Wow! Thanks to everyone for submitting so many ideas for next month's
topic. We've had a great response and choosing will be challenging.
At 12:11 AM -0500 2/23/1999, Rob Stillwell wrote:
>I would like to make a suggestion that could make the voting a little more
>fair. I know there is a time constraint, but it might be better to allow
>everyone a couple of days to propose topics before voting. Otherwise, the
>first question might get more votes.
Excellent point. I hadn't really thought that through and I appreciate you
pointing it out. It seems like we've had an even distribution of votes and
new ideas, so I don't know that there has been a lot of early-suggestion
favoritism. Even so, I'm thinking now that it would be best to review all
of the idea suggestions we've had and then have people rank-order their top
choices. I'll review the results and come up with a final question that
fits in the vein of the most popular discussion topic suggestion and
announce it on Monday.
Here's what I have as people's suggestions. I hope I haven't forgotten or
done violence to anyone's ideas in coming up with this condensed listing.
Please rank your top choices among these ideas. If I don't hear anything
new from you, I'll consider your original votes to still stand.
How does one explain the MOQ in 45 minutes or less to people who have never
heard of it?
Is [the dharmakaya light] really out there or has RMP taken a good metaphor
one step too far?
[Does the MOQ support Socrates when he says], "A man who has learned about
right will be righteous."?
Who is the the better judge of a moral question, a person well-versed in
the MOQ or a person with no MOQ knowledge but slightly more experience with
the issue?
Once Dynamic Quality is identified with religious mysticism it produces an
avalanche of information as to what Dynamic Quality is. Describe this
avalanche.
How are those of us still mired in a subject-object view of the world to
wrap our minds around Pirsig's Copernican revolution in the MOQ?
After we have wrapped our minds around this transformation, What about Zen,
the Lost Ox, and such ?
What did Pirsig mean by the terms dynamic and static quality, what is the
relationship
between them, and did he posit them as the actual nature of reality or just
a more useful interpretation of reality than the subject-object split?
Is this static-dynamic split merely an epistemic convenience that we make
arbitrarily or is it an ontological reality, transcending our thoughts and
intellectual description of it?
How would Pirsig answer the debate between Chomsky, who advocated modernity
in claiming that we need morality to legitimize our actions and Foucault,
who advocated postmodernity, claiming that despite our need of it, morality
doesn't exist?
What would our world look like today if the Sophists had won the debate
over the primacy of Truth over Quality?
Final comment: Troy Becker makes the interesting suggestion that we do a
"slow reading" of Pirsig instead of our current PROGRAM format. Also, David
Buchanan's suggestion of starting with a quote from Pirsig in each question
strikes me as very a good idea. I encourage anyone who has similar ideas on
how the list should work, how we should go about choosing a topic, etc. to
send their suggestions to the steering committee <ls_steering@moq.org>. Let
us know what you think!
Thanks,
Keith
______________________________________________________________________
Keith A. Gillette <http://detling.dorm.org/gillette/>
MOQ Online - http://www.moq.org
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