Hi Clarke, Glenn, Jonathan, Roger, Everyone:
The threads of the last month or so on Evolution, God and Socialism
present a case study in Pirsig's observation about how we experience
the world. To quote from Lila, Chapter 8:
*Phaedrus remembered reading about an experiment with special
glasses that made users see everything upside down and backward.
Soon their minds adjusted and they began to see the world *normally*
again. After a few weeks, when the glasses were removed, the
subjects again saw everything upside down and had to relearn the
vision they had taken for granted before.
*The same is true of subjects and objects. The culture in which we live
hands us a set of intellectual glasses to interpret experience with, and
the concept of the primacy of subjects and objects is built right into
these glasses. If someone sees things through a somewhat different
set of glasses or, God help him, takes his glasses off, the natural
tendency of those who still have their glasses on is to regard his
statements as somewhat weird, if not actually crazy.*
Clarke expressed a similar thought in a different context when he wrote:
*I certainly cannot claim the intellectual arrogance to believe that I am
capable of completely transcending the belief system in which I was
reared. It think all of us in the current left vs. right discussions could
rightly be accused of a healthy dose of cultural relativism.*
That we all interpret the MOQ in a way that fits with our acculturation
became startlingly evident in the recent Evolution discussion where for
me and Glenn it's clear that Pirsig rejects the Darwinian explanation of
evolution whereas for Jonathan and Roger it is equally clear that he
doesn�t. A review of posts on Socialism shows how we�ve adjusted the
MOQ to support our differing opinions. For the God posts, likewise.
Not that this observation comes as any great insight. Philosophy has
always been bent to serve agendas. But the MOQ is especially
vulnerable because Pirsig puts Quality beyond definition, thus
providing an open invitation for everyone to see in the MOQ what he
wants to see.
The devastating paradox that makes the MOQ so susceptible to varying
interpretations is that we all know what quality is, but few agree on
what it is. A new rap song that knocked the socks off my teenage
granddaughter so that *the Dynamic Quality all around her shone
through* left me cold while my new CD of *Rachmaninov Plays
Rachmaninov* drove her from the room.
More examples are not hard to come by. Some see government as a
low quality necessity to enforce contracts and punish criminals while
others look to it to as a high quality means to redistribute wealth in the
name of equality and basic fairness. Some regard compassion as the
highest form of social quality while others see it laying fertile ground for
low quality dependency. Some see God as a low quality superstition
created by man to provide solace in an uncaring universe while others
view God as a being of such high quality that worship is the only
appropriate response to his being.
A myriad of differing views on what constitutes quality threatens to
undermine the MOQ to the extent that its wide acceptance will be
almost impossible to achieve. After participating on this site since its
inception several years ago, I have reluctantly come to that conclusion
although I�m sure others more perceptive than me came to that
conclusion many months ago if indeed not on their first reading of Lila.
Simply put, the MOQ cannot be used successfully as a platform to
change the world.
However, far from being in despair, I find the MOQ to be the most
interesting philosophy I've ever encountered and a marvelous guide to
making personal decisions. I believe in its basic assumptions and
regard its explanations as valid. While my ideas of quality may differ
from everyone's, I�m not deterred because counting the number who
agree or disagree can never can be the ultimate arbiter of truth. For
that, like the brujo, we are alone.
Platt
MOQ.ORG - http://www.moq.org
Mail Archive - http://alt.venus.co.uk/hypermail/moq_discuss/
MD Queries - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To unsubscribe from moq_discuss follow the instructions at:
http://www.moq.org/md/subscribe.html
