinning our Wheels, metaphorically speaking

[david buchanan]

John said:
... For very, very many people, the whole GOD thing is a huge billboard pointing them in a Quality direction.  These people are your most primitive types, admittedly.  M. Scott Peck illustrates them as the criminals and police.  The drunkard and reformer.  Often, from a life of pure hedonistic selfishness, the only way to climb out of the chaotic patterns is to seek the structures of religion or society. ... On the other hand, there are those who get to the point where they're restless at this rest stop.  The rituals become hollow and meaningless, the priesthood venal and corrupt, the ideas stale and outworn.  For them, the rest stop with the big GOD billboard above it becomes a trap, a trap they need to flee. ... And that's where I think the MoQ is most helpful.



dmb says:

"Phaedrus saw nothing wrong with this ritualistic religion as long as the rituals are seen as merely a static portrayal of Dynamic Quality, a sign-post that allows socially pattern-dominated people to see Dynamic Quality. The danger has always been that the rituals, the static patterns, are mistaken for what they merely represent and are allowed to destroy the Dynamic Quality they were originally intended to preserve.     Suddenly the foliage opened up and there it was: the ocean."

"There was nothing in what he was reading that suggested James was some kind of ideologue interested in proving some foregone conclusion about religion. Ideologues usually talk in terms of sweeping generalities and what Phaedrus was reading seemed to confirm that James was about as far as you can get from one of these. In his early years especially, James' concept of ultimate reality was of things concrete and individual. He didn't like Hegel or any of the German idealists who dominated philosophy in his youth precisely BECAUSE they were so general and sweeping in their approach."


As I see it, the first quote is about religion on the social level. Pirsig is putting it in terms of rituals as static social values but I think this is more or less the same as your phrase, "the structures of religion and society". I think it is just a sociological fact that churches reduce vice crimes when they move into a neighborhood that's plagued by criminal hedonism. 

The second quote is about religion on the intellectual level. Pirsig is putting it terms of German idealism, but make no mistake about it. Hegel was doing hyper-rationalistic theology. Bradley and Royce too. He was on the watch for this crypto-theology in James' work but he didn't find it. In the pages that follow the second quote, Pirsig goes on to align himself with James and identifies Quality with James' pure experience, adding that Quality is NOT "some intellectualized Hegelian Absolute".

See it rituals can be mistaken for the DQ they're supposed to represent, then so can philosophical concepts. That's why there is always going to be a discrepancy between DQ and the MOQ. The MOQ is a system of philosophical concepts too. It has to be full of concepts and definitions, Pirsig points out, or there isn't any metaphysics. And yet his central term refers to something that is not a concept and cannot be defined. 


The moral code talks about things like this. Here we have two types of static depictions, one social and one intellectual, one religious and one philosophical. It's usually a no brainer to pick which one should prevail in cases where they conflict, but in this case we are talking about depictions of DQ and so its just a matter of worse and worser. In both cases, the danger has always been that the static patterns will be mistaken for the felt, lived reality that they refer to. 


So, sure. Let the drunks have their 12-step programs. Let the former theist grow into philosophers. But the MOQ is a philosophy that knows it has not captured God in a bottle. The MOQ says, in fact, that it is immoral to do so. The code of art says, basically, that it is evil to suppress evolution or promote regression or put the higher levels in the service of the lower ones. 


That's the sense in which the MOQ is anti-theistic. It's not against religion if it stops people from drinking themselves to death. But then again, that's not really religion is it? It's fine out in the world if it helps socially pattern-dominated people catch of glimpse of the light behind the traditional forms. If German idealism or New Age philosophy helps you escape the gravitational pull of your dad's church, then we have to applaud the progress. Ayn Rand has helped many oppressed fundamentalist kids find their inner sinner and so she does provide a valuable service to the severely unhip. (We had a love affair for most of my 19th summer.) 

But let us not reduce the MOQ to these former stages of development, to these cures, to these stepping stones. That would be a regression. DQ is not your higher power. DQ is not God. DQ is not the Absolute. It is not supernatural or transcendent and no faith is required. It's the primary empirical reality, the immediate flux of life, direct everyday experience and so you already know it by direct acquaintance. Let's keep it real, eh?

  


  		 	   		  
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