From: Wim Nusselder (wim.nusselder@antenna.nl)
Date: Tue Jan 28 2003 - 08:10:03 GMT
Dear Mari,
I feel a bit misunderstood in your 21 Jan 2003 10:13:14 -0500 e-mail.
You wrote:
'somewhere in [my quote from my 9 Feb 2002 19:56:28 +0100 e-mail] it appears
to me that what you are saying drifts away from the point i was attempting
to make when i said: "As agreement becomes wider
spread the ^social pattern of value^ becomes defined by agreement and hence
the social level virtually comes into it's own.'
That's only to be expected. It was after all a quote from an earlier e-mail
with references to a different context than the point you were making.
Especially the 'win/lose interactions' referred to a point Roger and I were
discussing then (he searching always for 'win/win interactions' as an
indication of progress).
I do NOT 'like the idea that the social level and intellectual level are
hardly distinguishable'. I think that is ONLY the case under specific
circumstances: 'Without competing social patterns of values'. The point
where 'things fall apart' for you is the point where I am starting to
explain this condition: why the intellectual level needs competing social
patterns of value (to be distinguishable from the social level). Just like
the social level needs competing biological patterns of value to be
distinguishable from the biological level.
You may have to look up the whole original e-mail of 9 Feb 2002 (or even the
whole discussion with Roger) to fully understand. And even then you may well
disagree (as others do).
In the last part of your e-mail you answer my questions, but I am not sure
you fully understand them, because you are taking them out of their context.
The key question was 'WHY SHOULD WE AGREE to "elevate DQ into practical
action"?'
Agreeing about some plan to practice DQ would turn it into static quality,
but probably you meant that we should draw practical consequences from the
MoQ (rather than form DQ).
Propagating the MoQ would be a form of practical action we could agree on
and carry out despite physical distance, that's true. I'm not at all sure
that such collective action is more effective in 'spreading the news' than
individual actions like writing a book or maintaining a website, however.
Apart from practical action somehow related with the MoQ, there will always
stay a need for discussion creating, maintaining and expressing some measure
of agreement about which version to propagate (not too much; the MoQ should
stay dynamic!).
I don't think there is one proper way of 'applying the MoQ' -which is not
the same as propagating it- on which we could agree and in which we could
co-operate. The MoQ is a metaphysics, a set of answers to basic questions
about how we know, what we can know and how we can know what to do. Even if
the MoQ would found a way to scientifically determine relative morality of
different courses of action (which it doesn't), there would still be a lot
of ethics to be produced on top of the metaphysics, before we would know
'what to do' in all situations. But (as Pirsig writes in chapter 17 of
'Lila':) 'you can't really say whether a specific change is evolutionary at
the time it occurs', let alone when planning a course of action. Unless we
develop a better version of the MoQ (than Pirsig provided), we will have to
try different practical actions and let history show which was the best.
With friendly greetings,
Wim
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