David B, 3wd, Horse, Bo,
I wrote
>> 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".
Bo wrote
>Dynamic quality is at the bottom, or top or surrounding, as the
>driving force behind the evolution. I don't really see this as an
>inconsistency in the MOQ.
If you look at 3wd's quotes, most of the time Pirsig talks of freedom in
itself as being a dynamic escape from whatever it is that is oppressing you
- whether its social, biological or intellectual. But with Indians freedom
is limited to escape from social order and that's what I think is
misleading.
Pirsig wrote:
>"FREEDOM" doesn't mean anything. FREEDOM'S just an escape
>from something negative. The real reason it's so hallowed is that when
>people talk about it they mean Dynamic Quality." p 220
>"What's good is FREEDOM from domination by any static pattern, P301
Note he says: "freedom from domination by ANY static pattern"
But in the Indian vs European section he's talking about freedom from a
specific static pattern, namely the social level. I think that makes it
seem as if all freedom is anything that isn't a social pattern, which is
completely wrong. Dynamic Quality seeks freedom from all restraints, not
just social restraints.
And later he does acknowledge that the social level is a kind of freedom too:
>"There are no chains more vicious that the chains of biological necessity
>into
>which every child is born. Society exists primarily to FREE people from these
>biological chains." 307
"Primitive tribes such as the American Indians have no record of sweetness
and cooperation with other tribes. They ambushed them, tortured them,
dashed their children's brains out on rocks. If man is basically good, then
maybe it is man's basic goodness which invented social institutions to
repress this kind of biological savagery in the first place." p360
If you take the Indian vs European thing as a metaphor then maybe it's
okay. But if the American way is freedom and freedom is morality then it
has to be taken as some kind of moral guideline. Behave like Huckleberry
Finn and then you will be more moral than the Tom Sawyers of the world. Be
anti-authority like an American Indian and then you will be more moral than
anyone else.
The enemy of freedom is oppression, not order. One person's freedom is
another's oppression and often the solution to that is some kind of order,
eg a non-smoking area in a restaurant. That's an increase in order and an
increase in freedom at the same time. I don't think it makes sense to talk
about freedom and order as if they were opposites. The opposite of order is
disorder, but disorder isn't the same as freedom, disorder can be one of
the most oppressive states of all.
Maybe the reason social rules take such a beating is because it's easier to
see them than it is to see biological and intellectual rules. Social
restraints are often written down in the form of laws and procedures, or
even books of ettiquette, and we have institutions to enforce these rules,
so it's all out in the open. We don't have an institute to enforce, say,
the biological laws that govern our breathing or our hearts beating or our
stomachs digesting food, but that doesn't make them any less rigid. The
intellectual level has its own repressive rules as well, most notably the
rules of objectivity and rationality which have brought freedom from social
restraints but has created prisons of their own at the same time. Horse has
pointed out there are many kinds of limitations acting on us, internal and
external. The whole subject is just so much more vastly complex than simply
the presence or absence of social rules.
When the brujo led his tribe through a period of change, he took them from
one state of order to another BETTER state of order. He didn't just say,
hey authority sucks man, let's, like, not have any order. If you take the
brujo story as being the core of the MOQ then you can see dynamic
quality/freedom is just *betterness* -- freedom from restraints of any
level regardless of whether these restraints are explicit or implicit, and
I think this is what Pirsig intends and I think if we want to discuss
freedom the brujo story should be our starting point. If you take the
Indian story as the core then dynamic quality becomes specifically freedom
from complex social rules, and that's a weak and misleading subset of the
real thing.
Diana
------- End of forwarded message -------
MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Sat Aug 17 2002 - 16:03:20 BST