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| 2021 examination of the American political divides |
Equality is the hidden American code, the unspoken feeling that everyone shares, even if it’s not articulated or fulfilled: the desire to be everyone’s equal—which is not the same thing as the desire for everyone to be equal. Equality is the first truth of our founding document, the one that leads to all the others. The word of the eighteenth-century Declaration became flesh in the dynamic commercial society of the nineteenth. Tocqueville described equality as the “ardent, insatiable, eternal, and invincible” desire of democratic peoples.
sng: Equality & liberty are the two great American political (and social) values often seemingly at war with one another. And what about community, social solidarity, as a value? Excluded by our excessive individualism? Our experience with the COVID-19 pandemic suggests so.
His [Louis Hartz's] Liberal Tradition in America meets the two main objections [to Daniel Boorstein's description of American liberalism] head on: he not only admits but insists that the liberal tradition has a theoretical content—that it is, in fact, Locke’s theory. We began with Locke, according to Hartz, and after every historical scuffle we find, as the dust settles, that we have ended with Locke. The second objection is confronted just as calmly: he not only admits but insists that universal subscription to this theory has made it an orthodoxy, the source of America’s conformism. According to Hartz, we have a liberal theory supported by conservative instincts—Locke’s arguments maintained for Burke’s motives of loyalty. Thus, what is wrong with the liberal tradition is not its liberal content but the fact that it is a tradition, that it forms “a colossal liberal absolutism.” A liberalism thus established is not challenged to reexamine and renew itself. Indeed, philosophical self-examination can no longer be achieved in purely American terms—there is no vantage point outside Locke from which to view our Lockean orthodoxy. The theory is everywhere, made invisible by its omnipresence. The solution is to go outside America—in historical analysis, by placing American liberalism against the broader spectrum of European political philosophies; in practical terms, by pursuing a course of international involvement. Only intimate dealings with other nations can make us recognize the nature of our own theory. In effect, by learning how bad they are, we learn how good we should be.
sng: Wills's dissection of American liberalism, written as a result of his beat as a political reporter in the 1968 presidential campaign, is still spot on, although the political terrain has now added a reactionary element.
The Metaphysics of Quality says there are not just two codes of morals, there are actually five: inorganic-chaotic, biological-inorganic, social-biological, intellectual-social, and Dynamic-static. This last, the Dynamic-static code, says what’s good in life isn’t defined by society or intellect or biology. What’s good is freedom from domination by any static pattern, but that freedom doesn’t have to be obtained by the destruction of the patterns themselves.
sng: Sounds like shades of Whitehead and Hartshorne to me. But I don't recall Pirsig every referring to either thinker. Am I missing something, or misguided?
Three key ideas underlie his [Jung's] implicit metaphysical system: first, that of the collective unconscious as a transpersonal experiential field, which generates all autonomous imagery we experience as both the perceived physical world and the worlds of dreams and visions; second, that of consciousness as an internally connected web of psychic contents that turns in upon itself so as to enable self-reflection; and third, that of daemons, autonomous psychic complexes that, although internally connected and conscious, are dissociated from their psychic surroundings.
sng: Sounds far-out? Both Jung & Kastrup are. But perhaps correct.
Gaston Bachelard, the foremost investigator of imagination in our century, says that the deformation of the given is the essential method of imagination, which, Bachelard writes, “is always considered to be the faculty of forming images. But it is rather the faculty of deforming the images … of freeing ourselves from the immediate images; it is especially the faculty of changing images … if an occasional image does not give rise to a swarm of aberrant images, to an explosion of images, there is no imagination.” Centuries earlier, Bachelard’s “deforming” was called by Quintilian “distortion”: “The essence of all wit lies in the distortion of the true and natural meaning of words.” Distortion tortures language to say what’s concealed from ordinary ears. So do puns. Silly and senseless they may be, but they do make us groan. Samuel Johnson names these low conceits or puns “quibbles” and finds that Shakespeare had a fatal attraction to them.
The great technological advance of the early twenty-first century consists not of new objects but of old ones made intelligent. The knowledge content of products is becoming more valuable than the physical elements used to produce them.
sng: The computer chips in your car are now the defining component?
PUSH YOURSELF BEYOND when you think you are done with what you have to say. Go a little further. Sometimes when you think you are done, it is just the edge of beginning. Probably that’s why we decide we’re done. It’s getting too scary. We are touching down onto something real. It is beyond the point when you think you are done that often something strong comes out.
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