[MD] MOQ is good. What is it good for?

[T-REXX Techs]

In response to Andre and David in Moq_Discuss Digest, Vol 106, Issue 7

 

Let's launch a new thread that gets to the heart of the issue I've been
having with MOQ.

 

Andre, you have replied well and fairly, and you have my respectful and
cordial attention.  (I don't presume to be someone whose respect would be
important to you, but you have it for what it's worth.)  And I really don't
think you are pompous.  Your reply struck me as deeply genuine, and you
showed me some honest vulnerability as a fellow human being.  I see you now
as a good man who can get frustrated and pissed off with other good people
sometimes.  Welcome to the common lot of man, Brother!

 

You've made two very important points that I found helpful and insightful:

1.       The MOQ isn't a living, dynamic entity.  It is a static
intellectual pattern.  It was made at a point in time by one person, in the
midst of his own unique circumstances.  But it doesn't fit mine, so I try to
bend it into something I can use, and I get chastised by some in this forum
for doing that.  (I think some of the time that's what JC is trying to do.)
Please see my explanation in my response to David below.

2.       The MOQ "points to the moon".  That makes sense, and I was trying
to use it to get there.  I didn't presume to get all the way to the moon,
but I thought I might make it to the space station if I kept working at it.
But the way it looks to me is that most of the people on the forum don't
believe in the moon.  They are saying, and the MOQ seems to be saying,
"There is no moon.  You can go there.  There's a space station.  That's
where I'm pointing, and that's as far as it goes."  Can you see why I get
frustrated trying to make it work?  (Maybe that's what makes John Carl "poke
the bear'.)  If I'm misunderstanding the MOQ, please show me.  But I don't
see how I can be mistaken.  It clearly stops at the intellectual level and
clearly says, "That's all there is."  But that's not "all there is" for me!
>From my view, the transcendent experience of faith and worship is more
Dynamic than intellectual experience, and its patterns are further advanced,
Dynamically, than intellectual ones.

 

 

David, I see that you do have a commitment to excellence in what you do.  I
honor that.  My impression from past posts was that you were meticulous to
the point of dogma in your insistence upon faithful adherence to MOQ.   The
fact is, as soon as I hit send on my last post, I thought, "Oh, crap!  I
meant to qualify that 'either/or'."  Of course, mappers and journeyers and
mutually exclusive.  Everyone here is some of both, and I doubt that one can
be exclusively either one.  All that happens is that, depending on
circumstances, a person emphasizes, or focuses attention, more on one than
the other.  Maybe you've had to concentrate on the map to keep some of us
stumble-bums from getting hopelessly lost and making problems for others who
are trying to follow the map.  So you have made a point that needed to be
made.

 

Now let's look at this:

You said:

Ron DiSanto was a member of my thesis committee, by the way, so it's funny
that you should mention him in this context. And my thesis compared Pirsig,
James and Buddha. Accusations that I don't have skin in the game or that
I've excluded religion from the picture are very far from true. Frankly, I
think it would be fair to characterize such baseless accusations as nothing
but self-serving bullshit.

 

The fact that you did your thesis in philosophy doesn't necessarily
translate to "having skin in the game" beyond passing you thesis exam, but
if you are telling me you are personally and vitally invested in these
issues, I agree to believe you.  But you haven't excluded religion???
C'mon!!  The only religion you haven't excluded is Buddhism.  You have made
it patently clear that you and Pirsig are anti-theistic.  The MOQ tolerates
religion but does not accept it as anything more than a flawed social
pattern.  You have dismissed faith in God as "garbage, low quality".
(Pirsig seems somewhat more tolerant.)

              So this is one of the key issues with the MOQ for me.  Pirsig
avers that the four levels of the MOQ embrace all of evolution and of human
experience.  Well, it deliberately (and I think arbitrarily) excludes the
most significant dimension of my human experience!  I feel like someone who
sees colors, and you see shades of grey and insist that seeing color is
"very low quality".  I agree that some "very low quality" patterns have been
of religion and in the name of religion. What's very low quality is
subversion of color vision (faith) to social institutions that screw it up,
or to bad intellectual constructs that are used to judge and abuse other
people.  But seeing color isn't a bad thing just because you don't!

              When I read ZMM, I felt a kinship with Pirsig.  He felt the
same sense of "dis-ease" in science that I did.  His philosophy of Quality
resonated deeply with me.  His idea of an expanded rationality with values
reintegrated into it inspired me to action, and I ran with it.  I wrote
essays about Quality.  I worked at philosophy with a purpose, and I arrived
at a form of rational though which was called "inspirationality".  (That was
given to me Dynamically.)  It became the mode of rationality I follow in
thinking and working and living.  It has enhanced my life, and I have shared
it with others, who have also benefitted from it.  (That's the kind of skin
I have in the game.)

              But then came the MOQ.  It's brilliant and beautiful.  But it
comes up short and says, "Your experience doesn't count.  It isn't valid,
and there's no place for it in the MOQ."  But I love and admire Pirsig.
Everything he has written persuades me that he is a good, caring person who
embraces so much that I believe in.  But the MOQ is static, as Andre says.
It is an intellectual pattern, and any attempt to update it or extend it or
expand it is forbidden.  So there it sits, a magnificent sculpture.  I can
walk around it, explores its nuances, touch it, feel inspired by it.  But
then it's time for me to get back on the road, and it doesn't come with me.

              That's why I've come to an impasse with it.  What can I do
with it?  Where can I go with it?  Of what use is it to me on the road???

              Please tell me, David, how you have used it.  What has it
done, or what do you do with it to enhance your life?  To enhance anyone
else's life?  I'm not baiting or taunting or accusing.  I really want to
know.  I so desperately want the MOQ to be right and Pirsig to be right, but
I've come to feel that they are holding me back in my life work.  I don't
want to let them go, but I may have to.

 

 

 

 

John L. McConnell

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