To Struan and all,
Hmm. I was careless with that last post. Suppose we look at the actual statement. Pirsig says it
better than I, but I've found this depiction of "evil" to ring true with what I percieve people to refer
to when they say the word.
Here's what Pirsig actually said: (p 308, hardback).
Today we are living in an intellectual and technological paradise and a moral and socail nightmare
because the intellectual level of evolution, in its struggle to become free of teh social level, has
ignored the social level's role in keeping the biological level under control. Intellectuals have
failed to understand the ocean of biological quality that is constantly being suppressed by social
order.
Biological quality is necessary to the survival of life. But when it threatens to dominate and destroy
society, biological quality becomes evil itself, the "Great Satan" of twentiehth century Western
culture. One reason why fundamentalist Moslem cultures have vecome so fanatic in their hatred of the
West is that it has released the biological forces of evil that Islam has fought for centuries to
control.
What the Metaphysics of Quality indicates is that the twentieth century intellectual faith in man's
basic goodness as spontaneous and natural is disastrously naive.
Maggie
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