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 in 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 TM 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 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 is 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:
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.
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 surprised to know then, that I no longer fret when I lose my car in a small parking lot.
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.
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