Excerpts From The book Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals, By Robert Pirsig Intellect versus Society: The metaphysics of substance failed to illuminate the gulf between ourselves and them, because it regards both society and intellect as possessions of biology. It says society and intellect don't have substance, so they can't be real. In a value metaphysics in the other hand, biology, society and intellect are all patterns of value. It makes it possible to see that there is a conflict between intellect and society that is just as fierce as the conflict between society and biology, or the conflict between biology and death. Biology beat death billions of years ago. Society beat biology thousands of years ago. But intellect and society are still fighting it out. And that is the key to an understanding of both the Victorians and the Twentieth Century. What distinguishes the pattern of values called Victorian from the culture of today, Is that the Victorians were the last people to believe that patterns of intellect are subordinate to patters of society. What held the Victorian pattern together was a social code, not an intellectual one. The one dominating question of the post world war one period by contrast is: are the social patterns of our world going to run our intellectual life or is our intellectual life going to run the social patterns. Cultures are unique historical patterns which contain their own values and should not be judged in terms of values of other cultures. The metaphysics of quality supports the dominance of intellect over society. It says intellect is a higher level of evolution than society therefore it is at a higher moral level . It is better for an idea to destroy a society than for a society to destroy an idea. However, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society has a defect in it. The defect is that from the prospective of subject - object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is nothing morally wrong with being lazy. Nothing morally wrong with lying, with theft, with suicide, murder, genocide...Nothing is right and nothing is wrong because there are no morals. Just functions. The scientific test of a vice is not that society approve or disapprove. The test should is it rational or irrational. Drinking that causes car accidents, or loss of work or family is irrational, because it does not contribute the greatest satisfaction of the greatest number. In the other hand drinking is not irrational if it produces mere social and intellectual relaxation. That type of drinking is not a vice. The same test can be applied to gambling, swearing, lying, slandering. It is the intellectual aspect not the social aspect that dictates the answer. The moral values of American Indians: Kindness to children , maximum freedom, openness of speech, love of simplicity, affinity for nature. Victorian language was a ornamental as their wall paper, full of involution and curlicues and floral patterns that had no practical function what so ever and distracted you from what ever content was there. The result of the new social looseness (intellect over society) weren't turning out as predicted . Something was wrong. The world was no doubt in better shape intellectually and technologically , but despite that somehow the quality of it was not good. The pursuit of happiness seems to have become like the pursuit of some scientifically created mechanical rabbit that moves ahead at whatever speed it is pursued. If you ever did catch it for a few moments, it had a peculiar synthetic, technological taste that made the whole pursuit seem senseless. The social chaos of this 20th century can be relieved if we see society as the middle turn in a clash between two codes of morals: society versus biology code- and intellect versus society. In the battle of society against biology the new 20th century intellectuals have taken biology's side. Society can handle biology alone by means of prisons, and guns, and police and the military. But when intellectuals in control of society take biology's side against society, then society is caught in a cross fire from which it has no protection . There are actually five codes of morals: inorganic chaotic, biological inorganic, social biological, intellectual social, dynamic static. Good is a noun: The dynamic static code says what is good in life isn't defined by society or intellect or biology. What is good is freedom from domination by any static pattern. But that freedom doesn't have to be obtained by destruction of the patterns themselves. The Sixties and the Hippies: The hippie revolution was a moral revolution against society and intellectuality. In the 20's it has been thought that society was the cause of man's unhappiness and the intellect could cure it. But in the 60's it was thought that society and the intellect was the cause of man's unhappiness and transcendence of both would cure it. What the intellectuals of the 20's have fought to create, the flower children of the 60's fought to destroy: Drugs that destroyed one's ability to reason were a sacrament. Oriental religions that Zen and Vedanta that promised release from the prison of intellect were gospel. By the end of the 60's the intellectualism of the 20's found itself in an impossible trap. If it continued to advocate freedom from Victorian social restraint, it would get more hippies who are carrying anti-Victorianism to an extreme. If in the other hand it advocated constructive social conformity in opposition to the hippies, it will get more Victorians in the form of the reactionary right. Continue