>From chapter 9 of LILA:
"...Since this whole metaphysics had started with an attempt to explain Indian
mysticism Phaedrus finally abandoned his classic-romantic split as a choice for
a primary division of the MOQ. The division he finally settled on was one he
didn't really choose in any deliberate way. It was more as if it chose him.
He'd been reading Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture without any particular
search in mind, when a relatively minor anecdote stopped him. It stayed with
him for weeks. He couldn't get it out of his mind. The anecdote was a
case-history in which there was a conflict of morality. It concerned a Pueblo
Indian who lived in Zuni, New Mexico, in the nineteenth century. Like a Zen
koan (which also originally meant 'case-history') the anecdote didn't have any
single right answer but rather a number of possible meanings that kept drawing
Phaedrus deeper and deeper into the moral situation that was involved.”
>From the Wikipedia article on Ruth Benedict:
"Benedict's 'Patterns of Culture' (1934) was translated into fourteen languages
and was published in many editions as standard reading for anthropology courses
in American universities for years.The essential idea in Patterns of Culture
is, according to the foreword by Margaret Mead, "her view of human cultures as
'personality writ large.'" Each culture, Benedict explains, chooses from "the
great arc of human potentialities" only a few characteristics which become the
leading personality traits of the persons living in that culture. These traits
comprise an interdependent constellation of aesthetics and values in each
culture which together add up to a unique gestalt. For example she described
the emphasis on restraint in Pueblo cultures of the American southwest, and the
emphasis on abandon in the Native American cultures of the Great Plains. She
used the Nietzschean opposites of "Apollonian" and "Dionysian" as the stimulus
for her thought about these Native American cultures. She describes how in
ancient Greece, the worshipers of Apollo emphasized order and calm in their
celebrations. In contrast, the worshipers of Dionysus, the god of wine,
emphasized wildness, abandon, letting go. And so it was among Native Americans.
She described in detail the contrasts between rituals, beliefs, personal
preferences amongst people of diverse cultures to show how each culture had a
"personality" that was encouraged in each individual."
Pirsig later in chapter 9 of LILA:
“Sometimes you can see your own society's issues more clearly when they are put
in an exotic context like that of the brujo in Zuni. That is a huge reward from
the study of anthropology. As Phaedrus thought about this context again and
again it became apparent there were two kinds of good and evil involved.” [The
two kinds are static and Dynamic, of course.]
“To cling to Dynamic Quality alone apart from any static patterns is to cling
to chaos. He saw that much can be learned about Dynamic Quality by studying
what it is not rather than futilely trying to define what it is. Static quality
patterns are dead when they are exclusive, when they demand blind obedience and
suppress Dynamic change. But static patterns, nevertheless, provide a necessary
stabilizing force to protect Dynamic progress from degeneration. Although
Dynamic Quality, the Quality of freedom, creates this world in which we live,
these patterns of static quality, the quality of order, preserve our world.
Neither static nor Dynamic Quality can survive without the other."
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