Moral Genius: A Parody of a Fantastic Metaphysics
'The paper makes a good argument that the MOQ perceives the world
in a better way than any framework that we have had previously.'
- Dr. Anthony McWatt,
in praise of "Quality in the New Millennium".
This is a true story about deceit and self-deceit that I'm happy to tell you about, notwithstanding some measure of guilt and shame. For someone not personally on the wrong end of this, it can also be quite hilarious.
In mid-May, 2005, Richard Loggins got an email from Anthony McWatt, cordially inviting him to Liverpool in July to help celebrate the awarding of his PhD in philosophy. Anthony also extended the invitation to other members of the MOQ discussion group (MD) so that they'd have an opportunity to meet Robert Pirsig and his wife, who would also be attending.
Then in early June 2005, Anthony sent Richard Loggins another email stating that an MOQ conference would be added to the docket. It was to be held at Liverpool University on July 7th where a new paper by Pirsig would be read. To make the conference viable, however, he solicited invitees (like Loggins) to write a 'decent' paper for it.
I know all this about Richard Loggins because he's a pen-name I used to re-subscribe myself on the MD soon after I was banished. I had enjoyed the discussions, sometimes for their weirdness, and didn't think Horse's reason for booting me was legitimate. To avoid the risk of being booted again, I made Loggins out to be a staunch supporter of the MOQ, particularly of its sillier bits. Loggins became my alter-ego: a blunt, intimidating enforcer who underneath all the bravado is insecure and friendless. His spelling is atrocious and he likes his scotch. Now I was really having fun!
Anthony's request for a paper was too irresistible to pass up. The Loggins character presented a perfect opportunity to present a parody of the MOQ. I had tried everything else to get through to people, so why not make one last ditch, desperate attempt. It would have to be written in Loggin's inimitable style: fearless, fawning, and over-the-top. But a parody alone wasn't good enough. I had to fool the conference attendees, or at least Anthony, into thinking the paper was serious. In other words, the parody had to double as a hoax. I needed ideas and I only had three weeks to pull it off.
I contacted Struan Hellier to tell him what I was up to and if he wanted to help. Struan was all in favor of writing a paper, but unfortunately he was too busy to contribute any writing. He suggested I modify the Sokal article to MOQese, but it worried me that Anthony might be familiar with it and see the ruse. However, I did take note that Sokal's hoax is well written. By this I mean that the sentences are well constructed and their meaning is clear, even if the ideas they present are daft. It seems that readers are more apt to swallow silliness if the silliness is well put.
After an abortive idea to write a paper about the secret Quality of dogs, I settled on a looser format that allowed me to touch on a variety of MOQ themes. My first working title was "Noumena, Rationality, Buddhism, Quality", or NRBQ , but in the end I settled on "Quality in the New Millennium". It concentrates on the speculations, claims, and attitudes of the MOQ for which the ratio of sense to nonsense is a smallish fraction. It should sound like curious malarkey, albeit well-written curious malarkey, to anyone outside Pirsig's small but devoted following. Importantly, the paper makes no attempt to misrepresent the MOQ in any way. In fact, the paper is largely a rehash of MOQ concepts cast in fresh scenarios, and attempts to be rhetorically faithful in emotional disposition and phraseology, though amped-up a bit. As such, adherents of the MOQ should find the paper just grand, even triumphant. Indeed, this was my hope, because if Anthony isn't fooled, the paper is not presented and read out in front of Pirsig. Fortunately, this was Anthony's response after reading the finished paper:
"I’ve made it a rule of thumb for the presentation of the papers at the conference that people have to read out their own papers and personally answer questions in regard to them. However, considering the circumstances that prevent you visiting and the high quality of your paper, I’ll make an exception in this case even if I have to read out the paper myself." Anthony McWatt (to Loggins)
After the conference, I got the following reactions from attendees:
"I'm getting some very positive feedback on your paper including from the Pirsigs, MOQ Discuss people and also my ex-MOQ students." Anthony McWatt (to Loggins)
"Just a quick note to say that your paper was excellent, was presented beautifully, and was very well received.I would like a copy if that is okay." Paul Turner (to Loggins)
"I have to say that Richard Loggins probably would have stole the show if he'd been there to deliver it in person. It was amazing, brilliant and original. I know Annabell (beautiful Gav's beautiful gal), Ant and Bob* were impressed by it too." David Buchanan ( posting to MD) (* Bob is Robert Pirsig)
"Do you have the text of the Richard Loggins paper that your student David read? It was excellent." Wendy Pirsig (to McWatt)
Having succeeded in fooling the lot, I now find myself with a challenge not unlike the one Alan Sokal had: it turned out that the people whom he wanted to dupe (the publishers of Social Text) still saw merit in his article even after he exposed the hoax. If something similar has happened with my paper, this is my attempt to expose the parody to those who still don't get it. Indeed, the people quoted above should read this follow-up carefully.
The introduction is little more than a blatant attempt at ingratiation. Pirsig's biggest fear is that he
The cautionary comment about academic acceptance was sincere; Loggins' response about "when Quality is properly understood" was not. Such an excuse might have been acceptable just after Lila was published, but nearly 15 years later it is wearing pretty thin.
The Mad Sweeper section provides some comic relief to the serious concerns over Pirsig's long-term staying power. There really was a Mad Sweeper in my life as I described her, but I never ran the numbers on her or went home to do vacuuming experiments. You might be wondering how I could confuse readers long enough to make them forget why cleaning is valuable, but the wonders of rhetoric allow for such illusions. In this case I used Pirsig's time-tested technique of blaming any trivial or perceived problem on a broken culture, and showing how everything makes sense again when we 're-center our activities on Quality'. Frankly, I can think of happier activities than vacuuming already clean carpets, or dusting already dusted furniture, and this section's final observation - that dirt removal is an auspicious secondary effect of cleaning - is a strange way to talk.
Amblyopia is a vision problem that occurs when one eye is lazy and the other dominant. Without treatment, which usually involves wearing a patch over the dominant eye, the patient may lose all sight in the lazy one. Amblyopia can indeed effect binocular vision. However, the phrase "neural ampblyopia" (notice the extra 'p') was my own invention, and as far as I know, there is no connection between amblyopia and dyslexia, except that they are both ocular problems that typically occur in children. Thankfully, I suffer from neither.
I had been searching the web for a Honeymooner line that had nothing to do with the writing of this paper. It was the one where Alice laments that the last time their apartment had been redecorated was when a nephew had come through with an ice cream cone. I found it on a website along with the one about the pizzas/manhole covers , and the latter became the inspiration for the kind of dyslexia that afflicts poor Richard. I'm certainly no expert on the subject and maybe there really are people who process speech and written material as whole-word spoonerisms all day long; but as far as I know, I made that up.
The idea of having no visual focus in the panorama of your visual field came from a disturbing account on a Ken Wilber web board I'd read years ago about someone who'd permanently screwed up his vision in this way after practicing an intense form of meditation over a ten year period.
The prescribed treatment of wearing blue and red tinted glasses, the kind you'd put on to watch a 3-D movie, is my own fabrication. When Anthony asked me for a picture for his website, I dug out my old aviator style eyeglasses and went over them with blue and red dry-erase magic marker. I got dressed up in a tie and sports coat, tilted on my younger son's cowboy hat and put on the glasses, and my older son snapped the picture as I pretended to read my paper as if in Liverpool. I sent it to Anthony and crossed my fingers, because seeing people wearing blue and red tinted glasses is uncommon, to say the least, and Ant had boasted, just a few days before this, how "you learn to be critical of everything, what you read in the paper, see on the TV, the adverts in the local shops and what other people say to you." Nevertheless, a few days later the picture appeared above my paper on his site, no questions asked.
As an aside, I am particularly pleased with the line that has "fractal isthmus" in it. It's a bit of a bow toward Pirsig's own use of isthmus, which he uses to good effect in his computer/machine-code passage in Lila.
The inspiration to use these ailments in the paper is a bit murky to me now, but I'm pretty sure it was either Pirsig's metaphorical phrase, "intellectual eyeware", that set it off, or Struan's phrase "culturally tinted spectacles" in his review of Lila's Child. In any case, I thought it would be extremely interesting to an MOQite, who doesn't believe that objects exist independently of people anyway, to have an existence proof of a person (Loggins) who literally doesn't see objects like everyone else, and has come to the conclusion that his dyslexia has saved him from the acculturation of objects, and that he can see the world now as it really is. I figured that for the Quality converted, not being able to find your keys when they are right there in front of you would be a small matter in light of the philosophical good news it brings to the MOQ.
On at least one occasion Pirsig has spoken of the Quality idea as a Copernican inversion, the kind of idea that turns the world on its head. That's because the commonsense notion that subjects and objects create quality is switched around; Quality creates the subjects and objects. Additionally, people participate in these Quality creations by supplying ideas, and then all kinds of things magically come into being that didn't exist before. The Laveran/Ross 'creation' of malaria takes its inspiration from Pirsig's belief that gravity didn't exist prior to Newton. Pirsig argues that it would be silly to think that gravity or the law of gravity existed before the sun and earth or anything else in the cosmos was created, and this led him back to the only sane conclusion he could think of: that it didn't exist until Newton created it.
Loggins makes a similar argument by saying that it would be silly to think that malaria existed prior to the existence of mosquitoes, but he doesn't seem to wonder about malaria's status after mosquitoes and parasites came into being and before Laveran and Ross had their insights. Awkwardly for Loggins, the very reference for malaria that he provides in his bibliography states in its first sentence that 'Malaria parasites have been with us since the dawn of time'. Certainly, this is earlier than 1880.
I was proud of Loggins' sensible sounding argument that time does not allow new ideas to be retroactive, thereby making discoveries impossible. Of course, ideas like malaria wouldn't have to go back in time in the first place if the idea of malaria didn't in fact create malaria.
Pirsig once got a letter that asked, 'On the day before Newton was born, did apples obey the law of gravity?' Sensing a trap, he answered: 'No. Apples did not follow the law of gravity on the day before Newton was born. On that day apples just fell.' [Pirsig to McWatt, 1997]
In a similar vein, Loggins tries to answer what killed people who had the symptoms of malaria before Laveran/Ross 'created' it. 'People who became ill and died were not bitten by mosquitoes nor invaded by parasites. Instead, they died from the black bile itself or, they just succumbed to an illness.' When something sounds this crazy, it's a good policy to admit that it sounds crazy, so that people will see that you have a modicum of sense. Both Pirsig and Loggins smartly do this, but in the same breath chalk up the normal explanation to cultural brainwashing.
The next section tackles Pirsig's contribution to ethics, with Loggins' highfalutin sounding claim that moral dilemmas can, for the first time, be 'adjudicated by a decision theoretic procedure'. This procedure is usually referred to as the moral hierarchy or the moral taxonomy, and after explaining how it works, Loggins pushes for its use in solving some of the most difficult moral issues of our time, like abortion and gun control.
Instead of doing this, however, Loggins shows the moral taxonomy at work on an issue with only the slightest moral difficulty, as a way to 'understand how this works in practice'. This is the same tack Pirsig uses in Lila - to show how the moral taxonomy works by stepping the reader through the moral conflict between patient and germ. Can Loggins be any more serious than Pirsig when he announces that malaria poses a moral dilemma between either letting the parasites live and the person die, or killing the parasites and saving the person? Do we really need a decision theoretic procedure to tell us these things? Is Loggins really impressing anybody when he raises the bar two millimeters and answers that it's moral to kill tens of millions of parasites to save a single person, two millimeters more to morally kill mosquitoes, and then 'to push the Metaphysics of Quality even further' (as Anthony suggested I phrase it), to morally kill a large percentage of mosquitoes that don't even carry malaria? I would hope not.
Instead of circling back at this point to tackle abortion and gun control, Loggins deftly moves on to a different topic. One goes away with the impression that abortion and gun control are relatively simple exercises left for the reader to work out, perhaps while showering or mowing the yard. The honest truth is that they are intractable as ever.
The section on plate tectonics is offered to illustrate a strange reason a Pirsigian might give for accepting a new scientific idea. The reason Loggins thinks plate tectonics is better than the old theory is that it better fits with the MOQ's notion of how the inorganic level should be. Most people, however, would think that it was better because it gave sensible explanations for the formation of mountains and for the cause of earthquakes and volcanoes. Generally, people accept scientific ideas if evidence found in nature is in harmony with it or predicted by it, and then use the science to inform their philosophy. Loggins does it the other way round; he uses his metaphysics as the benchmark for confirming and accepting a scientific theory.
We see similarly odd kinds of reasoning from Pirsig. The MOQ elevates science to the intellectual level, he says, not because it has anything to say about what's true, but because it has an eraser (i.e. it is more Dynamic).
After sending off the paper to McWatt for his comments, I was most concerned about his reaction to the next section which deals with degeneracy. Luckily, he had no complaints. In the first paragraph I say something fairly safe, which is that Quality and degeneracy are easy to confuse. The Hippies, Pirsig says, confused the degeneracy of drugs and sex, which are biological patterns, with Dynamic Quality. However, in the second paragraph, I get bolder and hint that Quality and degeneracy are pretty much the same thing. I start out safely again by saying that Quality makes the apple sweet, and when it rots, it loses its biological quality. But then when I say that 'the apple reacts to the pure Quality more intensely as it rots', after just having said that as it rots 'it spreads out like a cancer', I've now associated the pure Quality not only with rot but also with a cancer, not to mention the maggots and worms. How could Anthony have let me get away with this, if the pure Quality is supposed to be the ‘betterness’ of the cosmos?
Well, I got away with it simply by tossing in some Eastern mysticism mumbo-jumbo to which the MOQ subscribes. Throw in how Pirsig believes he had reached Nirvana, a complete at-one-ness with Dynamic Quality, while he sat in his urine and let cigarettes burn the flesh of his fingers. Throw in how grateful the apple is about casting off its material patterns and returning to an undivided state, the point at which it no longer has Quality, but Quality has it. No one can rightly say what all this means, if anything, but if Quality is rot, this bunk is comforting.
My purpose in the Strunk and White section is not to satirize the mysteries of quality writing as expressed by White. These are indeed all excellent insights and my writing about them is sincere. I had worried that with all the other sections of the paper making the MOQ out to be outlandish, I'd better end on a strong note so that my paper had a chance at acceptance. It turns out that I needn't have worried, but better safe than sorry. The only things outrageous about this section are Loggins' exaggerations of White's 'admissions' and 'cathartic confessions', and his insinuation that Strunk might have gone to hell. The latter pronouncement was inspired by Pirsig's 1975 book review, "A Husband without a Wife", where he concludes by suggesting that the Texas Protestant wife will go to heaven long before the Roman Catholic husband will.
The people mentioned in the acknowledgments are not real people except for David Boyce and Anthony McWatt. Laura Sheltin is supposed to be an English teacher at the school where Loggins teaches, and although she is not a real person, her name is an anagram for Struan Hellier, who is a real person.
Part of me feels a bit sorry about writing this paper, or more properly, the exposing of it, as it throws cold water at a time when Anthony and the others are still celebrating his PhD accomplishment. But it's my hope that most of you have by now come down from the conference high and can handle more sobering news. Though I hope not, some of you will still manage to rationalize the paper as having value beyond that of a parody. Some of you will lament that this is just another "metric ton of bullshit" that Anthony has had to slog through on his doctoral quest. Some of you will be just plain embarrassed or angered at being deceived. Still, there is comfort for me in knowing that the MOQ accommodates this kind of alter-ego thing. It turns out that Richard Loggins is just an expression of an entirely different pattern in my mind, made possible by Horse's karmic decision to unsubscribe me:
"The multiplicity of mind is accommodated by the MOQ. It says you can have many mental patterns and many people do. The characteristics of the narrator of ZMM are one pattern that was in my mind. The characteristics of Phaedrus were an entirely different pattern in my mind and those two patterns hate each other. The MOQ says that you can split a person out in lots of ways and that the patterns which we call our minds are the result of separate paths of karmic history and we don't really reconcile them very much." [Pirsig, 1993]
Discussion of and reaction to my hoax can be found on the MD forum and the MoQ Wiki site that is linked to moq.org. The hoax is also mentioned in issue 33 of The Philosophers' Magazine.