Arlo said to John
...by what rationale do you advocate "freedom" to do "whatever you want" for
the intellectual and social levels but not the biological level? Does "freedom"
only pertain to social and intellectual activity? Why not biological?
..."Anti-intellectualism" is never good.
John replied:
"The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral revolution against both
society and intellectuality." "Againt intellectuality" is the same as
"anti-intellectual" and according to Pirsig, that WAS the moral movement so I
cannot but conclude that your statement is not in the interest of the MoQ but
your own position as an intellectual.
dmb says:
The hippie example does not help John's case.
"The great intellectual revolution of the first half of the 20th century, the
dream of a ‘Great Society’ made humane by man’s intellect, was killed, hoist on
its own petard of freedom from social constraint."
"Phaedrus thought that Hippie revolution could have been almost as much an
advance over the intellectual twenties as the twenties had been over the social
1890s, but his analysis showed that this ‘Dynamic’ 60’s revolution made a
disastrous mistake that destroyed it before it really got started. The Hippie
rejection of social and intellectual patterns left just two directions to go:
toward biological quality & toward Dynamic Quality. The revolutionaries of the
60’s thoughts that since both are anti-social, and since both are
anti-intellectual, why then they must be the same. That was the mistake.
American writing on Zen during this period showed the same confusion. Zen was
often thought to be a sort of innocent 'anything goes.' If you did anything you
pleased, without regard for social restraint, as the exact moment you pleased
to do it, that would express your Buddhas-nature."
"…but the MOQ seemed to clear it up. When biological quality and Dynamic
Quality are confused the result isn't an increase in Dynamic Quality. It's an
extremely destructive form of degeneracy of the sort seen in the Manson
murders, the Jonestown madness, and the increase of crime and drug addiction
throughout the country. In the early 70’s, as people began to see this, they
dropped away from the movement and the Hippie revolution, like the intellectual
revolution of the 20’s, became a moral rebellion that failed."
"Today. it seemed to Phaedrus, the overall picture is one of moral movements
gone bankrupt. Just as the intellectual revolution undermined social patterns,
the Hippies undermined both static [sic] and intellectual patterns. Nothing
better has been introduced to replace them. The result has been a drop in both
social and intellectual quality. ..The end of the 20th century in America seems
to be an intellectual, social, and economic rust-belt, a whole society that has
given up on Dynamic improvement and is slowly trying to slip back to
Victorianism, the last static ratchet-latch."
Obviously, Pirsig is explaining where the hippies went wrong so that we can
avoid the same mistake. Just as he said about John and Silvia and the millions
like them, running away from technology (and science and rationality) is not
the answer. The answer is to expand rationality to include the DQ that those
hippies were looking for. This is the lesson that anti-intellectual types like
John really need to learn. As Pirsig says, this is a "disastrous mistake" and
"an extremely destructive form of degeneracy".
Peace, Man. Be groovy.
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