[Platt to Chris] If you find it less than satisfactory, you are probably of a mind that considers the average individual too stupid to know what's good, or at least that you know better what's good than she does.
[Arlo] In ZMM, the same book you draw your quote from, Pirsig talks about the cultural blindedness of a people conditioned not to see Quality. "The result is rather typical of modern technology, an overall dullness of appearance so depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just makes it all the worse. Now it's not just depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two together and you get a pretty accurate basic description of modern American technology: stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic stylized toys for stylized children, who at Christmas and birthdays are in style with their stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. It's the style that gets you; technological ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in an effort to produce beauty and profit by people who, though stylish, don't know where to start because no one has ever told them there's such a thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style." (ZMM) He continues, "Along the streets that lead away from the apartment he can never see anything through the concrete and brick and neon but he knows that buried within it are grotesque, twisted souls forever trying the manners that will convince themselves they possess Quality, learning strange poses of style and glamour vended by dream magazines and other mass media, and paid for by the vendors of substance." (ZMM) Thus Pirsig felt that the problems in the West could only be solved by a "Quality" Enlightenment, a metaphysical revolution that would open the eyes of the masses to see Quality. Are we beyond that point? Are the masses now seeing Quality? Near the end of ZMM, Pirsig comments, "I know what it is! We've arrived at the West Coast! We're all strangers again! Folks, I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. The funeral procession! The one everybody's in, this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style of life that thinks it owns this country. We've been out of it for so long I'd forgotten all about it." (ZMM) Are we still in that gumption trap? Are we "grooving it"? ""Getting with it," "digging it," "grooving on it" are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The owner of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The user of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phædrus' definition, it has no Quality." (ZMM) What changes in production and consumption have occurred since ZMM's time? Are our products today built in shops where identity is fostered? Do our modern factories no longer divide "art" from "manufacture"? "The ancient Greeks never separated art from manufacture in their minds, and so never developed separate words for them." (ZMM) In short, have we overcome Pirsig's acknowledgement that, "The real ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use." (ZMM). Because I would imagine when we, as a people, achieve this Quality Enlightenment, our world will be drastically different. And the so-called "evil" social programs the people have enacted to stave off the ills of an unregulated market based on an SOM Weltanschauung, will likely no longer be needed. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
