[MD] Finite (SQ) and Infinite (DQ) Metaphysics

[david buchanan]

Arlo quoted Carse's Finite and Infinite Games:
"It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of culture. Whoever merely follows the script, merely repeating the past, is culturally impoverished. There are variations in the quality of deviation; not all divergence from the past is culturally significant. Any attempt to vary from the past in such a way as to cut the past off, causing it to be forgotten, has little cultural importance. Greater significance attaches to those variations that bring the tradition into view in a new way, allowing the familiar to be seen as unfamiliar, as requiring a new appraisal of all that we have been- and therefore all that we are. Cultural deviation does not return us to the past, but continues what was begun but not finished in the past... Properly speaking, a culture does not have a tradition; it is a tradition."


dmb says:
Yes, I think this passage expresses the importance of the contrarians, as Pirsig calls them. Pirsig adds some insights into the difference between evolutionary deviation and degenerate deviance. The Zuni Brujo can be distinguished from the pimps and prostitutes even though they are both transgressors in some sense and both act in opposition to social level static quality. Pirsig's work is the work of a contrarian. Big time. And yet he tells us explicitly that he's dredging up silted old channels and blazing a new  trail up the same old mountain that every other seeker climbed. As radical as the MOQ is, it's still profoundly continuous with the past, even with the ancients. And he makes a case that this is just how cultural evolution works: as a continuous building process.