Sunday, March 29, 2015

Beyond Lila: Defining "Social" in Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality

SystemsFour.gifBeyond Lila: Defining "Social" in Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality 

by Margaret Hettinger, 1998





Robert Pirsig, in his book, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals, has followed up on the groundbreaking insight of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values.  He expands the concepts of Quality, "the leading edge of experience" and Value, "the pre-intellectual awareness that gives rise to structure", by describing four distinct levels of existence that have evolved as the result of Quality interactions.

The task of refining these concepts has occupied many people, some of whom are contributors to the Lila Squad mailing list, whose internet home is www.moq.org.  The point of interest of this article is the mechanism of Pirsig's social level and its interface with the intellectual.

The following brief explanation is provided to supply terminology and the point of view of this article:

Brief background of Metaphysics of Quality (MoQ)

MoQ involves a way of perceiving reality, quite different from the subject/object viewpoint that underlies Western thinking and language.  The first proposition of MoQ is that everything is value, and that the primary division is between dynamic value and static value, not between subjects and objects.  The undifferentiated, undefined, pre-existing source of all things is referred to as Dynamic Quality, but in this undifferentiated "ocean" there has formed, over time, sets of stable "wave patterns" of which the first is the material universe itself. 

The MoQ recognizes four such discrete sets of static value patterns (other terms are: 'levels', 'dimensions' and 'areas').  They are, in rising order of good:  Inorganic, Biological, Social, and Intellectual.  Each of these levels offers freedom from the constraints of the lower parent level, but each is also dependent on that parent level for its existence.

There are five types of struggle between different levels of static Quality.  The definition of the area of struggle in which an entity functions may have more to say about its reality than any of its objective qualities.  The five areas are: chaotic-inorganic, inorganic-biological, biological-social, social-intellectual, and static-dynamic.  As Pirsig says,
     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. (Pirsig, 1991, pg. )
(This is a very brief summary,  modified during conversation with Bodvar Skutvik and other members of the Lila Squad.) .  The original concept is found in Lila, An Inquiry into Morals,  Robert M. Pirsig, 1991 ISBN 0-553-07737-6
After reading Lila, it's easy to see the concept of evolutionary levels and to begin to see how they provide order and direction to otherwise confusing events.

Inorganic Patterns of Value are those substances, reactions and physical laws involving matter and energy.  They span a historical continuum from simple to complex and are usually considered under the study of physics.

Biological Patterns of Value contain those entities that have developed a mechanism to escape the constraints of the inorganic world.  Their value lies in their ability to grow and survive within a balance of the inorganic forces that both lend them support and threaten to destroy them utterly.  This is biology, the process of life.  Its processes span an evolutionary continuum that ranges from the simple dynamism of the carbon atom to the complex life forms enabled by the dance of DNA and RNA.

MoQ's delineation of inorganic and biological evolution is fairly consistent with common cultural understanding.  Pirsig's next two levels of historically-significant sets of patterns of value are not so commonsense.

Unlike the two lower levels, Pirsig did not go into the inner mechanics of the social level.  He pointed to where it is found, gave some examples of its effects, both contemporary and historical. But he did not define its workings.   Thus far, he has left that for others, and as he wrote recently,
    The material for the MOQ is not something I invented out of thin air. It has been lying dormant within the culture for centuries. I have mined probably less than one per cent of what is there. The best readers will pay minimal attention to what I have found and maximal attention to what I have missed.  That's where the excitement is. (Pirsig, 1997)
If permission was needed to extend the concept, it has been granted.

One of Pirsig's most direct statements about "social" is:
    The value that holds a nation together is a social pattern of value.  (Pirsig, 1991, pg.152)
Most of his other statements are either introductory, more casual, uses of the word, or are part of descriptions of social-intellectual or social-biological phenomena.  He may have deliberately avoided the issue because Lila is a very plain-spoken book, with a commonsense feel to it, and delineation of the social level requires a journey into the uncommon.

A traditional dividing line has been been crossed--one still part of elementary school curruculum--the line between "real" and "imaginary".  The substance of the inorganic and biological levels is tangible, therefore "real".  Things that have no such substance and exist "only in the mind" fall into the schoolday classification of "imaginary".

The majority of people never question this elementary assumption, but a worldview that denies the reality of the intangible cannot deal effectively with such things as money, dress codes, manners, law, honor, integrity, loyalty, ownership, leadership, anger, political influence, electric power, education, quantum physics, or roads.

Within Pirsig's MoQ, the realm of "imaginary" is shown to be not one, but two distinct sets of patterns of value, each with a reality as consistent as the reality of rocks and trees, yet each set as distinct from the other as the biological level is distinct from the inorganic level in which it struggles constantly to survive.

Unlike "inorganic", "biological", and "intellectual", the label "social" does not have a clear-cut correlation to an accepted common usage.  The words "social" and "society" have many connotations that don't work within the MoQ system.   So it seems important to address this problem.

The problem does not appear to be a fault of Pirsig's reasoning.  It is a fault of language and human perception. And it is a very significant fault.  To see why, it is worth looking backwards from what is lacking in our descriptions to determine the corresponding gap in our conceptions.

Julian Jaynes, in The Origin of Consciousness, uses a metaphor for the difficulty of the "conscious" trying to see the workings of the unconscious, and describes a flashlight searching for the dark.  It will not succeed.  Everywhere it seeks, it finds light. (Jaynes, 1976, pg. 23) And this may be the reason that "social" is so difficult to define. Social humankind holds the flashlight.  It does not see itself.  It defines itself in intellect.  It nurtures that intellect in individual biological beings.  But the huge social level that is responsible for most of human function is invisible to intellect and intangible to biology.  The social level is the divider between mind and matter, subject and object.

It is necessary to use the word "society" to point to social patterns of value.  Pirsig does it.  We have to use a word, and that word can provide a step in the right direction.   But "society" is not Pirsig's social level.  "Society" is held together by the glue of social patterns, a distinction I hope to clarify.
Since the word "social" is often confusing,  it is necessary to remember to use it differently than in normal language.  For the rest of this article, even though it is cumbersome, I will adopt the pattern (first done in the Lila Squad) of using "q-social" to talk about the Metaphysics of Quality social level and its patterns of value.

"Q-social patterns of value" becomes a viable concept when it is used for behavior patterns, whether instinctive or copied through imitation, that are not thoughtful or otherwise self-aware.
When an endangered baby raccoon is "rescued" and raised by humans, it can no longer survive in the wild unless it is also raised with other raccoons. There are behaviors it must perceive and imitate in order to have the skills that it needs.  These patterns are q-social.

The borders of the social level of patterns of value are not as easily defined as the border between biological and inorganic.  The difference between inorganic and biological is as plain as "dead or alive."  As E.F. Schumacher, another writer who seems to have observed and described the inner workings of the evolutionary levels,  observed, "No one has any difficulty recognizing the astonishing and mysterious difference between a living plant and one that has died and has thus fallen to the lowest Level of Being, inanimate matter.  What is this power that has been lost?  We call it 'life'." (Schumacher, 16)

The  border between biological and social has been the subject of much discussion.  It may be as simple as the difference between plant and animal, as in Schumacher's Levels of Being, or it may involve distinctions  that place instinctive animal behavior as a junction point that actually belongs to biology.   There are arguments that would say that insect so-called social behavior is actually biological, but most would agree that the behavior of the wolf pack and ape community are really q-social.    That distinction, however, is for another time.

There is no doubt that humanity is shaped by q-social patterns of value.  And the line I want to draw is the one between q-social and intellectual.

Q-social patterns include:
  • Smiling--not the caring, emotional, knowing smile of friendship, but the impulse to make a certain facial expression that is triggered upon seeing another human face
  • Yawning. One person does it, and everyone in the group wants to do it too.
  • The tendency to move and act in the same way as others do.  (Note:  Once, on a backpacking trip, when I was really tired and my mind was probably disconnected, I noticed that I had a tendency to place my foot exactly in the same place as the person hiking in front of me. I realized that in this particular case, it had nothing to do with evaluation that she had found the best spot, and I could follow her and not have to think. This was not difficult terrain where you would expect that following someone's lead would give some advantage. My body simply had a tendency to put my foot in that same spot. This kind of social interaction, if it is what I think it is, would have allowed pre-intellectual humans to pass on the habits of successful groups to their progeny.  I can't help wondering about a possible connection between this type of behavior and the 3.6 million-year-old-Laetoli Footprints, in which one humanoid followed so closely in the footsteps of the other as they walked across the an ash-covered plain. (Agnew and Demas, 44-55).
One of the stumbling blocks in understanding q-social is often encountered when someone notices how different human social patterns are from the social patterns of animal groups such as the wolf pack. This difference seems so great that it appears to be a dividing line, perhaps even the line between biological and q-social.

However important this distinction is, this line is not a line between evolutionary levels.

Turn it 90 degrees.  Let it become the dividing line between sets of q-social patterns that have not evolved intellectual patterns and those sets that have.  That line is the q-social evidence that the intellectual level exists.

Here's an explanation, one put forth by the Russian educator and  psychologist Lev S. Vygotsky, called his "socio-historical" theory.   Vygotsky says that the society of humans is very different from the society of animals.  This is for historical reasons.  The human social patterns have been mediated by the intellect and thought (or as MoQ would say, intellectual patterns). (Gredler, 237-273; Cole, 7, 131-133)  Vygotsky wrote about this difference in a time when behaviorists believed their work in biology would explain the development of the human mind.  Vygotsky not only saw the societal level dividing and linking the two, but saw how the human society is no longer connected to those animal roots.  It has grown new roots of its own.

Julian Jaynes describes at length many historical clues to the possible functioning of pre-intellectual humankind (Jaynes, 1976), but those particular q-social patterns are no longer in existence. 

Intellectual mediation has changed the substance of the human q-social patterns.  Still, it has not changed the way they function.

Examples of modern intellectually-mediated q-social patterns:
  • A child begins to say "bye-bye" when someone says "bye-bye" to him. (The reaction is q-social, the word is derived from some intellectual concept--not the child's intellect, but someone way back in the culture)
  • A person says "Excuse me, I didn't mean to do that," after bumping into another person.
  • An employee interprets a glance from a superior as an indication that he is somehow sub-dominant, and fishes in his repertoire of strategies to find something to say that will put him at a better advantage
  • Someone writes "s/he" instead of "he" because of an awareness that it matters to readers how this concept is presented, and this is an acceptable option within the group.
  • In her new house, a woman puts cooking utensils in the top drawer to the right of her stove because that's where her mother (and probably her grandmother) put them. If there's no drawer there, she will have to do something different--in which case she has other static q-social or intellectual patterns of value to draw from, or even Dynamic Quality to create a new way of storing them.
Intellectual patterns of value are involved in some interactions of q-social patterns. They depend on q-social patterns for their existence and storage.  They are valued by q-social entities because they allow the q-social entities to have more control over their environment (q-social, biological and inorganic) and themselves.

The domain of the intellectual level is the world of memory and self-awareness.  Examples of intellectual patterns are:
  • The concept of similarity, difference.
  • Squareness.
  • Algebra concepts (but not "algebra", which is a well-defined, highly mediated set of q-social patterns of behavior.)
The great majority of intellectual patterns are only accessible to humans, and this is what sets human q-social entities apart from animal q-social entities.  Since the emergence of the intellectual level, the substance of the primitive human q-social level no longer exists, as almost the entire makeup of human q-social patterns have been mediated by the existence of the intellectual patterns.  The processes of the original q-social level still exist and function.

And the important thing is to look at the process of the pattern, the interactions and effects, not their content.
  • Q-social patterns are formed through imitation and retained through habit. (McPartlin, 1998)
  • Q-social interactions involve awareness of pre-determined rank to determine which social pattern is to be followed. No thought is involved.   This is automatic.
Human q-social patterns are hard to see.  One reason is because many q-social patterns imitate intellectual events that have occurred in the past. Nevertheless,  once intellectual decisions are repeated and become automatic, they are no longer intellectual patterns. They are actually q-social.  (They also become invisible to the conscious self, which is the part of the human entity that discusses metaphysics. )

Many human q-social patterns include pockets of instructions for the pattern-follower to make a temporary leap into the intellectual level.  What is remembered by the observer is the intellectual phase, not the q-social pattern that underlay it.

For an example of this, consider human responses to traffic lights.

When a driver in the United States comes to a traffic light, it is red, yellow, or green.  If it is red or green, the driver will stop or go accordingly.  No thought.  No evaluation. This is q-social behavior.
(It's also very easy, when in this mode, to mistakenly start the car when the car beside starts to move, because in q-social mode the tendency to imitate is very strong. )

If the light is yellow, (which in the U.S. signals caution, preparatory to changing to the stop signal) the q-social pattern includes an instruction to use some intellectual patterns of judgment of distance and speed.  In this process, the driver will choose between any number of socially appropriate patterns of behavior, and then drop back into q-social to carry them out.

Driving a car can be an obvious q-social experience, despite the skill level required.   It is common for an experienced driver to get on the interstate and not be aware of the road or the act of driving for long stretches of time.  It is possible to think about things, or even have an intellectually-active conversation with someone in the back, having an eye on them in the rear-view mirror for quite some time, never attending the road.

On the other hand, even holding a conversation, which would be expected to be a highly-intellectual endeavor, has strong q-social elements.  Consider a phone call in which one party is not listening at all, merely responding with appropriate "Uh-huh", or "You don't say."  This can go on for a long time.

Q-social patterns of value.   Very different from the normal concept that is brought to mind by the word "social".



 A Watchmaker Press Book Forum Page
Created  7-10-98, Last Updated 7-19-98
Maggie Hettinger



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