Pirsig, on Quality

“In the time that Phaedrus grew up, intellect was dominant over society, but the results of the new social looseness weren't turning out as predicted. Something was wrong. The world was no doubt in better shape intellectually and technologically but despite that, somehow, the "quality" of it was not good. There was no way you could say why this quality was no good. You just felt it.

Sometimes you could see little fragments of reflections of what was wrong but they were just fragments and you couldn't put them together. He remembered seeing The Glass Menagerie, by Tennessee Williams, in which one edge of the stage had an arrow-shaped neon sign flashing on and off, on and off, and beneath the arrow was the word, "PARADISE," also flashing on and off. Paradise, it kept saying, is right where this arrow points:
PARADISE → PARADISE → PARADISE →But the Paradise was always somewhere pointed to, always somewhere else. Paradise was never here. Paradise was always at the end of some intellectual, technological ride, but you knew that when you got there paradise wouldn't be there either. You would just see another sign saying:
PARADISE → PARADISE → PARADISE →and pointing another direction to go.

On a theater marquee, the title Rebel Without a Cause caught his attention in the same way. It pointed to the same low-quality thing that he saw everywhere but which couldn't be put into words.

You had to be a rebel without a cause. The intellectuals had preempted all the causes. Causes were to the twentieth-century intellectuals as manners had been to the Victorians. 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. That was what was being rebelled against. All that neat scientific knowledge that was supposed to guide the world.

Phaedrus had no "cause" that he could explain to anybody. 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. He knew that intellectually contrived technological devices had increased in number and complexity, but he didn't think the ability to enjoy these devices had increased in proportion. 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. If you ever did catch it for a few moments it had a peculiar synthetic, technological taste that made the whole pursuit seem senseless.

Everyone seemed to be guided by an "objective," "scientific" view of life that told each person that his essential self is his evolved material body. Ideas and societies are a component of brains, not the other way around. No two brains can merge physically, and therefore no two people can every really communicate except in the mode of ship's radio operators sending messages back and forth in the night. A scientific, intellectual culture had become a culture of millions of isolated people living and dying in little cells of psychic solitary confinement, unable to talk to one another, really, and unable to judge one another because scientifically speaking it is impossible to do so. Each individual in his cell of isolation was told that no matter how hard he tried, no matter how hard he worked, his whole life is that of an animal that lives and dies like any other animal. He could invent moral goals for himself, but they are just artificial inventions. Scientifically speaking he has no goals.

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.”

Robert M. Pirsig, Lila

 

I originally intended to quote only the last paragraph, but the more I considered the issue, the more I became convinced of the necessity of context, which itself needed more context. Upon the completion of typing it all out, being concerned that I would potentially be breaking some legal law by directly quoting so much from this book, I looked at a rule-of-thumb guide to Fair Use. My goal in quoting this passage from Pirsig's Lila is first that you would think about the nature of quality, and second that you would consider investigating what Pirsig has to say on the subject. Given that the character of my use is to highlight the book's worth, that the portion of the book that I am quoting here is a mere ~1/235^th of the entire work, and that the only likely effect of my use will be to increase the sales figures of the book by a few copies bought by a few friends that read what I post here, I am reasonably satisfied that I have little cause for concern regarding a legal violation. I am wholly convinced that I have acted morally, whether or not I have been in technical violation of copyright law.