Bodvar Skutvik (skutvik@online.no)
Mon, 23 Feb 1998 19:39:28 +0100
On Friday 20 February Lawrie Douglas wrote:
> Sorry, I know this post is a bit late and that the discussion of
> ethics expired about three weeks ago . . . I fell a bit behind then
> - you know how it is, miss a few days and suddenly you've got thirty
> or forty very dense little essays to get through . . . So forgive me
> if this point was actually made before . . . although, judging by
> lots of the comments I keep reading, I doubt it was.
Lawrie!
Being just as much behind as you are, I may well linger a bit longer
on the morals/ethics issue. First. The immorality of a lower level
"devouring" a higher one has been contested by several members. Donny
Palmgren followed up by Maggie Hettinger and now you. You write:
> It strikes me that it is silly to say that for a lower level to
> overrule a higher is always IMMORAL; morality is an INTELLECTUAL
> concept. ...
A conditional "yes", but allow me a little lecturing. I have the
sinking feeling that you regard the Intellect of MOQ as identical to
the Mind of SOM. From the SOM point of view we have an objective
amoral material world; an amoral animal kingdom and then a mysterious
top layer of conscious humans. What is good - morality - is just in
the minds of us demigods. This is the impossible 'cul-de-sac'
that Western philosophy has been stuck with --most obvious since
Kant.
I have repeatedly admonished that it is the farewell with
"consciousness" in this SOM sense that must be grasped before the
quality idea is understood. The Intellectual level is not the ability
to think. It is thinking all right, but only thinking as determined by
our social condition! This top moral level has since gone its own way
and strives to act as free of its social origin, but it's there.
According to the MOQ humans are aggregates of all evolutionary planes
and stepping down from Intellect is not leaving mind or thinking, but
it is thinking purely collective values, we may call it EMOTIONS.
Another notch down and we are "thinking" bodily SENSATIONS. Even the
Inorganic level is not outside the moral universe. This is the
enormity of the MOQ that makes it so exasperating.
Intellectual Patterns of Value (InPoV) is not SOM's consciousness (or
mind), but the other way round: SOM is the Intellect of MOQ! In other
words: the quality idea is the first Dynamic effort to free itself
from the rigidity of the highest static level. Pirsig does not
explicitly say so, but I find it a natural extension of his teachings.
Finally you write:
>.... Certainly, in
> individual cases, sometimes things will go backwards, and a lower
> level will triumph over a higher. But this never holds for good.
> Life cannot but get ever more structured. We could therefore simply
> talk about the story of existence (any fans of Vico out there? He's
> one of my favourites, and fits in with Pirsig very well. One of his
> big ideas is the Ideal Eternal History - there is one big story of
> life, things moving from anarchy to order, but also from dynamism to
> inertia) and say this is the way things are. There's no need to
> worry that progress might not occur, and no need to extend
> intellectual concepts, which only have any meaning when applied to
> the actions performed by intellectual beings, where they don't
> apply.
No objections. Things do not always follow a smooth path,
evolutionary attempts do often slip back, but in that case the lower
level is not "triumphing"; it is the safe ratchet lock that keeps it
from slipping all the way down. Your example of a microorganism
wiping out humankind is not possible, but a bacterium killing one
human being is not a lower level's triumph over a higher one:
Shakespeare is as much biology as the bug. A true example of the
moral struggle between two evolutionary levels is an ordered Society
succumbing to Biological "jungle law" or a Democracy's intellectual
freedom being overwhelmed by social common causes. (like Germany's
budding democracy was by Nazism in the twenties). The most convincing
aspect of the MOQ is its ability to explain the riddles of SOM -
most notably the one which is called "Evil".
I do not know Vico, but he sounds most qualitylike.
Do you feel I have omitted all your points Lawrie? For example the
one about bacteria fulfilling an important role? It is so obvious
that I did not care to affirm it and has no bearing on the quality
level struggle aspect. I sense a familiarity with Ken Clark here, he
wants to pull a Gaia context over the Quality one (humans as a bug of
the earth that is better exterminated) Even so the Quality holds.
Thanks for your interesting piece anyway.
Bo
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.0b3 on Thu May 13 1999 - 16:42:48 CEST