From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sun May 25 2003 - 14:17:53 BST
Hi Steve,
> I've been considering making it a bit of a summer project to look into the
> MOQ from a child development point of view. I usually read discussion and
> Pirsig wrote mostly about the evolution of the levels in history and
> debating dating of emergence, but looking at the emergence of the levels in
> the experience of a child may be just as enlightening.
>
> My hypothesis is that a child should progress through the MOQ levels as it
> matures in the same order that the levels evolved.
>
> Within this same proposed project, I want to also compare Kolberg's
> hierarchy of moral development (Pre-conventional, conventional,
> post-conventional levels) with the MOQ levels.
>
> Has anyone already looked into the MOQ from a child development point of
> view that I could read in the archives? Does anyone think that this sounds
> like an especially good or bad project? Platt, I remember an example with a
> baby in Lila, do you know of any other instances where Pirsig touches on
> this idea?
I don't recall any places where Pirsig talks about child development other
than what he wrote Chapter 7. Coincidentally I was studying that passage
when your question came in. It seems to me that the biological pattern of
a human baby (or any animal for that matter) gets as close to pure
experience (and thus Quality) as anything we can imagine. This presumes
that all entities, which are static patterns in the MoQ, possess the inner
capability to experience and thus be cognizant of Quality, there being no
separation between experience/Quality. Only humans when they develop as
Pirsig describes in Chap. 7 start to make distinctions and begin "seeing"
objects, derived from and a step away from undifferentiated primary
experience/Quality. So I look at my cat and conclude he experiences
Quality like a newborn baby, pure and unadulterated by social or
intellectual patterns. Like a baby, my cat understands the Q world
perfectly, i.e., some things are better than others.
In other places, Pirsig talks about how Indian children brought up
'naturally' are ill-equipped to adjust to the white man's urban life, and
how Victorian children brought up under the philosophy of 'spare the rod
and spoil the child' fared better when social codes were broken by the
60's hippies. A particularly poignant passage about children occurs in
Chap. 26:
"A child in a money-society will draw pictures of coins that are larger
than a child in a primitive culture. Moreover the money-society children
overestimate the size of a coin in proportion to the value of the coin.
Poor children will overestimate more than rich ones."(26)
So socialization of children begins at an early age, adding social
patterns to the bio-patterns that comprise the object we call a human
being. Then, later in school come the intellectual patterns of logic,
measurement (grades) and scientific 'objectivity.' Seems human development
follows the levels fairly closely, some 'emerging' from within but most
imposed from without, then internalized..
But, I could be wrong.
Platt
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