Excerpts From The book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, By Robert Pirsig Capital punishment: The strongest moral argument against capital punishment is that it weakens society's dynamic capacity for change and evolution. It is not the nice guy who brings about real social change. Nice guys look nice because they are conforming. It is the bad guys who only look nice a hundred year later that are the real dynamic force in social evolution. Definition of 'Culture': A culture is an evolved static pattern of quality capable of dynamic change. We may think that everything we say and everything we do is "us", but actually the language we use and the values we have are the result of thousands of years of evolution. It's all a kind of debris of pieces that seem unrelated but actually are part of a huge fabric. The static patterns which held one level of organization together are often the same patterns that another level of organization must fight to maintain its own existence. It is out of the struggle between conflicting static patterns that the concepts of good and evil arise. Vice is the conflict between biological quality and social quality. Sex, alcohol, gambling, etc... feel good but they threaten society. This century is about the struggle between intellectual and social patterns. The intellect is not an extension of society, anymore than society is an extension of biology. The intellect is going its own way, and in doing so is at war with society , seeking to subjugate society. A society that weakens its people physical health endangers its stability, so an intellectual pattern that weakens the health of its social base endangers its stability. Biology versus Intellect: Lila is a judge of hundreds and thousands of years standing. In the eyes of this biological judge, his intelligence is some kind of deformity. She rejected it. It was not what she wanted. Just as the patterns of intelligence have a sense of disgust about the body functions, the patterns of biology, so do Lila's patterns of biology , her cells, have a disgust about the patterns of intelligence. They don't like it, it turns them off. Hell: Zen hell is of this world, right here and now, in which life is all around you, but you cannot participate in it. You see others bathing in the life all around them, but you have to drink it through a straw never getting enough. Mirroring Mirrors: Each person you come to, is a different mirror. And since you are just another person like them, may be you are just another mirror. And there is no way of knowing if your own view of yourself is just another distortion. May be mirrors is all you ever get. First your parents, then your friends, then your bosses, officials, priests, teachers, writers ...and what controls all these mirrors is the culture, the giant, the gods. And if you ran afoul of the culture, it starts throwing up reflections that try to destroy you, or will withdraw the mirrors and try to destroy you that way. The Moth Syndrome: Celebrity can become some sort of narcosis of mirrors , where you have to have more and more supportive reflections just to stay satisfied. Mirrors take over your like , and soon you don't know how you are. Moths aren't flying toward the flame. The moth is really trying to fly straight. Moths steer by keeping a constant angle with the sun or the moon. Which works because the sun or moon are so far away that a constant angle with them is virtually a straight line . But with a close up light bulb. A constant angle makes a circle. That is what keeps the moths spinning around and around and around. What is killing the moth is not a dynamic aspiration for a higher life. It is a static biological pattern of value. They can't change. That was the feeling he got from this city. He was like a moth in danger of drifting in circles around some kind of celebrity orbit. May be at some prehistoric time before celebrity become important people could trust their natural desires to keep them going in straight forward direction. But one the artificial sun of celebrity was invented, they started going in circles. Brains were capable of handling physical and biological patterns in prehistoric times. But a brain is dynamic enough to handle modern social patterns? That was the Victorian stance: affecting some romantic notion of quality without intellectual penetration of the meaning of quality. Continue