Robert Pirsig - Lila. An Inquiry Into Morals

On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-old exploitation of the poor. Some of them seem to sense there is also something mysteriously virtuous in a free enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into words but they don’t have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do.

The Metaphysics of Quality provides the vocabulary. A free market is a Dynamic institution. What people buy and what people sell, in other words what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual formula. What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The market is always changing and the direction of that change can never be predetermined.

The Metaphysics of Quality says the free market makes everybody richer by preventing static economic patterns from setting in and stagnating economic growth. That is the reason the major capitalist economies of the world have done so much better since the Second World War than the major socialist economies. It is not that Victorian social economic patterns are more moral than socialist intellectual economic patterns. Quite the opposite. They are less moral as static patterns go. What makes the free-enterprise system superior is that the socialists, reasoning intelligently and objectively, have inadvertently closed the door to Dynamic Quality in the buying and selling of things. They closed it because the metaphysical structure of their objectivity never told them Dynamic Quality exists.

People, like everything else, work better in parallel than they do in series, and that is what happens in this free-enterprise city. When things are organized socialistically in a bureaucratic series, any increase in complexity increases the probability of failure. But when they’re organized in a free-enterprise parallel, an increase in complexity becomes an increase in diversity more capable of responding to Dynamic Quality, and thus an increase of the probability of success. It’s this diversity and parallelism that make this city work.

And not just this city. Our greatest national economic success, agriculture, is organized almost entirely in parallel. All life has parallelism built into it. Cells work in parallel. Most body organs work in parallel: eyes, brains, lungs. Species operate in parallel, democracies operate in parallel; even science seems to operate best when it is organized through the parallelism of the scientific societies.

It’s ironic that although the philosophy of science leaves no room for any undefined Dynamic activity, it’s science’s unique organization for the handling of the Dynamic that gives it its superiority. Science superseded old religious forms, not because what it says is more true in any absolute sense (whatever that is), but because what it says is more Dynamic.

If scientists had simply said Copernicus was right and Ptolemy was wrong without any willingness to further investigate the subject, then science would have simply become another minor religious creed. But scientific truth has always contained an overwhelming difference from theological truth: it is provisional. Science always contains an eraser, a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight could wipe out old static patterns without destroying science itself. Thus science, unlike orthodox theology, has been capable of continuous, evolutionary growth. As Phædrus had written on one of his slips, The pencil is mightier than the pen.

That’s the whole thing: to obtain static and Dynamic Quality simultaneously. If you don’t have the static patterns of scientific knowledge to build upon you’re back with the cave man. But if you don’t have the freedom to change those patterns you’re blocked from any further growth.

You can see that where political institutions have improved throughout the centuries the improvement can usually be traced to a static-Dynamic combination: a king or constitution to preserve the static, and a parliament or jury that can act as a Dynamic eraser; a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight can wipe out old static patterns without destroying the government itself.

Phædrus was surprised by the conciseness of a commentary on Robert’s Rules of Order that seemed to capture the whole thing in two sentences: No minority has a right to block a majority from conducting the legal business of the organization. No majority has a right to prevent a minority from peacefully attempting to become a majority. The power of those two sentences is that they create a stable static situation where Dynamic Quality can flourish.

In the abstract, at least. When you get to the particular it’s not so simple.

It seems as though any static mechanism that is open to Dynamic Quality must also be open to degeneracy to falling back to lower forms of quality.

This creates the problem of getting maximum freedom for the emergence of Dynamic Quality while prohibiting degeneracy from destroying the evolutionary gains of the past. Americans like to talk about all their freedom but they think it’s disconnected from something Europeans often see in America: the degeneracy that goes with the Dynamic.

It seems as though a society that is intolerant of all forms of degeneracy shuts off its own Dynamic growth and becomes static. But a society that tolerates all forms of degeneracy degenerates. Either direction can be dangerous. The mechanisms by which a balanced society grows and does not degenerate are difficult, if not impossible, to define.

How can you tell the two directions apart? Both oppose the status quo. Radical idealists and degenerate hooligans sometimes strongly resemble each other.

Jazz was generally considered degenerate music when it first appeared. Modern art was considered degenerate.

When you define morality scientifically as that which enhances evolution it sounds as though you have really solved the problem of what morality is. But then when you try to say specifically what is and what isn’t evolution and where evolution is going, you find you are right back in the soup again. The problem is that you can’t really say whether a specific change is evolutionary at the time it occurs. It is only with a century or so of hindsight that it appears evolutionary.

For example, there was no way those Zuni priests could have known that this fellow they were hanging by his thumbs was going to turn into some future savior of their tribe. Here was a drunken bragging window-peeper who told the authorities they could all go to hell and they couldn’t do anything to him. What were they supposed to do? What else could they do? They couldn’t let every damn degenerate in Zuni do as he pleased on the ground that he might, at some future date, save the tribe. They had to enforce the rules to hold the tribe together.

This is really the central problem in the static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike and break all the rules alike? Freedoms that save the saviors also save the degenerates and allow them to tear the whole society apart. But restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution.

It was almost a custom for people to come to New York, prophesy a doomsday of one sort or another and then wait for it to descend. They’re doing it now. But so far the doomsday has never come. New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there. Always changing. Always changing for the worse, it seems, but then right in the middle of the worse comes this new Dynamic thing that nobody ever heard of before and the worse is forgotten because this new Dynamic thing (which is also getting worse) has taken its place. What looks like hell always turns out to be something else.