MF,
>Phaedrus seem to be saying that by and large the Europeans valued order more
>highly than freedom the Indians the reverse.
>
>Is this an accurate portrayal ? but more importantly just what is freedom?
>How does the MoQ provide for it ? How it the same, different, than other
>philosophies? etc.
>
>in other words......
>
>What are the qualities of freedom?
Freedom doesn't mean anything, except something better than what there was
before. I think we all accept that America gave the world freedom from the
social level. But I would not say that this has anything to do with some
kind of universal moral solution. In fact it's only really freedom to those
people who have a social level to begin with (as Pirsig points out in his
analysis of inner city black culture). To countries still fighting the
battle between social and biological, intellectual freedom only allows the
biological level to take control.
FREEDOM FROM THE SOCIAL LEVEL VS THE FREEDOM OF THE SOCIAL LEVEL
Remember Rwanda, where the parliamentary system that the West promoted was
a factor in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis by Hutu militias.
In response to pressure from Western governments, the Rwandan regime
established a multi-party system and transformed itself into a coalition
government. Yet the new political parties became nothing more than masks
for ethnic groups that organised murderous militias, and the coalition
nature of the new government helped to prepare the context for the events
that led to the genocide in 1994. Evil individuals were certainly
responsible for the mass murder. But they operated within a fatally flawed
system.
Remember those pictures? Whole villages wiped out, charred bodies in mass
graves, children with their arms and legs hacked off. That's the biological
level, and it needs a social level to control it and that's something that
intellectual freedom just can't do. What Rwanda needs is freedom from the
biological level, ie a social level.
In the tribal societies of Kurdistan and Afghanistan the United States
encouraged versions of democracy in the 1990s. The security vacuums that
followed were filled by Saddam Hussein for a time in Kurdistan and by
Islamic tyranny in much of Afghanistan. So much for Huckleberry Finn. In
sub-Saharan Africa democracy has weakened institutions and services in some
states, and elections have been manipulated to restore dictatorship in
others. In Bosnia democracy legitimised the worst war crimes in Europe
since the Nazi era. And I could go on.
Consider these democracies and then consider undemocratic Singapore. Thirty
years ago, it was a mosquito-ridden bog filled with slum quarters that
frequently lacked both plumbing and electricity. Today it is a prosperous,
hi-tech, meritocratic city. Its citizens have a high standard of living, a
relatively just and effective legal system, a clean and safe environment
and education and opportunity for all. Don't liberation from illiteracy,
filth, poverty and crime count as human rights too? Morally Singapore is
dubious, but what about practically?
Singapore has the conditions now for democracy. The social institutions are
in place, the population is literate and cosmopolitan and can vote based on
informed decisions on politics and economics. Equality emerges successfully
only after other social and economic achievements.
It just isn't reasonable is to put a gun to the head of the developing
world and say: "Behave as if you had experienced the Western Enlightenment.
Behave as if 95 percent of your population were literate. Behave as if you
had a middle class and an effective police force and there were no bloody
ethnic or regional disputes ready to explode in your society."
Simply pushing for American-style freedom and equality without bothering
about the consequences, is what Pirsig calls "cost-free morality" -- you
shout about something because it sounds like the moral high ground and
everyone will think you're a nice guy. And you can say what you like
because if you're wrong it won't matter, because nobody is going to come to
_your_ house and murder _your_ family.
In countries where tribal conflict is high, where literacy is low and
institutions of government and social infrastructure are weak or
non-existent, the most pressing need is to *establish* these social
patterns, not to break them down.
The notion of freedom vs order doesn't make sense because sometimes order
IS freedom.
The more I think about it the more I wish Pirsig hadn't bothered with the
whole Indian vs European thing at all. Later on in LILA he talks of
freedom, dynamic quality and mysticism as all being the one thing, which I
agree with. But to equate freedom per se with one particular kind of
freedom, ie freedom from the social level, is dangerously misleading and it
contradicts the rest of the book. In the Zuni story the brujo is arguably
introducing more order to his society in the form of submission to white
laws. Yet Pirsig says this is dynamic and that dynamic quality is "freedom
itself". Plus it is the dynamic good of the brujo's "vague sense of
betterness", not the Indians' distrust of society, that Pirsig takes as his
primary example of dynamic vs static.
Diana
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