Re: MD The Education System

[Matt the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat]

Ahem, (clunk, clunk), is this thing on?

Oh!  It is.

Well, (cough), it's been awhile and, while I don't have any great insights, I thought I might take a stab at some of your (Brian) Quality questions.  Mainly just to stretch and make sure I don't sprain anything.

Brain wrote:

>It seems that somewhere in between ZMM and Lila there is a jump made from
>Quality to Dynamic Quality. I accepted it when it was first presented, but
>upon looking back and seeing how the idea of DQ has evolved, something seems
>a bit off. Is all Quality Dynamic? Is it good for things to change at all?
>Since DQ is the highest order of quality, anything that changes is good, no
>matter what it is changing into or towards??

As far as I can tell there isn't a jump from Q to DQ per se.  Re-reading ZMM again at the moment has me seeing several parallels between the two books.  Some obvious, some not.

One: Quality is the same in both books.  It hasn't changed.  Pirsig's excitement and argument has, though.  The first book was the argument for Quality.  Lila was the argument for a Dynamic/static division.  As he says, "...sooner or later he was going to have to stop carping about how bad subject-object metaphysics was and say something positive for a change."

Two: if you look closely in ZMM you'll see Pirsig favoring romantic Quality over classical Quality.  It's subtle and I certainly didn't pick it up until after reading Lila and understanding more about where he was going to go with Quality.  I think the reason was that Pirsig himself favored romantic Quality, but not for any metaphysical reason as far as he could tell.  It was fairly obvious to everyone that you needed both romantic and classical.  Therefore it just got hinted at. 

In Lila it's pretty obvious that he favors Dynamic Quality.  He has to restrain himself most times to not come out and say "No one needs to be static!  Just be Dynamic!"  He knows it's not true and I think he makes a point on several occasions to make it plainly obvious to the reader that, though DQ is better, it is vitally important to have static and Dynamic.

And I think his new split, in particular, counters Rigel (in chapter 6).  Romantic Quality is what the Hippies were doing.  Pirsig likes the Hippies, he likes the rebels of the sixties.  But deep down he also knows that they weren't quite on the right track.  Pirsig wants to rock the establishment, but in a good way.  Rigel was there to hammer down the point that the Hippies, many times, didn't "rock" in a good way.  With his new Dynamic/static split Pirsig could go back to the Hippies and tell them where they had gone wrong.  Reject social and intellectual patterns.  Fine.  But leave patterns completely, don't go to biological patterns.  Go to Dynamic Quality.  Pirsig could then defend himself against Rigel and still rock the Casba.

So, Brian, to answer your questions specifically:

No, not all Quality is Dynamic.

It is good for things to change.

No, not all change is good.  The Hippie change, for instance, wasn't good.  They rocked, but had only drug addiction to latch onto.  That, of course, devolved into the coke addictions of the 70's and 80's.

So when you rock ... just make sure you're Dynamic.

Thank you, thank you very much,

Matt