Platt and all:
Here are my thoughts on Pirsig's letter to Bo.
PLATT:
For those who haven�t yet read Pirsig�s letter to Bodvar Skutvik
now on MOQ.org, please do so. There you�ll find more challenging
ideas in five or six paragraphs than in many books.
Here�s a statement from Pirsig that I found especially provocative:
PIRSIG:
�The question, �How do you justify the statement that Quality
equals reality?� was the best one. The correct answer from the
MOQ perspective is, �by the harmony it produces,� but this answer
is only for people who already understand the MOQ. Those who
don�t can�t see the harmony and for them the answer is
meaningless.�
And later he elaborates on this:
PIRSIG:
... we are seeing a kind of quality blindness that musicians call a
"tin ear" of singers who keep sharping and flattening notes without
knowing they are doing it. Many people just do not "see" quality at the
same time they are obviously seeing it, in the same way that tin- eared
people do not "hear" harmony at the same time they are obviously hearing
it.
I agree it's provocative, to say the least. He's saying certain
people are incapable of seeing the harmony that quality produces, in much
the same way tin eared people can't hear the harmony in music. These
quality-blind people are, not coincidently, his critics. The charge of
quality blindness is ridiculous in Struan's case. He's a jazz musician,
for heaven's sake. But for Pirsig it's the easy way out - insult your
critics instead of engaging them. Treat the dissenters as "enemies" and
your disciples as "friends". Paint yourself as the besieged, misunderstood
contrarian. It's sad, really. It makes me sad. Where is all the harmony in
these attitudes?
If the only people who can truly "see" quality are those who understand
and agree with MOQ, where does that leave the rest of us quality-blind
folk? Does that mean only a handful of people can understand reality,
despite the irony that MOQ says reality is right in front of your face?
And how are these numbers an improvement over the handful of physicists
who he claims understand reality in his SOM straw-world?
What really irks me is that he has taken a wonderful concept, quality, a
thing I deeply cherish, and he's mixed it all up with mysticism, dualism,
and teleological explanations in such a way that each is tied inexorably.
In order to swallow MOQ these all have to go down.
I've had a sense for some time that quality was initially a subject he
intended to use as a hook to attract people into his corner (because,
after all, who is against quality?), and then once he had them
there, to mix in this other stuff and make it all sound reasonable and
consistent with quality. This sense was strengthened when I read his reply
to one of the email questions at the end of the 25 Anniversary edition of
ZMM, where he was asked to comment on the possible political reactions to
the narrator's claim that "we need a return to individual integrity,
self-reliance and old-fashioned gumption", all obviously high-quality
attributes. His reply, in part, was:
PIRSIG:
Nobody takes the stump to shout "What we need is more dull conformity!"
The narrator is coming up with a cliche here because the narrator is
something of a politician himself. He is speechifying a platitude to
win general approval of the audience.
If someone still balks at his ideas after reading his books, RPM could
shame him with, "Well you don't get quality then, do you?" See how this
works?
Glenn
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