Platt and all interested thinkers: Platt asked me (David B) if I could point him to the reference used in claiming the pragmatic and evolutionary moral value of leaders like Buddha, Jesus, Abe Lincoln, Ghandi and Martin Luther King. I dont have page numbers, but the following Lila exerpts come from http://www.enteleky.com/lila6.html . "If you look at the lives of some of the great moral figures of history, Dhrist, Lincoln, Gandi. You will see that that is what they were really involved in. The cleansing of the world thru the absorbtion of Karmic garbage. They didn't pass it on." Pirsig does not mention MLK in this passage and I really don't know if he is mentioned elsewhere or not. However, I happen to know that MLK was inspired by Ghandi and his tactic of non-violent resistance and that both men were big fans of Thoreau's "Civil Disobedience" in particular and Transcendentalism in general. Further, on a pragmatic level their aims and achievements were very similar. They both increased human freedom. ON THE KARMA DUMP VS. THE SAINTLY ABSORBTION Pirsig says... "From an evolutionary point of view it is really a backward step, and therefore immoral. You invent a devil group, Jews, or blacks or whites, or capitalists or communists, it doesn't matter, and say that group is responsable for all your suffering and then hate it and try to destroy it." Bob Wallace out there? "I say kill all the Karma dumpers! Its their fault! I hate them all!" (irony intended) "The idea that satisfaction alone is the test of anything is very dangerous according to the MOQ. There are different kinds of satisfaction and some of them are moral nightmares. The holocaust produced satisfaction among the Nazis, that was quality for them. They considered it to be practical. But it was a quality dictated by low level static social and biological patterns whose averall purpose was to retard the evolution of truth and dynamic quality." I don't mean to just throw quotes around without any comment or explaination, but the meaning is very obvious, isn't it? As to the issue of Pirsig's stance in the battle between communism and capitalism, I think he is neither. He says "...you can see them (free enterprisers) struggling to put it into word but they don't have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do." I think he's saying that both economic systems suffer from the same error. They are both grounded in the same scientific objectivity. They are both materialistic and blind to the kind of value that would make them acceptable. Both sides in the cold war are amoral in this sense. They both worship material wealth and military might nearly to the exclusion of everything else. They both understand the price of everything and the value of nothing. Pirsig's arguments against amoral scientific objectivity also can be seen as arguments against the economic theories that it produced. In both fields, the social level mediation has been ignored or by-passed in the name of this objectivity and they are extremely unfriendly to social values as a result. We can see the results of such cold calculations in the world and looks pretty ugly. Ever notice how Hitler's concentration camps, Stalin's Gulag and the West's public schools are all based on the factory model. Murder, oppression and education are all based on efficient production? David B. MOQ Online Homepage - http://www.moq.org Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/ Unsubscribe - http://www.moq.org/md/index.html MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
