Hettinger (hettingr@iglou.com)
Fri, 27 Feb 1998 17:26:09 +0100
Hi, LS, Ant, Donald and Mark L,
Ant McWatt wrote:
> 25th Feb. Donald T Palmgren wrote:
>
> > Could be. Personally I see this -ism partisianship as a
> > result of the Church of Reason -- the school system we
> > are all churned through as if it were some great sausage
> > machine -- *programming* us to see a question as an
> > unfinished answer, a blank to be filled in, either
> > correctly or incorrectly.
>
> That`s one of the (subsidary) points of the classroom
> scenes in ZMM. The usual school system that grades and
> fills its students with "knowledge" is in danger of
> destroying the originality and creativity of each one of
> its pupils. As Pirsig says (in ZMM) to regurgitate the
> "program" correctly that has been fed by the Church of
> Reason, is the way to get an A. To to be original within
> the Church is to risk a grade anywhere between A and F.
>
Hey, you guys got back around to something I can sink my teeth into.
To me, the greatest value of MoQ is what shows up when we perceive that
huge unacknowledged social level, and realize that there is an important
watershed--whether social patterns are being more strongly influenced by
intellectual (social/intellectual mode) or whether they are being
determined more by biological patterns (social/biological mode). And,
as Bo and some others have worked out, in the normal course of things,
an entity seems to "perceive" or "interact" on only one level (or maybe
in only one of the inter-level struggle zones) at a time.
Getting back to what Ant said about school, to be "original" seems to
be to seek and perceive DQ mediation of intellectual patterns. That is
something our American culture prizes. "Free to be, you and me." has
been the themesong of the educational process for the last 25 years.
This is not totally new. Education has always provided intellectual
freedom, freedom from the static constraints, (at least for a few, but
that's a different, though related, topic).
However, school is a social institution. The structure of "do what is
expected, get an A" is something that exists in the social/intellectual
realm. It is strongly linked (and therefore almost invisibly linked,
from the perspective of those who don't question it) to the
seldom-stated social/biological pattern of school that says "do what is
expected or you will be paddled, or restrained or taken to jail". It
is only when these structures of school are stable that the work of the
intellect can be done.
It is only by the creation of social patterns that value intellectual
work that the body of intellectual work can be maintained. And the
only way for that "body" of intellectual work to be shared is to
transform it (link it) to social patterns. And social patterns are not
passed on, are not propagated, by originality. Social patterns are
passed on by imitation and conformity. This is the rub that bothers
everyone.
A person who has "escaped" the social patterns of "school" into dynamic
intellectual work seldom recognizes the social structures that brought
him to that point. Organizations that have escaped almost never do.
The people inside organizations which have emerged into the
dynamic/intellectual domain tend to go around thinking that their "new
way" of behavior is something that can be maintained on its own, and
that the old ways, the social/intellectual and social/biological ways of
behavior are bad, and can be gotten rid of. In this country (USA), in
the last 35 or 50 years, large segments of society have become organized
in such a way that they can focus most of their existence in the
intellectual/social and occasionally dynamic/intellectual realm. Since
these people are the movers and the shakers, and they have found
high-quality results and had high-quality experiences in this mode,
their natural reaction is to extend this experience to others, to
propagate these new ideas. In doing this, they reconstruct
intellectual/social patterns like decision-making and leadership.
What they DON'T have is MoQ, which lets you see that the underlying,
"invisible" social structures, those structures that they perceive as
standing in opposition to the new ways, are essential to their very
existence. Patterns in each level depend on lower level patterns for
their existence.
In Kentucky, where we put widespread school reform into effect, the
massive changes, which were expected to be good, have caused widespread
system overload an massive breaking of social structures, kicking the
operation of the educational system back into social/biological, instead
of the social/intellectual to which it had recently emerged. (And the
movers and shakers, who have no connection to and little perception of
the social/biological struggle, don't know that this has happened.
Another topic for another time.)
>From MoQ and some of the things that the Lila Squad has worked out, it
has become clear to me that:
You can't bring Metaphysics of Quality to the world just by talking
about it. You can't "plan" to have the good effects of DQ unless a
situation is created in which all levels are involved, in which a group
of people (social) interact with knowledge (intellectual), and vision
(DQ), rearranging the intellectual, social, biological and inorganic
structures around them in small closely-linked shifts.
And that, my friends, is what I have put into my new book, "Service
Projects with Technology", which is geared toward schools, but is
actually part of a program that can be done within any organization of
people who want to be more in control of their own lives.
And that's why I haven't been hanging around the Squad lately. I've
found a lot of work to do.
I hope somebody kicks back on this stuff. You guys may be the only
people in the world who have a handle on it.
Maggie
"Dynamic Quality...is what gets us up in the morning.
Static quality...is what permits us to get to sleep at night."
--Mark Lencho and class
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