Hi All, One of the most penetrating and poignant passages from Lila is Pirsig's description of our current spiritual state as the result of following the siren song of science:
"Everyone seemed to be guided by an "objective," "scientific" view of life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved material body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge physically, and therefore no two people can ever really communicate except in the mode of ship's radio operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and thinks like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals. "Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian "virtue" ever was." (Lila, 22) In an article entitle, "Psychology: The Hard Truth about a Soft Science," the author not only supports Pirsig's view but attributes much of the cause to modern psychology, beginning with Freud. Citing that "Science deals in empiricism, in what can be observed, touched and quantified, and nothing spiritual, be it the soul, Truth or something else, qualifies," the author concludes, "Thus, psychology prefers to view man as an organic robot, a cosmic accident, one whose actions are explainable in terms of hardware (genetics) and software (conditioning or socialization." As a result, any notion of a rational morality embedded in nature as proposed in the MOQ is rejected out of hand. "If psychology's predominant school of thought is correct and there is no God, no Truth and we have no souls, then, sure, we are simply a few pounds of chemicals and water; hence, organic robots. And this would have some staggering implications. For one, morality is then mere opinion, and we can't expect opinion to govern the operation of the human "machine" any more than it influences the rotation of the Earth." I can only give you the flavor of the article here. Read In full at: http://www.americanthinker.com/2008/04/psychology_the_hard_truth_abou.html If you have ever asked yourself why the MOQ gets a cold reception by most academics, this article helps answer. Best, Platt Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
