From: Platt Holden (pholden@sc.rr.com)
Date: Sat May 08 2004 - 17:18:11 BST
Hi Mark H,
Generally your brief description of the MOQ appears correct except for
your "secondary moral hierarchy" at the social level.
> I have no immediate textual support for this (maybe someone can help
> me here), but I believe the Social level of morality also has a
> secondary moral hierarchy, according to Pirsig Thus, it is SI for a
> family to destroy it's city, or for a city to attack its state, a
> state its nation, a nation the world?
I can find no textual support either for your conclusion. But, I do find
support for the notion that social patterns are more moral that allow
individuals freedom to respond DQ. From Chapter 17 of Lila:
"That's what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured
out. From a static point of view socialism is more moral than capitalism.
It's a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually guided society,
not just a society that is guided by mindless traditions. That's what
gives socialism its drive. But what the socialists left out and what has
all but killed their whole undertaking is an absence of a concept of
indefinite Dynamic Quality. You go to any socialist city and it's always a
dull place because there's little Dynamic Quality."
"The Metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary. A free market is a
Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in other words
what people valve, can never be contained by any intellectual formula.
What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The market is always
changing and the direction of that change can never be predetermined."
"The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody richer-by
preventing static economic patterns from setting in and stagnating
economic growth. That is the reason the major capitalist economies of the
world have done so much better since World War II than the major socialist
economies. It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more
moral than socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite.
They are less moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise
system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and
objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the
buying and selling of things. They closed it because the metaphysical
structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists."
I don't think it's too much of a stretch to apply the same reasoning to
any social pattern whether family, business, church, state or nation. The
only exception that immediately comes to mind is the military where order
of necessity restricts the freedom of individuals that in other social
arrangements can be allowed, and in an ideal world, encouraged.
What do you think?
Best,
Platt
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