Justin Foeppel

The connections we make as we read are amazing and never cease surprising me! You may be thinking ‘Why should I care?’ In what follows I will tell you why.

Recently, I made a mental connection while reading Lila by Robert M. Pirsig between this book, some words from Charlie Munger, and the racial unrest which escalated during the summer of 2016 near when I began writing this piece. First, the excerpt from Lila.

Phaedrus remembered a conversation in the early sixties with a University of Chicago faculty member who was moving out of the Woodlawn neighborhood next to the university. He was moving because criminal blacks had moved in and it had become too dangerous to live there. Phaedrus had said he didn’t think moving out was any solution.

The professor had blown up at him. “What you don’t know!” he had said. “We’ve tried everything! We’ve tired workshops, study groups, councils. We’ve spent years in this. If there’s anything we’ve missed we don’t know what it is. Everything has failed.”

Phaedrus had had no answer at the time, but he had one now. The idea that biological crimes can be ended by intellect alone, that you can talk crime to death, doesn’t work. Intellectual patterns cannot directly control biological patterns. Only social patterns can control biological patterns, and the instrument of conversation between society and biology has always been a policeman or a soldier and his gun. All the laws of history, all the arguments, all the Constitutions and the Bills of Rights and Declarations of Independence are nothing more than instructions to the military and police. If the military and police can’t or don’t follow these instructions properly they might as well have never been written.

Phaedrus now thought that part of the professor’s paralysis was a commitment to the twentieth century intellectual doctrines, in which his university has had a prominent role. A second part of the paralysis probably came from the fact that the criminals were black. If it had been a group of trash whites moving into the neighborhood, robbing and raping and killing, the response would have been much fiercer, but when whites denounced blacks for robbing and raping and killing they left themselves open to the charge of racism. In the atmosphere of public opinion of that time no intellectual dared to open himself to the charge of being a racist. Just the thought of it shut him up tight. Paralysis.

That charge is part of the paralysis of this city here. Right now.

The root of the “racism” charge goes all the way back to square one, to the subject-object metaphysics wherein man is an object who possesses a set of properties called a culture. A subject-object metaphysics lumps biological man and cultural man together as aspects of a single molecular unit. It goes on to reason that because it is immoral to speak against a people because of their genetic characteristics it is therefore also immoral to speak against a people because of their cultural characteristics. The anthropological doctrine of cultural relativism reinforces this. It says you cannot judge one culture in terms of the values of another. Science says there is no morality outside of cultural morality, therefore any moral censorship of minority patters of crime in this city is itself immoral. That is the paralysis.

By contrast the Metaphysics of Quality, also going back to square one, says that man is composed of static levels of patterns of evolution with a capability of response to Dynamic Quality. It says that biological patterns and cultural patterns are often grouped together, but to say that a cultural pattern is an integral part of a biological person is like saying the Lotus 1-2-3 program is an integral part of an IBM computer. Not so. Cultures are not the source of all morals, only a limited set of morals. Cultures can be graded and judged morally according to their contribution to the evolution of life.

A culture that supports the dominance of social values over biological values is an absolutely superior culture to one that does not, and a culture that supports the dominance of intellectual values over social values is absolutely superior to one that does not. It is immoral to speak against a people because of the color of their skin, or any other genetic characteristic because these are not changeable and don’t matter anyway. But it is not immoral to speak against a person because of his cultural characteristics if those cultural characteristics are immoral. These are changeable and they do matter.

Blacks have no right to violate social codes and call it “racism” when someone tries to stop them, if those codes are not racist codes. That is slander. The fight to sustain social codes isn’t a war of blacks vs. whites or Hispanics vs. blacks, or poor people vs. rich people or even stupid people against intelligent people, or any other of all the other possible cultural confrontations. It’s a war of biology vs. society.

It’s a war of biological blacks and biological whites against social blacks and social whites. Genetic patterns just confuse the matter. And this is a war in which intellect, to end the paralysis of society, has to know whose side it is on, and support that side, never undercut it. Where biological values are undermining social values, intellectuals must identify social behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and support it all the way without restraint. Intellectuals must find biological behavior, no matter what its ethnic connection, and limit or destroy destructive biological patterns with complete moral ruthlessness, the way a doctor destroys germs, before those biological patterns destroy civilization itself.

Robert M. Pirsig in Lila: An Inquiry into Morals pp. 310-311

This is fascinating in light of the many posts on social media from friends on both sides of the political aisle regarding the Black Lives Matter movement and all the unrest that is going on in the United States as a result of what appears in the news media to be systemic racial prejudice. Now, as I’m reading I think of another passage I’ve heard and read multiple times over the years. This time, by Charlie Munger:

You find an isolated example of a little old lady in the See’s Candy Company, one of our subsidiaries, getting into the till.  And what does she say?  “I never did it before, I’ll never do it again.  This is going to ruin my life.  Please help me.”  And you know her children and her friends, and she’d been around 30 years and standing behind the candy counter with swollen ankles.  When you’re an old lady it isn’t that glorious a life.  And you’re rich and powerful and there she is: “I never did it before, I’ll never do it again.”  Well how likely is it that she never did it before?  If you’re going to catch 10 embezzlements a year, what are the chances that any one of them — applying what Tversky and Kahneman called baseline information — will be somebody who only did it this once?  And the people who have done it before and are going to do it again, what are they all going to say?  Well in the history of the See’s Candy Company they always say, “I never did it before, and I’m never going to do it again.”  And we cashier them.  It would be evil not to, because terrible behavior spreads.

Remember…what was it?  Serpico?  I mean you let that stuff…you’ve got social proof, you’ve got incentive-caused bias, you’ve got a whole lot of psychological factors that will cause the evil behavior to spread, and pretty soon the whole damn…your place is rotten, the civilization is rotten.  It’s not the right way to behave.  And I will admit that I have…when I knew the wife and children, I have paid severance pay when I fire somebody for taking a mistress on an extended foreign trip.  It’s not the adultery I mind, it’s the embezzlement.  But there, I wouldn’t do it like Gutfreund did it, where they’d been cheating somebody else on my behalf.  There I think you have to cashier.  But if they’re just stealing from you and you get rid of them, I don’t think you need the last ounce of vengeance.  In fact, I don’t think you need any vengeance.  I don’t think vengeance is much good.

Charlie Munger in “The Psychology of Human Misjudgment” ca. June 1995

What’s the connection? Well, in both cases we have authors talking about authorities policing others’ behaviors. In the first case, race is shot through the discussion. In the second, it is not. But, we have the same conclusion: The moral thing for the authority to do is put an end to behavior that is supportive of biological value patterns and destructive of social value patterns. It’s important to keep in mind that this conclusion is carried out from policeman to citizen and within the police force ranks, chief to captain, etc. Good policing requires police supervision that supports police men and women who execute their responsibilities consistent with enforcing law and inconsistent with abusing power.

Remember, you were wondering why you should care? If you haven’t found your own reasons by now, here’s why. First, we have a logical framework from two sources which directs our thinking. We don’t have to take sides supporting or not supporting Black Lives Matter or the police. We simply can state that we support whatever behavior is more pro-social and we have a framework for what that looks like. Second, and more importantly to you and me, we have witnessed the power of reading consistently over many years. Yesterday’s refrain to take back into life was ‘just write.’ Today’s refrain is ‘just read.’

Justin Foeppel