x-man,
You want to pose as a moralist? That's amusing. Here's a quote you missed:
"There are so many kinds of problem people like Rigel around, he thought, but
the ones who go posing as moralists are the worst. Cost-free morals. Full of
great ways for others to improve without any expense to themselves. There's an
ego thing in there, too. They use the morals to make someone else look inferior
and that way look better themselves. It doesn't matter what the moral code is -
religious morals, political morals, racist morals, capitalist morals, feminist
morals, hippie morals - they're all the same. The moral codes change but the
meanness and the egotism stay the same."
Marsha
Woman of Mars,
Pirsig suggests we all are moralists. You like to pose as if you are not. That
is more amusing. Here is another quote you have missed:
"That may have been why Rigel was so angry back in Kingston. He thought Lila
was
immoral because she'd broken up a family and destroyed a man's position in the
social community - a biological pattern of quality, sex, had destroyed a social
pattern of quality, a family and a job. What made Rigel mad was that into this
scene come intellectuals like Phaedrus who say it's unintelligent to repress
biological drives. You must decide these matters on the basis of reason, not
on the basis of social codes.
But if Rigel identified Phaedrus with this intellect-vs.-society code and the
social upheavals it has produced, he certainly picked on the wrong person. The
Metaphysics of Quality uproots the intellectual source of this confusion"
The source of the confusion and the problem are partially due to the "hippie"
morals you and others express,
that thinking itself is evil and partly due to the way you take a kind of
objectivist viewpoint on self and value
by telling everone that their essential self is a mirage a social convention,
no two people can ever really communicate
because no two people can ever share the same experience because of personal
history, unable to judge oneanother
because metaphysically it is impossible to do so, they could invent morals to
live by but these are just artificial inventions l
ike the self. Metaphysically speaking they have no goals. Another prison.
But the metaphysics of quality uproots the source of the confusion:
"What's at issue here isn't just a clash of society and biology but a clash of
two entirely different codes of morals in which society is the middle term. You
have a society-vs.-biology code of morals and you have an intellect-vs.-society
code of morals. It wasn't Lila Rigel was attacking, it was this
intellect-vs.-society
code of morals.
In the battle of society against biology, the new twentieth-century
intellectuals have
taken biology's side. Society can handle biology alone by means of prisons and
guns and
police and the military. But when the intellectuals in control of society take
biology's
side against society then society is caught in a cross-fire from which it has
no protection."
"this is a war in which intellect, to end the paralysis of society, has to
know whose side it is on, and support that side, never undercut it."
"Phaedrus thought the reason this movement has been so hard to understand is
that
'understanding' itself, static intellect, was its enemy."
"the Hippies undermined both static and intellectual patterns. Nothing better
has been introduced to replace them. The result has been a drop in both social
and intellectual quality."
On morals:
"There aren't any there. They are all in your head. They exist only in your
imagination."
"the world is a completely
purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything. Nothing is right
and nothing is wrong. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy, nothing
morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, with murder, with genocide."
They are all just social conventions right Marsha? The result is a drop in both
social
and intellectual quality.
Citing Buddhism as supporting this undermining of social and intelectual values
either
calls into question the actual tenants of Buddhism and its compatability with
MoQ
or it calls into question the interpretation of either one or the other.
Now THAT is interesting AND a rather good philosophical discussion.
..
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