[Platt] It figures. [Arlo] What? That Arlo likes art?
[Platt] But, I never quite figured out what Pirsig meant by a moral revolution in specific terms. Any different from Christian compassion and love thy neighbor? Or, did he mean recognition and acceptance of the MOQ? Or more street performances, as you seem to suggest? [Arlo] Whoa, I'm not suggesting Pirsig's view was that a moral revolution equates to simply more street performers. [Platt] By a moral revolution I thought he meant a broader understanding of the role social values played in keeping biological values like terrorism at bay. But, I could be wrong. [Arlo] Ah, you mean like the Victorians and neoconservatives. I doubt that's what Pirsig had in mind. Otherwise, he'd talk about the "drift backwards to Victorianism" as a moral revolution. Which he doesn't. We can start where Pirsig starts (with the hippies in LILA). "The Hippies have been interpreted as frivolous spoiled children, and the period following their departure as a "return to values," whatever that means. The Metaphysics of Quality, however, says that's backward: the Hippie revolution was the moral movement. The present period is the collapse of values. The Hippie revolution of the eighties was a moral revolution against both society and intellectuality." Why was it moral? "Phaedrus thought that this 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" sixties 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 and toward Dynamic Quality. The revolutionaries of the sixties thought that since both are anti-social, and since both are anti-intellectual, why then they must both be the same. That was the mistake." "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 seventies, as people began to see this, they dropped away from the movement, and the Hippie revolution, like the intellectual revolution of the twenties, became a moral rebellion that failed." The Hippies rejected both intellectual and social patterns, but confused biological with Dynamic Quality. That's the place to start. But I don't think tossing in a few lutes and drums would be a bad thing. moq_discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
