Dear Platt and Woods, Thank you for your responses. They have made my understanding of the flow/contents and aims of the Discuss much clearer. Reading through all the posts over the past few weeks I began to wonder what had happened to Pirsig's MoQ as started in ZMM and finally worked out in Lila. In other words, I found it extremely difficult to find the link between the arguments and the MoQ. A bit like 'cannot see the forest for the trees' anymore. I failed to see the basic premisses of the MoQ (i.e.Quality) in the posts. A basic premiss I like to work towards is the one Pirsig talks about in ZMM (p 291 of my Corgi paperback) "...social values are right only when individual values are right. The place to improve the world is first in one's own heart and head and hands, and then work outward from there".
In this sense I did not want to come across as 'moralising' Platt, far from it. I am merely looking at ways of improving myself, with the aid of your posts within the context of the MoQ and as this process continues share some of those things learned/ insights gained. There must be 'common ground' which we share and this is what I didn't see. I am reminded of seeing David Suzuki on Australian televion, it must have been back in the eighties. The audience consisted of "greenies" and scientists, business people and a mix of your "average" Aussies. Suzuki opened the discussion by asking: "Do you think that clean air, clean water and clean land is important?". At the end of the programme, which lasted something like an hour or so, no agreement was reached about this basic premiss and Suzuki just thanked the audience saying it was nice getting to know them and left. The reason I picked on America is because American policies (both internal and foreign) have such a huge impact on the rest of the world. America has assumed a sort of a global 'moral policing' role. I just find the intellectual content of that morality rather low quality. I hope it is now clear I do not want to put the MoQ in the service of any social organisation rather exactly the opposite. Again thank you for clarifying things for me, I hope I have clarified things for you as well. Andre Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
