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BOOK CLUB: Lila Part III (Patreon)

Published:
2022-08-24 21:03:22
Edited:
2024-02-16 16:50:01
Imported:
2026-06
Tags:

Content

[Pictured: New York City, Manhattan in 1990]

This is a discussion thread to post quotes/feelings/thoughts on the third part of Lila: An Inquiry Into Morals.

Lila and Phaedrus arrive in NYC to a frenzy of conflict, celebrity and one N word with the hard R!

I guess I'll let you guys say what there is to say about the theatrical opening of Part III without my prescription, but I personally felt spine snapping whiplash at the transition between maybe the worst chapter of the book and one of my favourite chapters of anything I've ever read directly in sequence with each other.

--------------------THE GIANT-------------------------

Chapter 17 is all at once a love letter to and condemnation of New York, introducing politics, the dangers of dynamic/degenerate freedom, and the cosmic horror of The Giant. 

It seemed like he'd been running all his life.

It used to fill his dreams, night after night. When he was little it was a giant octopus that he'd seen in a cartoon movie. The octopus would come up on the beach and wrap its tentacles around him and squeeze him to death. He would wake up in the dark and think he was dead. Later it was a huge, shadowy, faceless giant who was coming to kill him. He would wake up afraid and then slowly realize that the giant wasn't real. He supposed everyone had dreams like that although he doubted whether most people had them so often. (p. 216)

People look upon the social patterns of the Giant in the same way cows and horses look upon a farmer; different from themselves, incomprehensible, but benevolent and appealing. Yet the social pattern of the city devours their lives for its own purposes just as surely as farmers devour the flesh of farm animals. A higher organism is feeding upon a lower one and accomplishing more by doing so than the lower organism can accomplish alone. (p. 217)

This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was creating something better than any biological organism could by itself achieve. (p. 220)

The "gods" were the static culture patterns. They never quit. After trying all these years to kill him with failure, now they were pretending they'd given up. Now they were going to try the other way, to get him with success. (p. 253)

--------------------ECONOMICS-------------------------

There are many, MANY conversations to be had about how the Metaphysics Of Quality maps on to capitalism vs. socialism. Pirsig's perspective a la 1991:

That's what neither the socialists nor the capitalists ever got figured out. From a static point of view socialism is more moral than capitalism. It's a higher form of evolution. It is an intellectually guided society, not just a society that is guided by mindless traditions. That's what gives socialism its drive. But what the socialists left out and what has all but killed their whole undertaking is an absence of a concept of indefinite Dynamic Quality. You go to any socialist city and it's always a dull place because there's little Dynamic Quality.

On the other hand the conservatives who keep trumpeting about the virtues of free enterprise are normally just supporting their own self-interest. They are just doing the usual cover-up for the rich in their age-old exploitation of the poor. Some of them seem to sense there is also something mysteriously virtuous in a free enterprise system and you can see them struggling to put it into words but they don't have the metaphysical vocabulary for it any more than the socialists do. (p. 220-221)

Forgiving discrepancies in definitions of capitalism and socialism as well as Pirsig's particular perspective, discussing economics and politics with the language of value and Quality is just... deeply stirring to me.

--------------------CELEBRITY-------------------------

Chapters 19-21 are also major highlights for me, analyzing Social Quality and the Anthropology of Celebrity in what I think is a profound and useful way.

Firstly I just think it's very sweet how generously and admirably Pirsig represents Robert Redford. This meeting almost definitely actually happened! Redford actually did get pretty close to producing the Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance movie. I love his framing device of making the story flash backs/ forwards from the rhetoric class wherein Phaedrus just stares at his students silently for an hour, pretty soon before he fully loses his mind.  Great adaptive choice!

Anyways, then he theorizes extensively:

Celebrity is to social patterns as sex is to biological patterns. Now he was getting it. This celebrity is Dynamic Quality within a static social level of evolution. It looks and feels like pure Dynamic Quality for a while, but it isn't. Sexual desire is the Dynamic Quality that primitive biological patterns once used to organize themselves. Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive patterns once used to organize themselves. That gives celebrity a new importance.

None of this celebrity has any meaning in a subject-object universe. But in a value-structured universe celebrity comes roaring to the front of reality as a huge fundamental parameter. It becomes an organizing force of the whole social level of evolution. Without this celebrity force, advanced complex human societies might be impossible. Even simple ones. (p. 256)

Anyway there it was: another whole field Phaedrus would never have time to study—the anthropology of celebrity. (p. 257)

We have whole departments of universities, in fact, whole colleges, devoted to the study of economics, that is fortune, but what do we have that is similarly devoted to the study of fame? (p. 258)

---------------------THE 20TH CENTURY-----------------------

There's also a kind of bold retelling of modern history, from Victorianism to WW1 to the roaring 20s and communism and fascism and I guess just about everything else... bold strategy, let's see if it pays off.

There's bits of this I think are reductive and bits I think are profound. As Pirsig said way back at the start of the book, it's kind of impossible to do anthropology without generalization about values, with a "subjective" story instead of with "Objective science." It strikes some parallels with Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death in ways I find true, particularly with how this so called Intellectual Quality, Capitalism(?), Technological Evolution, THE GIANT, has this Death Force feeling to it.

He didn't think you could say with certainty that people are any happier than they were during the Victorian era. This "pursuit of happiness" seemed to have become like the pursuit of some scientifically created, mechanical rabbit that moves ahead at whatever speed it is pursued. (p. 283)

Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land. This scientific, psychiatric isolation and futility had become a far worse prison of the spirit than the old Victorian "virtue" ever was. That streetcar ride with Lila so long ago. That was the feeling. There was no way he could ever get to Lila or understand her and no way she could ever understand him because all this intellect and its relationships and products and contrivances intervened. They had lost some of their realness. They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying:

PARADISE -> PARADISE -> PARADISE ->

but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself—and from each other. (p. 283)

This touches on a something I've alluded to in my Bo Burnham essay and elsewhere, that we could actually use a little bit of religious value in today's universe. I think it's good we shed oppressive religious systems, separation of church & state etc., and I also don't think it's possible to go backwards, stuffing things back into Pandora's box. However, old static patterns in the JUNK pile can and should be reincorporated into the future when they turn out to have dormant Dynamic Quality.

Them Victorians and the religious did have some juice in their unity and commitment to a slightly twisted and one sided sense of "community" and "morality". God, what I'd give for a slightly more unified sense of morality. It's all chaotic idea freedom with so little social quality on this damn internet thing.

I'm excited to read A Preface To Morals by Walter Lippman referenced in this text. It seems like a good old reputable source for this societal shift and loss (and touches on art, religion and morals, delicious).

----------------------LILA-----------------------

I'll leave interpretations of the last chapter to the room, but I do think in the initial Lila Stalking The Streets chapter (18) is very interesting in the way that Lila makes observations in her own voice that are very similar to some of the observations that Phaedrus makes, about New York and society and morality. 

There are a few examples of this, including the cynical reading of street signs while they walk around, the feelings about degeneracy (things getting worse) and the depressing class divide of the city, and even the people who on the surface are rude to you but are secretly good and on your side. But I particularly like them seeing eye to eye on what I'd call "The Conscious Conspiracy".

Sometimes people think there are some evil individual "men" somewhere who are exploiting them, some secret cabal of capitalists, or "400", or "Wall Street bankers", or WASPS or name-any-minority group that gets together periodically and has secret conferences on how to exploit them personally. These "men" are supposed to be enemies of "man." It gets confusing, but nobody seems to notice the confusion. - Phaedrus (p. 217)

When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what's going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what's going on. - Lila (p. 233)

Just the delayed, classic academic version then the immediate, romantic dynamic version.

---------------------------------------------

Anyways! Another wildly sprawling section! Spooky ending! Racism!

Phaedrus fuckery and Lila lamentations below!

Files

Comments

BrEaNs

-- General Comments -- I really liked the unity between the narrative and the philosophy in this section. Adison highlighted that Lila/Phaedrus's blow up parallels the philosophy about the loneliness pure intellectualism causes. I didn't notice this at first, but that observation makes me appreciate this section even more. I also loved everything with the moth. -- Me Trying to Understand Static Levels of Quality -- So I felt very confused with social and intellectual quality last section, and I think it would be fun to explore that more now that I have this section behind me. A key question I had was essentially why intellectual is above social. Part of the problem I was having was thinking about this too evolutionarily and too organizationally. For the static levels, you start with quality coalescing into quarks and stuff (base level of inorganic quality). Eventually the organization of inorganic stuff becomes so complex that the molecules made from quarks and electrons start serving as the building blocks for a fundamentally different form of static quality, life. Life exhibits new patterns not explainable in terms of inorganic forces. Just as inorganic patterns range in complexity from quarks to molecules, biological patterns range in complexity from cells to large animals. Groups of lifeforms then begin to constitute social patterns, which range in complexity from simple herds to massive cities or even countries. If each level is formed from units of the prior static level, then what is intellectual quality? Naively, it seems like intellectual quality should be groups of societies or something, but, if such a level of evolution is conceivable, it is seemingly beyond our comprehension. Intellectual quality being made from lower social patterns also seems to contradict our own personal experiences with intellectual quality. So this way of looking at MoQ that I was seemingly using is flawed. Here's my best guess at explaining how the MoQ works as of now: My cat was cuddling with me while I was reading Lila, and I asked myself, "do you have social quality?" Cats are notoriously solitary animals, but they do engage socially. Therefore, they must have social quality (if a social quality of a different form). I started thinking about my cat's behavior more deeply. She is not controlled by pure biology. She has to eat and poop, sure, but she also seems to love me, which isn't reducible to biological quality. Phoebe Bridgers has this comparison between her emotional dependence on someone disrespecting her and "a dog with a bird at your door" in Moon Song. The dog in this metaphor is behaving in accordance with its social quality pattern, but doesn't recognize that a dead bird will upset a human. It's a maladaptive social quality. What I'm getting at here is that social quality doesn't seem to be the emergent pattern of groups of people (like I thought) but, rather, a pattern of broadly defined culture that lives both inside and outside lifeforms. When my cat is territorial towards my cousin's kitten, my cat is displaying a social pattern that served feline species well in the past, but that is inappropriate now. I'm at a higher level of evolution than my cat because I can question things deeper and update my social patterns. That seems to be what intellectual quality "is", the ability to transcend raw culture by way of thought. -- Remaining Problems with Static Levels -- The above makes enough sense to me right now. But I think Phaedrus's perspective is flawed. It strikes me as obvious that a philosopher would think that intellectual thought is the height of quality. The philosophy is kinda self-serving in that way. -- Quotes -- "The gigantic power of socialism and fascism...is explain by a conflict of levels of evolution (313)" - This corresponds to my understanding of the history of evolutionary science well. Before Darwin, people thought the life was essentially immutable and ordered in a certain way, then Darwin introduced a biological theory powered by Dynamic Quality and that upset the social order. So conservatives and establishment types continually try to re-justify the old social order (e.g.: by eugenics, by hiding social patterns under the "objectivity" of AI). This also reminds me of a quote by Walter Benjamin (I think) that goes something like "Fascism is a politics of aesthetics". Fascism (and far right-wingness in general) has no intellectual merit and seek to maintain a purely social pattern that benefits a select few. "This 'pursuit of happiness' had seemed to have become a pursuit of some scientifically created, mechanical rabbit" - The fallacy science falls into when it discounts social quality for pure intellectual quality is that the social patterns still inform our evolution. Ignoring social patterns is like thinking that biology can transcend the laws of physics. It would be like trying to create a completely sexless society in service of Puritan social quality and in opposition to biological quality.

Chandler Sterling

Alright, it's about time I got to expand on my Quality is God throughline from ZMM. Dynamic Quality is God, and Static Quality is gods. That feels close. I still have a part to refine that into something a bit more specific, so take it as you will for now. Chapter 16: I found it interesting that Jamie describes Lila by saying that "Nobody's home." I'm of the opinion that this is indicating that Jamie was where the idea came from. It seems like that's the same thing as the "mixed up" feeling she says men try to put on her to bring her down to their level. "He had come to think of dreams as Dynamic perceptions of reality." (pg. 247) I think this is a beautiful explanation for the sense of wonder that dreams evoke, and especially the prophetic undertones they have in so much media. If Dynamic Quality is the cutting edge, then any consistently reliable access to it would feel like seeing just over the horizon. When discussing the ways farm animals view a farmer: "They would 'oink,' or 'cluck,' and he would come with food, so they probably thought he was some sort of servant." (pg. 248) A bad omen of how we discuss modern technology. We think it serves us, and yet, we constantly complain about how much it feels like we are in service of it. I'm not convinced AI is the next layer of evolution, but I do think that this is a sign that our Social tendencies being preyed upon by Intellectual degeneracy. It's Dynamic all right, but are we feeling the QUALITY??? Lila is rocking it as usual. I absolutely love the bit where she gets frustrated that pigeons are allowed in an area she isn't. A Dynamic moment of recognizing how arbitrary a Static Social rule can feel. She is on the same wavelength as Phaedrus, but they are coming from different directions. I think it's interesting that despite the rejection of the classic/romantic split as the best option, Phaedrus and Lila seem to stick on their sides pretty militantly. I don't think Pirsig does fully want to let go of that split, so even if it's not at the forefront, it is always around. Lila wandering through New York based purely on intuition reminded me of how Phaedrus was found wandering through the city when he was committed in ZMM. That aimless wandering seems to thematically indicate that someone is on the precipice of a really transcendental thought. Maybe the last part will deliver on that, or maybe I'm just seeing things again.

Just Connor

this book just keeps getting better (except for that one chapter)! the new york vibes are on point and the expansions on the bioloical v social and social v intellectual are really good. i don’t have much to add, but i’m just really loving this book. the object-subject slander goes hard once again and i can’t help but feel deep intellectual scars heal every time pirsig solves a problem with the moq. as cj said in the post, the reevaluation of church values with fair and reasonable consideration with the moq in mind is really important for me personally. one last thing is the bit on socialism lacking dynamic quality, and while yes i do sympathize heavily with socialism, i also grew up in post-communist russia and the vibes i get from the communist period is definitely that of the lack of dynamic quality, and it was nice to put a name to that feeling i’ve always had.

Adison

some more little moments i enjoyed to start off… “Everybody just sits around and talks nice now till their teeth drop out, if that’s what they want. But that isn’t what they want.” (chapter 16) “New York has always been going to hell but somehow it never gets there.” (chapter 17) “Like the kids. You don’t see them but they’re here, growing like mushrooms in secret places.” (chapter 17) (this one is too good!) “A teenage girl squealing in ecstasy at one of his lectures. A woman broadcasting executive grabbing his arm at lunch and saying, I must have you. I mean you. You’d think he was a sandwich or something.” (chapter 20) “It’s the clothes that make them think you’re not really there. If she took all her clothes off then they’d see she was really here.” (chapter 23) “The bastard. You shouldn’t say that about dead people but that’s what he was. She said it to him when he was alive. No reason to change now. It was the truth.” (chapter 23) now into the philosophy/heavier narrative stuff. i think a lot of this section set out to explore how quality exists inside of conflict, and how conflict can either destroy or elevate quality. narratively, both lila and phaedrus are recovering from their initial blowup and running around new york trying to process the fall out. this mirrors the philosophical discussion in which phaedrus explores the intellectual revolution of 20th century, the dissatisfaction it accidentally created, and the tension between the biological and intellectual forces of value. i also enjoyed all the moments with the moth. “From a Metaphysics of Quality’s point of view this devouring of human bodies is a moral activity because it’s more moral for a social pattern to devour a biological pattern than for a biological pattern to devour a social pattern. A social pattern is a higher form of evolution. This city, in its endless devouring of human bodies, was creating something better than any biological organism could by itself achieve. Well, of course! My God! Look at it! The power of this place! Fantastic! What individual work of art can come anywhere near to equaling it? Sure: dirty, noisy, rude, dangerous, expensive. Always has been and probably always will be. Always been a hell-hole if what you’re looking for is stability and serenity… But if you’re looking for stability and serenity, go to a cemetery, don’t come here! This is the most Dynamic place on earth!” (chapter 17) “This is really the central problem in the static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike and break all the rules alike? Freedoms that save the saviors also save the degenerates and allow them to tear the whole society apart. But restrictions that stop the degenerates also stop the creative Dynamic forces of evolution.” (chapter 20) “He really didn’t know enough about moths to know whether it was or not.It would probably just find another light somewhere, a searchlight probably, and really get zapped. But suppose it flew up from the balcony so high it got free of the lights of the city and saw the moon and began to fly straight. Would that make releasing it moral? What does the Metaphysics of Quality say to that? Better not to interfere. Maybe that moth had its own patterns to fulfill, and he had his, whatever they were. This Metaphysics of Quality, maybe. Certainly not running around like some Victorian romantic, shooing moths outdoors.” (chapter 21) (this makes me want to shoo as many moths outdoor as possible!) “They just hate it when people make love. And then they’ll go to a fist fight where somebody’s really hurt and all covered with blood and they’ll just love that. Or a war and stuff like that. They’re all mixed up and they’re trying to take it out on you so you get mixed up too. They want to mix you up just like they are and then you’ll be all mixed up too and then they’ll like you.” (chapter 23) “Everyone knew the cowboys of the silver screen had little to do with their actual counterparts, but it didn’t matter. It was the values, not the historical accuracy, that counted.” (chapter 22) i like that none of this tension was quite resolved. it’s like a cliff-hanger. i’m curious to see how we explore beyond this!

Eli

The narrative through-line of Lila is not doing it for me quite like the first book (plus the racism, big L) however I quite enjoyed the application of the Metaphysics off quality to politics. I also just accepted from the get-go that by “socialist” were talking USSR-era socialist ideals and nothing else. "You can see that where political institutions have improved throughout the centuries the improvement can usually be traced to a static-Dynamic combination: a king or constitution to preserve the static, and a parliament or jury that can act as a Dynamic eraser; a mechanism whereby new Dynamic insight can wipe out old static patterns without destroying the government itself." (chapter 17/pg 240) “This is really the central problem in the static-Dynamic conflict of evolution: how do you tell the saviors from the degenerates? Particularly when they look alike, talk alike, and break the rules alike? (241) Some real thought provoking stuff here! A fun thought experiment I did while reading Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance was to apply the logic of Quality to the interactions between people and systems of government. Traditional political science tends to look at the problem with a subject-object lens: There are the governed and the systems that govern them, and the interaction between the two creates a system of politics that is either good or bad or very often somewhere in the middle. Regardless, it has Quality. Flipping the script to how Pirsig might view it, the concept that that the Quality experience/interaction of a political system in motion is what creates the governed and the government (like how the Quality experience creates the subject and object ) puts a LOT more emphasis on qualitative study than quantitative. The question is no longer “what single system of institutions can do democracy the best” because there would be no “best system” because the system cannot be removed from the greater context of the people and the country and all that. Generally, it lends me to believe that a lot of the heavy focus on scientifically determining the best forms of government or what leads to the best outcomes may be an unproductive path for political science to take. I need to give the static-dynamic aspect a bit more time to bounce around in my head, but again very interesting stuff.

Eli

an additional thought: Institutions are static patterns of value while the interaction between political elites and said institutions is dynamic. Therefore the political whole can be subdivided into parts but only when viewed as a raw dynamic system can you truly understand how a political system works in a given case. Removing a piece from the dynamic whole renders it static and therefore less valuable in understanding it’s action/inaction/function.

Natthew Lee

Hello!! I live in NYC. I grew up in Denver, Colorado, and have lived in the city for 6 years. I read the first 50 pages of this while doing errands around the city. Was very weird reading Phaedrus’ list-poem descriptions of how the city overwhelms sensorily while also sitting on the subway and hearing the babies crying and phones ringing and people chatting around me irl. The City as The Giant feels like a very very true to life metaphor. I’ve talked about this before with friends of mine actually, how the city feels like a big organism, with the subways as its veins, and the people as the blood cells. When we talk about that it’s in a celebratory way, maybe because we feel it is a beautiful organism to be a part of? We feel it doesn’t degrade our individuality? Idk. Sometimes in the city you do feel The Giant, you do feel the tail wagging the dog. It’s such a bureaucracy with so many people that systems get a stranglehold and become much less personal. I read this section while at the DMV and I certainly felt The Giant there, standing in lines with no idea of how the system was shuttling me, being told I didn’t have the correct forms by the workers, but they wouldn’t help me out because it’s just how “The System” works. In smaller towns if you get to the DMV and you don’t have everything together, people have the time to help you out and walk you through it a bit more, cut some corners. If the situation with Lila having her money stolen at the diner happened in a rural diner, the waiter would not have been so callous to her. It’s the guilty-until-proven-innocent attitude he talks about. I even feel it working at a restaurant here. There’s just so many people, you really need to follow conversational scripts and keep your guard up or people can and will take advantage of you. The system needs to be more airtight than usual because there’s more people trying to claw at any loophole they can get to find a leg up. “That was it. He didn’t want to prove anything. Not to Rigel, not to Lila, not to her “friends” . . . God, what a shock that was. If those were her friends he sure didn’t want to meet her enemies.” (245) idk, I feel like what Jamie said wasn’t that bad? Maybe I’m just a confrontational person but it seems like this shows just how interpersonally fragile Phaedrus is. Could also just be his racism, as evinced by his comments later on about how he saw a black guy wearing Reeboks reading the newspaper in a coffee shop instead of pulling out a gun is the most novel shit he’s ever seen. Obviously the narrative later confirms his biases about Lila’s friends by showing Fatso stole from Lila, but from what he saw in that interaction there was nothing awful said. So much of what he said about the city feels very true: “New York dart-of-the-eyes” “People’s lives passing through each other without any contact at all” “Nobody stayed still for four years in New York” On a whole Chapter 17 really felt true. The freedom to be trashy allows the best to emerge, the city is endlessly falling towards hell but never gets there. You have to be open to Luck. He’s obviously thought about this city a lot, and I will definitely hold his thoughts with me as I continue to live and work here. NYC is like a drug to Phaedrus, he loves it until he crashes, it’s an OD of Dynamic Quality. But he says “The boat was better, where the view keeps changing all the time” (286) why is the Dynamic Quality of being on a boat, or a motorcycle better for him than the Dynamic Quality of a packed city? Is it that the city is too intellectual over social? He posits this Metaphysics where higher evolutionary levels taking precedent is moral, but it seems like he doesn’t agree with his own theory. CJ you mentioned in the previous week’s post that he felt a bit of fear in the face of evolutionary forces beyond his control, but to me it seems that more than fear like he flat out disagrees with his own moral proposition. He finds The Giant of the city compelling, but ultimately shallow and a detriment to capital Q Quality. If his hierarchy is correct, Intellectual Quality dominating Social Quality should be the ultimate good, but instead it seems his ideal is a balance between the two? The Lovecraftian horror of Intellectual Quality feels different from the Lovecraftian Horror of evolution/pregnancy. Maybe because it is externalized? The inevitable end point of progress for its own sake could be a self aware AI being developed and killing us all. All of this social media panic/techological evolution horror could mean the reactionary instinct is to be a luddite. I’m not saying “iPhone bad”. To me primitivists and people saying we were better off before crazy technology are even more wrong than transhumanist freaks. I think the fear is just that the tail of technology is wagging the dog of humanity. The problem isn’t the technology itself, or forward development, it’s why and how it’s being applied. The problem unique to our age is that the forward development is now so exponentially fast that we don’t have time to stop and think about how and why to use it, hence tail wagging dog. “Films are social media: his book was largely intellectual” (296) Portentous. I wrote last week about whether social media dominating our culture was Intellectual Quality in excess, and I didn’t even consider that SOCIAL media could be pushing on Social Quality reward systems lol. Celebrity is the basal driving force for Social Quality, Sex and dopaminergic gambling design are basal Biological Quality drivers, and all of this is being weaponized by social media app developers and algorithms. Would Pirsig consider this concretely immoral? I think he would think it’s undeniably a degeneration, allowing ourselves to be dominated by these forces so thoroughly. Also he’s saying Films are strictly Social and not Intellectual is just wrong and maybe Bob hasn’t seen enough good movies. The last sentence of Chapter 20, after all the movie deal talk: “Those gods. They’ll pull anything.” (296) He always capitalizes God throughout his books. When he says gods here, he means Hollywood big wigs twisting his truth into celebrity, degenerating his Intellectual product into Social product. God is Quality, gods are devils. What would he think of Silicon Valley? I think last week I saw way more sexism than there actually was. Was looking for it actively in this part and I don't think it's really there. Maybe because Lila and Phaedrus weren't interacting with each other so that weird personal/condescending thing I felt couldn't rear its head? Maybe because the racism is so explicit and egregious that looking for hints of sexism felt pointless? Maybe because I can't help but fall in love with how he writes Lila and every sentence in her voice. “The whole thing with her on the river was like Mae West and Sherlock Holmes. What a mismatch. Sherlock lowers his standards by having anything to do with Mae, but Mae is also lowering her standards by having anything to do with Sherlock.” (246) beautifully put! Almost disappointed he wrote this in here because it feels like it’s just telling us too explicitly everything we’ve already been shown. Beating the theme to death a bit. re dun dant All throughout this section I feel like Lila and Phaedrus’ differing views of the city and different ways of thinking are remarkably well realized. When I read Lila’s narration in Chapter 23 it reminds me of how I think a lot of the time. The repetition, self reassurance, running down catastrophic branches of thought, even contradictory ones, then being pulled back into reality by external stimulus. I don’t think Robert Pirsig thinks like this all of the time, but he writes it very believably. I don’t have too much to say about Chapter 23. I feel like Lucky leading her to the boat, maybe being real, maybe not, is the narrative disagreeing with Phaedrus and validating Lila’s intuition as a valuable guiding compass. Who cares if he’s real, he got her there in the end. I don’t have an “interpretation” of Chapter 23. It’s like a David Lynch movie, I could watch a YouTube video to figure out what the symbolism is “supposed to mean”, but the emotional truth of the imagery resonates so directly with me as is that boiling it down to direct metaphor makes it lose a lot for me. But maybe that’s just me trying to be lazy and not think about what things actually represent for her. The emotion of it felt cathartic, terrifying, isolating. When she hugged the baby, it felt like a Homecoming. Ok thats all i think! Xoxo Nat

Beck

"Social snobbery was being replaced with intellectual snobbery. Brain trusts, think tanks, academic foundations were taking over the whole country. It was joked that Veblen's "The Theory of the Leisure Class" should be updated with a new one called "The Leisure of the Theory Class." A new social class had arrived: the theory class, which had clearly put itself above the social castes that dominated before its time." page 314 (my version, I realized just now we have different page numbers) Wow fuck! This really hit hard. Of course I think social snobbery Absolutely still exists. It's not that intellectual snobbery exactly replaced social snobbery as much as it just added a new dimension to it, one with different requirements. As Pirsig stated previously, these levels of static quality exist independently from one another, but are also interconnected: you can have intellectual static quality without having social static quality but you will absolutely struggle socially if that's true. It's not a waterfall effect, it's all levels working in parallel. Similarly, you will struggle if you have social s.q. but you don't take care of yourself physically. So maybe it's less that intellectual s.q. wins the wrestling match and throws social s.q. out of the ring. It's more that the Victorian-social-supremacy club allowed for NO intellectualism. It was irrelevant and even UNSEEMLY to dabble too much in intellectual quality. When intellectual quality takes over, it doesn't eliminate social quality, but merely adds another dimension that also needs to be fulfilled. Now, to be really "elite," you usually need both intellectual & social quality (unless you can just have SO much Dynamic Quality in one area that it overrides all other shortcomings). Tie this into college degrees becoming a form of BOTH intellectual AND social posturing. The college you go to matters because intellectual quality is now an important informer of your social quality (in certain circles). And EVERYONE goes to college because having a provable demonstration of "intellectual ability" is seen as an important factor in being accepted in society. But, you still need to be accepted in society in other ways: again, they exist independently of each other. "Now, it should be stated at this point that the Metaphysics of Quality supports this dominance of intellect over society. It says intellect is a higher level of evolution than society; therefore, it is a more moral level than society. It is better for an idea to destroy a society than it is for society to destroy an idea. But having said this, the MOQ goes on to say that science, the intellectual pattern that has been appointed to take over society, has a defect in it. The defect is that subject-object science has no provision for morals. Subject-object science is only concerned with facts. Morals have no objective reality... From the perspective of a subject-object science, the world is a completely purposeless, valueless place. There is no point in anything... Everything just functions, like machinery... ***Now that intellect was in command of society for the first time in history, was THIS the intellectual pattern it was going to run society with?***" page 316-17 THIS IS SO FUCKING GOOD! I feel it speaks so cleanly to the main problem that Pirsig has been speaking to ever since Zen, and also speaks to so much of our modern anxiety about science, in general. The deep divide between "believe the science" and "anti-science" antivax antiwhatever camps. Religion vs. science. What intellectual pattern are we going to run society with? And: how do we classify religion exactly? It's been around for a long time, and has dominated society for a long time. Is it.. a social pattern? That doesn't feel exactly right... There certainly is a social element to it, but the teachings of religion are not fundamentally social, they are intellectual. So where does it fit in here. Is it an intellectual option? An intellectual framework? It's clearly a value of Some sort. Is this missing from the tiers of static quality? Am I missing or forgetting a section where Pirsig touches on this? Under "is [science] the intellectual pattern we want to run society with?" I also wrote: "or politics?" Because it increasingly seems to me that, in many circles, in many forms, the primary intellectual pattern people use to engage with the world is politics. Ascribing to a certain set of political stances. Politics CAN be social (I would consider blind partisanship to be a sort of social pattern) but it can be VERY intellectual (think of any hardcore leftist internet circles based on theory). So if we are choosing between intellectual patterns, I feel many people on the internet especially might not choose science, but might choose politics. Is that what we want to do, though? I don't have an answer. I feel alienated by politics in general and choose not to engage in many ways. But like philosophy, we all HAVE politics, whether they're examined or not... so. I'm not sure! Then I felt Pirsig touched on a similar thought when he said in the next few pages: "There was no way you could beat a Victorian on manners and there was no way you could beat a twentieth-century intellectual on causes. They had EVERYTHING figured out. That was part of the problem. All that neat scientific [or political] knowledge that was supposed to guide the world. Phaedrus had no "cause" that he could explain to anyone. ***His cause was the Quality of his life,*** which could not be framed in the "objective" language of the intellectuals and therefore in their eyes was not a cause at all." The trauma I experienced as an immunocompromised person over the pandemic destroyed all political idealism left in me... or at least the idealism that I as an individual could affect mass political change. In the short-term, this was absolutely true. I could not stop COVID from happening or force my state to go into lockdown. I had to recenter everything in my life around keeping myself alive, first, and second, trying to find any quality in my day-to-day life, because there was nothing else I had control over. Now that the pandemic is "over" I still have this value framework, even though from a political point of view, it's selfish, from a religious point of view, it's hedonistic, from a scientific point of view, it's meaningless. But also, it feels right. Because "pursuing Quality in your life" is more than hedonism or nihilism or selfishness: it's trying to pursue the type of life that brings real satisfaction, a life that necessarily entails connection, community, social responsibility... all those REAL-LIFE things. But how to communicate that, philosophically!! I felt... validated, I guess, to see this written out; and I want to keep developing this thought, and I hope Pirsig does, too. "A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement... Sometime after the twenties a secret loneliness, so penetrating and so encompassing that we are only beginning to realize the extent of it, descended upon the land." Yeah.... yeah. Yep. Hard to argue with that one. And a really lovely passage, too. Chapter 22 is really a banger.

31 Dogs

It sounds like he's describing the city as a body. I imagine a bright-eyed molecule of vitamin D seeking fame and fortune within a giant human body. It's highest aspiration in that city or system may be to become a part of its bones. In bone form, a molecule of vitamin D would be allowed a lasting "legacy" in the body. But vitamin D doesn't just lock into a piece of bone. It first has to be consumed, digested, and have it's very identity, it's molecular structure, rearranged and bound into a form that that body can use, which is then sifted into a homogeneous group of similarly altered molecules. Just like in a big city, very few individuals that become a part of the overall body maintain their full identity, if they have any hope of being useful or long lived in that system. Celebrities represent those ideals, the consumed nutrients that have to rearrange who they are in order to fit that exalted mould. Social celebrity, academic tenure, politics, religion, and businesses too big to fail could be like blood, neurons, amygdala, dopamine and bone. Or any idealized structure that people hope to be converted into some small part of. The more likely outcome is that you will be digested and passed out of the system, stripped of anything you had that was useful along the way. To be a part of the system, you must contribute some sort of sustenance, and if you have not already been converted into part of a substructure in that system, then you yourself ARE the sustenance. Ideas are sustenance in an innovation driven culture and you must share your ideas in order to do anything with them, but that also risks them getting stolen and consumed while leaving you behind. The same could be said of money, social and virtue reputation, political clout etc. If you cannot change to fit, and you run out of things to contribute to those structures, you will be discarded from that system regardless of your inherent quality. Unusable molecules that cannot be discarded from the body remain adrift as "free radicals". They are either ignored or attacked by the body because the body doesn't know how to use them. Perhaps Lila could have been a "productive member of society", but too much was stripped away from her and not enough provided back to her in order to unlock her full potential. The city only knows how to strip, contain or destroy her type of identity. If you consider Phaedrus to be like a dendritic immune cell, whose goal and purpose is to roam freely collecting information about the system, then he too is a part of that system. He is not a free radical, but his system identity isn't set to be digested into one of the hierarchical subsystems either. His identity, his social, intellectual and moral purpose, is to identify other identities, and communicate that information to the system in a way that that message will not be stripped for parts, ignored or rearranged into oblivion. To take his information, his book, into the city to have it made into a movie would be like giving a presidential debriefing to a 2-year-old who will rip it up to make confetti. Confetti can be useable, and 2-year-olds are great at making it, but there is a way to consume that increases the value of paper rather than diminishing it. Static systems do not discriminate between scrap paper and valuable information because that's not their job. So are we parts within a system? Are we self-contained systems? It's both, but how you view yourself and your place within the world depends on whether you see yourself in the context of a part, a whole or both in flux. And our entire sense of identity depends on the specifics of that view. In parts level cognition, hierarchy represents a scale of usefulness in service of a system, which could be seen by the individual as greater purpose. To be consumed, absorbed and assimilated is to achieve coveted hierarchical status. Because to be consumed and shat out is common, but to be permanently utilized is to be immortalized. Celebrities represent standards of how each system wants to utilize you. Different systems have different hierarchies, determined by the unique consumption patterns of that system, be they physical, intellectual or romantic. In individualistic cognition, one is still a single part, but is identified as whole by virtue of rejecting being a part within a system. A rogue part, like a free radical, can appear chaotic in its identity, purpose or morality, but is static and rigid and its convictions, and purposely does not contribute to a system because it doesn't want to be subsumed and lose its sense of wholeness, which feels like a death of autonomy. In systems cognition, one is a self-contained system, which is necessarily unfit for consumption, because only parts can be utilized. So like the stripped individual, they are rejected by systems as undigestible. Yet they can still contribute to a system, not by being a member of its structure, but by utilizing their own self-contained systemhood to create some usable byproduct that IS digestible, and hopefully, incorruptible. In this way they can maintain their individual identity as a self-contained system, complete with its own working parts (or boat) but also able to contribute to a system. I think he's using these characters to represent some of these types of dynamics.

annie liz

This book makes me think and this book makes me feel and it’s so flawed and beautiful! GOD I love people and their minds “Well, of course! My God! Look at it! The power of this place! Fantastic! What individual work of art can come anywhere near to equaling it. Sure: dirty, noisy, rude, dangerous, expensive. Always has been and probably always will be. Always been a hell-hole if what you're looking for is stability and serenity. . . . But if you're looking for stability and serenity, go to a cemetery, don't come here! This is the most Dynamic place on earth!” (p. 220) I love New York. I live a few hours’ bus ride away from the city and went there twice last summer, and that dynamic energy is electric if that’s what you’re searching for. I walked something like 36 miles one weekend, and I felt like I could have gone forever because yes, it’s impersonal, it’s a concrete jungle, it can be soul-sucking, it’s filled with shitty rent and rich greed, but that doesn’t completely cover the Absolute Art there, in people and creation and connection and history and pure humanity. You understand the ironies around it but you can’t help but understand the songs about it too. Having the vocabulary to differentiate capitalism/socialism and economics and politics on a basis of VALUES was so moving and USEFUL. It was put clearly in a way that just made things click and I WISH I had the words to explain it to people other than saying “so there’s these two dense philosophy books you gotta read first…” (shoutout to beck for working on that elevator pitch in pt 2 lol) “What people buy and what people sell, in other words what people value, can never be contained by any intellectual formula. What makes the marketplace work is Dynamic Quality. The market is always changing and the direction of that change can never be predetermined.” (p. 221) The randomness and unpredictability descriptors make sense, but I struggled a little with this, mainly because I don’t always feel like what the market leans toward is always Quality. It’s NEW, yes, but newness and popularity don’t always necessitate Dynamic Quality. Maybe we could add part of the Celebrity chapter to this analysis, representing things we want that capture our attention without necessarily deserving it? “When things are organized socialistically in a bureaucratic series, any increase in complexity increases the probability of failure. But when they're organized in a free-enterprise parallel, an increase in complexity becomes an increase in diversity more capable of responding to Dynamic Quality, and thus an increase of the probability of success. It's this diversity and parallelism that make this city work.” (p. 221) So good! The capitalism/socialism argument sounds like Jonathan’s Haidt’s The Righteous Mind and his Elephant/Rider metaphor when it comes to political parties. Now to be honest, I did not love that book, partially due to bias, partially due to other, more arguable factors (besides, it was assigned in a college class where I wasn’t really sure what I believed in or how to argue it anyways). However, there were some parts I appreciated, and there’s absolutely ties to capitalistic goals aligning with Dynamic Quality and his Elephant Morality psychology, as well as the stronger unity in morality that comes from religion, loyalty, patriotism, and other “moral taste buds” Favorite quotes from the contrast/completion between SQ and DQ in culture: “It's ironic that although the philosophy of science leaves no room for any undefined Dynamic activity, it's science's unique organization for the handling of the Dynamic that gives it its superiority. Science superseded old religious forms, not because what it says is more true in any absolute sense (whatever that is), but because what it says is more Dynamic.” (p. 222) “The pencil is mightier than the pen” *theater kid snaps* “Radical idealists and degenerate hooligans sometimes strongly resemble each other.” (p. 223) “Like the kids. You don't see them but they're here, growing like mushrooms in secret places.” (p. 225) that’s so evocative I’m going to go lay down “Sometimes you miss the ones who scowl at you but secretly support you in every way they can. When you talk to them they treat you with a ten-foot pole, but at the other end of it you sense this guarded affection. They're just survivors whose rough edges are all worn smooth.” (p. 225) I am LAYING DOWN “There has to be a certain kind of people who can look at it and say "Hey, wait a second! That's good!" without having to look over their shoulder to see if somebody else is saying the same thing. That's rare.” OOF he’s right. I feel called out, but it hits. Chapter 17 is so good! so good!! I feel like I could divide every section up and talk about it for days. “When she first came here she used to think there was somebody up in those big buildings who knows what's going on here. They would never come down and talk to her. After a while she found out nobody knows what's going on.” It’s delightful how clear Lila’s observations of the city compare to Phædrus’s, showing their absolute opposite ways of thinking. He looks up at the skyscrapers and sees the kings of the machine, the lieutenants of the Giant, the ones who push the components forward. She looks up and sees that they don’t care, so why should she? “Pictures aren’t an intellectual media. Pictures are pictures. The movie business belonged to the celebrity people and they wouldn't begin to know how to portray an intellectual book like his. And even if they did, the public wouldn't buy it, probably, and that would be the end of their money” (p. 258-59). Hm. While it makes sense along his line of morality that the social value of a movie is lower than a book, his book, it doesn’t feel right to say that making a movie *in good faith* (and it appears like Redford wanted to do so) would be like “a lower form of life feeding upon a higher form of life” and thus immoral. I guess I’m just struggling to align what we DO know about the vampiric nature of Hollywood sucking away delicately crafted works for decimal point profits with the potential for excellence I know many films and visual/multimedia arts are capable of achieving. Are films purely social value patterns? Would it have to be a documentary for it to be intellectual? Is it impossible for intellectual quality to come from storytelling? I don’t think so. It could also just be attaching different biased contexts onto “social” and “intellectual.” In the ZMM threads, there was a conversation at one point about how it was hard to talk about “capitalism” or “socialism” without a ton of social, cultural, and emotional baggage; that could be applied here as well. “What a cornball image. Just awful. Yet there it was, burned into him from childhood.” (p. 263) lol “Better not to interfere. Maybe that moth had its own patterns to fulfill, and he had his, whatever they were.” (p. 264) The moth moment in addition to the incident with Lila outside the grocery store in the previous section reallllyyyyy demonstrate Phædrus’s opinions on getting involved. Something that Lila innately gets that he—at least at this point—does not, is the capacity for change in real human people that comes from Dynamically intervening, moving, and interceding with the static patterns around you. Maybe it’s empathy, maybe it’s Dynamic Quality, maybe it’s just caring more, but it’s definitely not something he appears to be interested in. “Other people count,” Rigel said back in chapter 6. “You should understand that.” Phædrus, at least in my understanding, views the people around him in a loose “live and let live (unless pushed)” perspective, and I think that actively prevents him from appreciating the value (sorryyy) of being IN a community, not just observing it. [added later: “They were living in some kind of movie projected by this intellectual, electromechanical machine that had been created for their happiness, saying: PARADISE > PARADISE > PARADISE > but which had inadvertently shut them out from direct experience of life itself—and from each other.” (p. 283) this! exactly this! but for him! He fully admits to being a rebel without a cause but doesn’t get how he fits into this exact history] (CJ I saw that “bold strategy” Dodgeball reference in your notes don’t think I missed it) It seems like Phædrus is fighting with his own system in many of these chapters. He defined the tiers, he stands by the hierarchy, but something more intrinsic and Dynamic wants to rebel against it, and I don’t think he necessarily likes it. The same way he doesn’t know why he likes Lila. It’s a good push-pull. Lila is such a wonderful, living, vivid character, especially in contrast to Phædrus. I think sometimes Pirsig falls short from the idea in his head of her that he wants to provide to his readers, but there’s a palpable love for her in his writing that’s genuinely endearing. It’s not always perfect, but it’s very much alive, and I can’t help but feel it In other news, I finally picked up a physical copy of ZMM at the store today, and I’m pumped to dive back into it with margin notes and greater understanding of Pirsig’s vision this time around! Plus the insights you all point out that I sometimes miss. Not to broken-record, but I’m really glad I joined this