Quality in the
New Millennium
By Richard Loggins
Every so often in the course of human affairs, a man
(usually it is a man) steps forward on the stage of life and
outshines everyone around him and becomes a star in his own
time. Think of people like Sigmund Freud, Babe Ruth, and
Albert Einstein. In another dimension of fame there are people
like Vincent van Gogh and William Shakespeare, who toiled with
little or no recognition during their lifetimes but achieved
great status after passing away. The Quality of their legacy
takes a little longer to latch, but once having done so,
spreads like wildfire! With the help of patrons and champions
of their work, their names have endured in the annals of human
history.
There is a book called 1000 Years, 1000 people by Gottlieb et.
al. that ranks the people who most shaped the last millennium.
There is one man not on that list who should be in the top 5
on the list for the next millennium, and belongs right there
in the ranks with Columbus, Newton, and Galileo when all is
said and done. That man is Robert M. Pirsig. Through no fault
of his own, Mr. Pirsig's life spans millennia, and his life's
work, like that of Van Gogh, has not been appreciated in his
own lifetime by the important people whose opinions entrust
fame. In Van Gogh's case, art critics banned his work from
major art exhibitions. His painting was considered not very
good, even bad. It didn't matter that lay people liked or
didn't like his work. If the paintings were not given the mark
of approval by art critics, there would not only be little
chance for eternal fame, but also no way his work could reach
the masses. It took the tireless work of his family,
particularly his brother, to finally get him recognized.
Mr. Pirsig does not have the accessibility problem. Walk into
any bookstore in the world and you will find Pirsig's books on
a shelf in either the Philosophy, Self Help, or New Age
sections. What Pirsig's philosophy so sorely lacks right now
is the approval of academics, because it is this writer's
contention that in Pirsig's case the vaunted fame that
transcends mere celebrity will quickly follow from that, and
be cemented within 25-50 years. In this light, professional
philosopher Galen Strawson's short and mostly dismissive 1991
review of Lila – a hard blow to be sure - ended with what
could well be a prophetic remark: "But perhaps I am trapped in
some dead theoretical outlook; perhaps Pirsig won't be
properly understood for 50 years yet."
It is important to realize, though, that the academic approval
that Pirsig needs is not just a means toward social
advancement. Indeed, I don't think Pirsig would care for that
part of it very much. But there is more at stake here than a
ticket for fame. These approvals, these evaluations, as it
were, are central to Pirsig's own philosophy. What reaches the
core of his notion of Quality is not the subjects and objects
of the world, nor is it the intellectual descriptions and
explanations that produce them. The core of Quality is the
evaluations and decisions that take place along the way.
Consequently, and perhaps paradoxically, if Pirsig's ideas are
evaluated negatively by academic standards, there is no
getting away from the implication, even from within his own
system, that Quality is low-quality. My personal view is that,
when Quality is properly understood, this will not be the
outcome. However, it also says that a lot is riding on these
academic evaluations.
Luckily, the climate for Pirsig's ideas is slowly starting to
change and you can almost feel it in the air. Just as the
impressionist movement was gaining steam in the latter third
of the 19th century, with the likes of Van Gogh, Monet and
Cezanne, Pirsig's contemporaries, such as Northrop, Foucault,
Chalmers, Wilber, and Kuhn, are plowing under sections of
philosophy and science so that the ideas and consequences of
Quality have a favorable place to take root. The brittle
layers of rationality that have built up and dominated thought
for well over 1000 years are finally cracking under their own
weight, and a new era is dawning when you can wake up in the
morning and feel no guilt about believing that what's true is
what's good, and not the other way around.
Beyond these trailblazers we have those people who have
supported Mr. Pirsig directly and who will continue to support
his ideas into the 21st century. First and foremost of course
is Dr. McWatt, who I'm sure will gently direct his future
students toward a Quality centered life. His doctoral thesis
is the first ever written about the Metaphysics of Quality.
Next is Horse, whose quiet leadership and private funds have
kept the discussion going at moq.org all these years. Next is
Dan Glover, whose diligence has spawned an annotated account
of this internet discussion group called Lila’s Child. And
finally, the people who in my view have best communicated the
Quality message on this group (in addition to those just
mentioned): Paul Turner, Mark Maxwell, David Buchanan and –
though absent today - Platt Holden.
My own path to Quality was seeded some 15 years ago. This was
around the time I had bought my first house and car. The
driving route I regularly took out of my development took me
past a modest suburban home, where on more occasions than
seemed normal by chance, I would encounter a middle-aged woman
in front of it, wielding a push broom, grooming the street.
Being handy with numbers, I made some assumptions and
calculated that there was a 90% chance that she spent some
time sweeping each and every day and only a 60% chance that
she skipped a day. I could think of no reason why she felt
compelled to do this so often, and thinking her slightly
crazy, I dubbed her the Mad Sweeper and laughed at her. It was
only after this, though, that I consciously started to
recognize how good I felt myself when I vacuumed my carpets
back home, or dusted furniture. I didn't know why, and no one
else seemed to know, either. I experimented by vacuuming
carpets that were clean to begin with, and I got the same
surge of satisfaction and goodness as before! Even when a
carpet looks clean I figured that I was still vacuuming hard
to see dust from its surface. What was so awful about dust, I
wondered, that I should feel so good about getting rid of it?
I didn't know if I was as crazy as the Mad Sweeper, but I know
this: I stopped laughing at her.
I had no answers until I stumbled across Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance in 1994. It was a revelation. And then
Lila. Another revelation! One of its insights is that our
culture takes the experience we get from sweeping and dusting
and, pardon the pun, sweeps it under the rug. In an amoral,
scientific culture there is no wondering why we should feel
good about sweeping and dusting. The culture provides us with
vacuum cleaners to roll on our floors and Endust to spray on
our rags, but says nothing about why cleaning is valuable to
us. In fact the culture is so broken that it doesn't even have
the wherewithal to admit that this failure is a shortcoming.
It's just ignored. We dust and we sweep. We sweep and we dust.
It's just something we automatons supposedly do. But what the
Metaphysics of Quality does is re-center our activities on
their Quality. We sweep and dust because we like to do it. We
are driven by the liking. The fact that sometimes dirt is
removed is a happy consequence, but it's not the primary
thing.
I have been diagnosed with what the medical profession calls
"neural ampblyopia". This is a rare condition that affects my
binocular vision. Doctors can find nothing physically wrong
with my eyes. It's a problem with my "brain", they say. It is
in some ways related to dyslexia, and indeed I have a learning
disability as well that causes me to transpose words seen in
print and spoken in conversation. (Strangely, the
transposition does not happen with numbers, or strings of
numbers.) I also am poor at grammar, spelling, and sentence
construction. This essay was composed with a great deal of
effort and a lot of assistance.
Because of my problems with word transpositions, I have
trained myself to check and double-check what is being
communicated so I can ascertain the highest Quality meaning.
Note that this is different from the correct meaning. To see
what I'm getting at, take this line from the famous 1950's
sitcom, the “Honeymooners”, uttered by sewer worker Ed Norton
as he is thoroughly enjoying a pizza: "If pizzas were manhole
covers, the sewer would be a paradise". Most people laugh at
the joke without even realizing that he blew the line, but I
might hear the sentence as it was intended and laugh harder
and sooner. Then again, I might have heard that "paradise
would be a sewer", so I have to mentally try a number of
different combinations until I get something that seems
plausible. This slows me down during conversation and to many
people I appear confused or dull-witted.
I mention all this only because of the high Quality-attraction
I experience when there is ambiguity in the semantics. For
example, when I first read Foucault I couldn't tell if he was
saying that 'knowledge is power' or that 'power is knowledge'.
Was Pirsig saying that 'people have Quality' or that 'Quality
has people'? In cases such as these where I guess incorrectly,
I often become dazzled when upon reflection I realize that the
thinker is creating alternative realities that seem to have
higher Quality than the common sense way of thinking.
The "problem" with my binocular vision causes me to see the
world in the fractal isthmus that lies between the second and
third dimension. I almost literally experience Wilber's
flatland. Foreground and background appear indistinguishable.
I have to use other visual clues to estimate the relative
distance of objects. My "deficiency" is improved, however, by
wearing tinted eyeglasses; the left lens is tinted blue and
the right red. Further, I have lost the ability to focus my
visual attention. Instead, the entire panorama of my visual
field, from left to right and top to bottom, appears to me
with equal intensity of attention. I can have trouble finding
things, like my wallet, even when it is right there in front
of me.
The hair on my arms stood on end the day I first read the
Pirsig passage that explains how the culture builds in the
primacy of subjects and objects into our intellectual eyeware.
I understand that 'eyeware' here is a metaphor for most, but
for me the situation was much more than that. I literally
don't see objects, at least not like everyone else.
My doctors had treated my word transposition problems and my
vision problems as separate biological problems, but after
studying carefully what Pirsig has to say, I've come to a
different conclusion: they are not separate and they are not
biological. Because my kind of dyslexia causes me to never
trust the accuracy of ideas transmitted to me, forcing me to
evaluate ideas and their linguistic variants ad nauseam, I've
never been completely certain about what the culture expects
me to believe. I have been forced to consider many more ideas
than the average person. Most of these ideas are untenable,
but a surprising number I've kept and incorporated into a
loosely latched kind of common sense. As a result, I am not
nearly as inured to the subject/object culture as I could be,
and this breakdown of static patterns has been dramatic enough
as to also affect my vision. I have a strong conviction now
that, at least visually, I am perceiving reality in its more
primary state, a flattened, almost timeless landscape without
the tunnel vision of normal sight.
Pirsig's studied consideration of what is primary is perhaps
his greatest contribution to modern thought. It is more
far-reaching than even the Copernican revolution, because
whereas Copernicus' ideas compel us to change the way we
perceive ourselves with respect to everything else in the
cosmos, Pirsig's ideas simply change everything. An example
will help clarify this.
Alphonse Laveran and Sir Ronald Ross were awarded separate
Nobel Prizes for their contributions to the creation of the
static pattern called Malaria. In 1880, Laveran was the first
to get the idea that parasites were causing the black bile
seen in the autopsied corpses of people who had died of
disease. (It shouldn't be overlooked that Laveran was
fortunate that European culture by this time had accepted the
use of microscopes as empirical devices.) Ross's contribution
in 1897 was to link these parasites to those found in the gut
tissue of mosquitoes, establishing an idea about the source of
the disease's transmission.
The Metaphysics of Quality submits that before these men had
had these Quality insights, malaria did not exist. That is,
prior to this, 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. Everyday reality is built up from an evolving set of
ideas that latch into static patterns, guided eternally by the
undefined Quality. The high quality pattern of time, as the
Metaphysics of Quality currently understands it, does not
allow new ideas to be retroactive or flow backward. It would
be silly to think, for example, that malaria existed prior to
the existence of mosquitoes. Nevertheless, the countervailing
opinion of Western culture, to which its inhabitants have
endured a prolonged subjection, is that malaria was
discovered, and so it is not surprising that any opinion in
opposition to this sounds nutty at first.
Pirsig has also made a major contribution to the field of
ethics. For the first time, moral dilemmas can be adjudicated
by a decision theoretic procedure as prescribed by the
Metaphysics of Quality. In a nutshell, each side of a moral
issue is treated as a static pattern of value either belonging
to or being dominated by one of either the inorganic (lowest),
biological, social, or intellectual (highest) levels. Each
pattern is then said to be assigned to the level to which it
belongs or is dominated by. The pattern assigned to the higher
level has moral precedence. This method works, and works well,
because it uses an objective framework for dealing with
morality and not, as is all too often the case, a prejudicial
one. As such, strong consideration should be given for its use
in courts to establish rules for international conduct in
times of conflict, in the boardroom to shape business ethics,
and to resolve the great social issues of our time, like
abortion, pornography, gun control and gay rights.
To understand how this works in practice, we might once again
consider Malaria, but this time, delve into the moral dilemma
imposed on society by a person infected with it. On the one
hand, we can let the parasites live and let the person die, or
on the other, we can kill the parasites and let the person
live. Which should we do? According to the Metaphysics of
Quality, we decide by assigning the parasites to the
biological level and the person to the intellectual level, and
since the intellectual level is higher on the evolutionary
scale than the biological level, the person takes precedence
over the parasites. Therefore, we should kill the parasites
and save the person. It should be noted that the numbers don't
matter here; even if we have to kill tens of millions of
parasites to save a single person, it is still moral according
to the Metaphysics of Quality. Suppose we don't know how to
kill the parasites? Would it be moral to pre-emptively kill
hundreds of thousands of mosquitoes since mosquitoes are the
carriers of the parasites? The Metaphysics of Quality answers
again with a definitive yes, because, just as for parasites,
mosquitoes are seen as a lower evolutionary form than humans.
To push the Metaphysics of Quality even further: Would it
matter if a large percentage of the indiscriminately destroyed
mosquitoes did not carry the Malaria? According to the
Metaphysics of Quality, it would absolutely not matter. As
long as destroying a lower pattern of value does not
indirectly or directly harm a pattern of value at a higher
level, the action is moral.
So far we have seen how higher morality is coincident with
higher evolutionary levels. Pirsig also noticed that patterns
at the lower levels are ancient, stable and steadfast, and
patterns at the highest level are relatively new, unstable and
short-lived. From this trend he postulates that reality is
evolving toward Quality, a state of being that is always new,
always changing, always creative, and more moral. It's easiest
to see this process happening at the intellectual level. Take
the intellectual pattern of value that says that the
continents and oceans of Earth were fixed in place soon after
the Earth began to cool some four billion years ago. This was
the Earth until about 1960, when a new idea called "plate
tectonics" took hold and displaced it by 1975. It had the
continents floating like plates upon the Earth's crust and
moving around the globe, alternately breaking apart and
colliding in inconceivably slow-paced events.
This example illustrates two things the Metaphysics of Quality
says about reality. The first is that ideas come into being
and displace other ideas in a relatively short period of time.
This confirms that the intellectual level is evolving quickly.
The second is that the displacing idea has higher Quality than
the displaced idea. Plate tectonics has higher Quality than
its predecessor because it describes the inorganic level as
being stable, as the Metaphysics of Quality says it must, but
not completely static. That is, the Metaphysics of Quality
would approve of an inorganic level that changed very slowly,
just as plate tectonics does.
I'd next like to touch on the issue of degeneracy and Quality,
because to the uninitiated it is hard to understand how these
two things could have anything to do with one another. In
fact, the best students of the Metaphysics of Quality have
difficulty distinguishing them. As Pirsig has noted about the
Hippie movement, sometimes it is easy to confuse degeneracy
and Quality in a Dynamic environment.
For a new example of this kind of thing consider the lifecycle
of an apple. For once, this is not Newton's apple, but a
non-famous apple on a non-famous apple tree. Here we have the
apple, a biological pattern of value, and in its own short
lifespan we see it reacting to Quality and bettering itself -
Dynamically evolving from small and sour tartness to big and
juicy sweetness - all in accord with the Metaphysics of
Quality's prescription for reality in microcosm. But that’s
not the end of it. It keeps evolving and changing and lo and
behold, it decays. It gets brown and mealy and soft at its
core and it spreads out like a cancer. Digestible only to the
maggot and odd worm, the apple has lost its quality as far as
people are concerned. But the apple is fine, thank you. Just
as Pirsig was at the apex of his Quality bliss in the most
degenerate throes of his insanity, the apple reacts to the
pure Quality more intensely as it rots, casting off its
material shackles as it returns to the undivided state. Put
another way, at the point where you have fallen into
degeneracy you no longer have Quality, but Quality has you.
Quality applies to all human pursuits and each and every one
of them is fundamentally mysterious. Many rationalists have
tried to show that it isn't but at its root it most certainly
is. I have a thin volume called The Elements of Style, by
Strunk and White, that illustrates these points nicely. The
book serves as a manual for writing effective English prose,
and Strunk expends all his pages explaining what is correct or
acceptable in English grammar and usage. For example, we are
told when to use the dash, colon, and parentheses; we are told
to put sentences in positive form; we are told to omit
needless words. We are told how to use specific words or to
avoid others: 'finalize' is a 'pompous, ambiguous verb', he
declares.
After Strunk died, the publisher of The Elements of Style
asked E. B. White to bring the book up to date for a new
edition. He modified some entries, but he also did something
quite extraordinary. He added a chapter at the end called "An
Approach to Style" that says something about writing that was
ignored in all the rest of the book. It contains a startling
admission:
[In this chapter] we leave solid ground. Who can confidently
say what ignites a certain combination of words, causing them
to explode in the mind? Who knows why certain notes in music
are capable of stirring the listener deeply, though the same
notes slightly rearranged are impotent. These are high
mysteries, and this chapter is a mystery story, thinly
disguised.
It is thinly disguised because later in this chapter he asks
the reader to 'write with nouns and verbs', 'revise and
rewrite', and 'avoid the use of qualifiers', falling back into
the Strunkian mode that typifies the rest of the book. But
before those relapses he explodes into what must have been a
cathartic confession for him, one that undermines every
previous page and exposes the complete failure of the analytic
approach to writing.
There is no satisfactory explanation of style, no infallible
guide to good writing, no assurance that a person who thinks
clearly will be able to write clearly, no key that unlocks the
door, no inflexible rule by which the young writer may shape
his course. He will often find himself steering by the stars
that are disturbingly in motion.
To prove that writing is high mystery, White takes a famous
phrase by Thomas Paine and tries to improve upon it. I'd like
to do the same but with a different phrase, an epigram by
Plato that has endured for over two millennia and is itself
pertinent to the topic at hand. Readers of Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance know it well:
"And what is good, Phædrus, and what is not good - need we ask
anyone to tell us these things?"
Let's try some variations:
• Do we need to ask someone to know if something is good,
Phædrus?
• Phædrus, need we find out what is and isn't good by asking
somebody?
• Phædrus, no one need tell you what is good or bad, because
you already know.
• Goodness is understood intuitively, Phædrus, not rationally.
It's immediately clear that none of these variations improve
on Plato. But it's not clear why. Indeed, each uses fewer
words than Plato's and avoids the dash, the punctuation mark
of last resort. Yet somehow each is shorter without being
pithy, and the words either lack the gentle rhetorical plea,
contain no poetic sway, or explain too much. White's
conclusion is as true for his variations as they are for mine:
'Each version is correct, and each, for some reason we can't
readily put our finger on, is marked for oblivion.'
As compared to the student of rationality, the student of
Quality is not disturbed when he must steer by stars set in
constant motion. To be disturbed by such a thing is to be
immoral. To miss out on the opportunity to be a creative,
Dynamic force in this life, is immoral. E. B. White is gone
now, but for at least a moment he could see through to the
truth of this moral struggle, and if there is a heaven, this
moment of honest acceptance probably landed him there. As for
William Strunk, his landing spot is less certain.
Conclusion
From the Mad Sweeper to E. B. White, from malaria to plate
tectonics to rotten apples, I hope this paper has demonstrated
the varied ways of experiencing Quality in the world, and has
led you to consider the possibility that the world is Quality
itself, every last bit of it.
Mr. Pirsig deserves a place in the pantheon of human history
for having the genius to see the world in a new way, a better
way than any previously conceived. The future holds promise.
With the Metaphysics of Quality as our moral guide, I see the
possibility for real peace and happiness, even though the
struggle with the motorcycle we call ourselves will persist. I
predict that this third thousand years of our calendar will
become known as the Millennium of Quality. Eventually, the
notion that the Quality idea is a metaphysics will be
forgotten as it enters the very fabric of thought.
Finally, from a personal standpoint, the reading of Zen and
the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and Lila were life-changing
experiences that literally transformed my visual handicaps
into intellectual gifts. You might not be surprized to know
then, that I no longer fret when I lose my car in a small
parking lot!
Acknowledgements
I'm truly grateful to Laura Sheltin,
Carmine Latucci, Karen Doherty and Anthony McWatt for
proofreading this essay with care to make countless corrections,
improvements, and suggestions. To my principal Robert Huston,
for giving me time off and to David Boyce for kindly reading my
paper at this conference.
To Robert Pirsig, always.
Bibliography
Giaschi, Deborah E.,Ph.D. Visual
Neuroscience Lab. [Online] Available
http://www.interchange.ubc.ca/giaschi/debbiecv.html
Glover, Dan. Lila’s Child.
Authorhouse. (January 1, 2003)
Gottlieb, Agnes et. al. 1,000 Years,
1,000 People: Ranking the Men and Women Who Shaped the
Millennium. Kodansha America (November 1, 1998)
Lambert, Paul Henri. “Malaria, Past and
Present”. [Online] Available
http://nobelprize.org/medicine/educational/malaria/readmore/history.html
McWatt, Anthony M. A Critical Analysis
of Robert Pirsig’s ‘Metaphysics of Quality’. [Online]
Available
http://www.robertpirsig.org/PhD.html (November,
2004)
Pirsig, Robert. Lila. Bantam
(November 1, 1992)
Pirsig, Robert. Zen and the Art of
Motorcycle Maintenance. Perennial Classics (October 1, 2000)
Strawson, Galen. “Lone Man on High Seas”.
[Online] Available
http://www.moq.org/forum/Strawson/strawson.html
Strunk, William and White, E. B.
The Elements of Style.
Allyn & Bacon; 3rd edition (June 21, 1995)
Uyeda, Seiya. The New View of the Earth.
W.H. Freeman and Co., 1978.
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