Hi MOQ Foci.
Inspired by the many good essays delivered up to now I would have
liked to pick my own favourite LILA passage, but find it hard to
choose between the story and the philosophical sections, so - to
avoid using Todd's method of throwing the book in the air and
letting gravity decide - I elect one chapter which IMO is a mix
between the two, namely number 26 and from it the "insanity"
passage. On page 334 in the Bodley Head edition it says:
(LILA)
That includes the considerations of people like Lila. This whole
business of insanity is an enormous important philosophical
subject that has been ignored - mainly, he supposed, because of
metaphysical limitations. In addition to the branches of
philosophy - ethics, ontology and so on - the MOQ provides a
foundation for a new one: the philosophy of insanity. As long as
you're stuck with the old conventions, insanity is going to be a
"misunderstanding of the object by the subject". The object is
real, the subject is mistaken. the only problem is how to change
the subject's mind back to a correct comprehension of objective
reality."
Pirsig speaks of the contrarians of the Plains Indians who rode
facing backwards and generally did everything the opposite way.
Perhaps we of the LS/MF/MD are "contrarians" of our culture. I am
to a degree, being dead tired of the predictable opinions aired
everywhere and jumps with joy each time I see a surprising input.
John Beasley says that Pirsig created his MOQ to meet his own
demands (hopefully he sees the backlash effect here?). Let that be
as it may, the Metaphysics of Quality is revolutionary in every
aspect, but in its treatment of insanity it really shows how different
it is from the conventional wisdom.
Throughout our discussion we have pointed to many subject-object
"platyi", but in my opinion SOM has its hardest time when one
start to analyze abnormal human behaviour. I guess only the
psychiatrists still believe in the theories what causes "illness of the
mind". I am no expert in this field - but as far as I know all
creatures above the reptilian realm can be brought to nervous
breakdown if confronted with a sufficient confusing environment.
There are also a lot of phobias and irrational notions, but this isn't
insanity in the Lila Blewitt sense. It is the subject's explanation of
reality that we call craziness.
Long before Lila - even before ZMM - I had this suspicions
regarding psychiatry. Some of it stemmed from my reading of the
French multihistorician Michel Foucault's work "Madness and
Civilization" in which he shows how culturally dependent our
attitude regarding abnormality is. And yet, how deep Focault saw
even he was SOM-steeped and struggled like "mad" to come to
grips with the problem. He obviously didn't fall in the "be kind and
nobody will go mad" trap, but sees that all cultures have their
special form of madness and that something fundamental is
connected with abnormality. I would have liked to go deeper into
his work, for instance the notion that the Medieval times were so
abnormal in themselves that the mad weren't very noticed - merely
called "fools" and put on boats to sail the channels of Europe, but
must limit myself to one quotation that is uncannily like the one
from LILA about the subject misunderstanding reality. Foucault
says - quoting one De la Rive:
External objects do not produce upon the mind of a sufferer
the same impression as upon the mind of a healthy man; these
impressions are weak, and the sufferer rarely heeds them; his
mind is almost entirely absorbed by the action of the ideas
produced by the deranged state of his brain."
This is the eighteenth century and still what we deem a brutal view,
and yet it is the start of the modern humane "illness" model which
is prevalent today when every effort is made to liken mental illness
to a somatic one. It's a matter of bad luck if you are to contract a
mental disease in the same way as you may have the bad luck of
inhaling a virus. An aside here. My wife works as a librarian at a
mental hospital and I have had glimpses into the archives and seen
the vast written material on the illness model of abnormality. It's
stupendous.
Of course, there are theories and countertheories: a phony show of
disagreement, but it merely fluctuates within the same paradigm.
Before LILA I had no means to understand my feeling of
uneasiness when confronted with this enormous theoretical edifice
and I still shudder when contemplating the possibility of it
crumbling. Anyway, the MOQ view of insanity model was an eye-
opener for to me and the part of LILA that made me shout (after
looking carefully around) "yes"!
We know its outline: The static value levels and their respective
"immune systems" much like the biological one, of which the
intellectual one looks for dangerous non-self ideas entering its
perimeter .
(LILA)
"Obviously no culture wants its legal patterns violated and when
they are, an immune system takes over in ways that are
analogous to a biological immune system. The deviant dangerous
source of illegal cultural patterns is first identified, then
isolated and finally destroyed as a cultural entity. that's
what mental hospitals are partly for. And also heresy trials.
They protect the culture from foreign ideas that if allowed to
grow unchecked would destroy the culture itself".
At this point I must tell about the Austrian writer Robert Musil and
his work "Mann Ohne Eigenschaften" (The Man without Qualities)
1930, in which there is a scene where a party is being shown
around in a lunatic bin and passes from one section worse than the
previous. Somehow they grows used to the naked feelings and
honesty of the insane so when entering a room with silent people
they think it's the lost cases, but it proves to be visitors. That is
what sanity is: tranquil, well behaved automatons saying the
expected things.
Pirsig's assertion is that each level strives to control the values of
the level below, for instance does society want the biological
impulses to be brought under its own umbrella: sex to be
institutionalized in matrimony, food to be shared at meals along
with millions other written or unwritten laws. The "immune system"
of an actual modern day society: a country - penal law and its
enforcement - works to keep that society healthy: keep biological
impulses at bay, but also social growths from spreading too far.
However, there is a "society" far more subtler: Culture, or in
MOQish: The Intellectual level.
Its "immune system" is equally subtle, but the methods are more
far-reaching and effective than the coarse bludgeon-like of the levels
below. The means of control varies according to the times, but it is
always a isolation of the deviating individual something that makes
the erring mind either recant or - if it is honest - go mad. As Michel
Foucault shows the culture/times determines what model is
applied to abnormality, right now it is the SOM derived mental
illness template, in former religiously dominated times it was
"heresy".
The present S-O mental illness model of abnormality is considered
humane. Will a Quality abnormality model be inhumane then? Not
as I see it, on the contrary it will be much better and may even
eliminate "madness of intellect" because it sees beyond intellect,
but introduce an abnormality of the ....?? This is so weird that I
don't dare venture along that path any longer for fear of being
regarded a contrarian among contraians :-).
Bo
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