posted
This is a book i've wanted to read for a while. And recently one of my friends read it, and when he was done gave it to me and said I had to read it. And i'm not finished quite yet, just 100 pages into it, but it's one of the most interesting books I've read in a while. Every few pages there's something I read that I have to stop and think about. Some things i've never thought of, many I have thought of, but just the way they're laid out lends to further contemplation.
I can't say whether it's made better or not by the fact that I ride a motorcycle. The way Mr. Pirsig ties many deep issues into the philosophy behind motorcycle riding and maintenance is quite interesting. And has made me want to do two things related to motorcycles:
1. Learn more about motorcycle maintenance.
2. Go on a long cross country motorcycle ride as soon as possible.
But i do honestly think that the book is a must read whether you've ever been on a motorcycle or not. The book boils down to a study of life itself. Of values, rationality, truth, personal reflection, etc...
There's so many great ideas in the book, and it's a pity i didn't think of it earlier, but I think it'd be a neat idea if maybe every day or couple days i quoted a passage that struck me while reading it, and open it up to discussion. So here's one that's been in my mind for a couple days:
quote:But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself...If a revolution destorys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There is so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
This really resonated with me because I have personally been in situations where I've felt the current system was faulty and in need of change, and have been in a position of power to do something about it. And I even knew how and what to do to change that system. I had a vision of how things should work and knew in my head that they would. But what I never thought about, and which i sort of had an inkling of then, but really *know* now, is that in the end it still wouldn't have worked. Because the rationality behind the old system still existed. My way would have only worked if people truly understood and believed it. Without that understanding my system would have been just as affective as the old system. Not. And it's something I don't think I'll forget any time soon.
And it makes sense when applied to almost anything I think. Thoughts? I realize i cut short at the end, and I may have written more but it's late and my brain has officially shut off.
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Ah, I've been trying to get everyone to read this book for years. Yeah, it's great.
About tearing down systems, my thought is that building up something new is always very hard and iffy. And especially from scratch. Also that if a new system is better, the old one will fall away and be discarded naturally when the new one catches on. So about revolutions, I think the very smartest easiest best way to bring about change is to build the new better system while leaving the old one in place. Then let it die on its own from lack of participation, when it is superceded by something obviously better.
People who think tearing down the old is ever necessary or a good idea seem to me to be mistaken.
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Annie gave me a copy of this book in Portland, she apparently gives a lot of people copies of this book, which leads to the concluesion that Annie is wonderful, but I guess that's not the point of this thread so I'll just tell you to try and get her attention to respond to this thread, and that you're not alone in having really liked this book. She always has more brilliant things to say than I do anyways.
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Well, my reasons for liking the book are a little more biased than anything - it takes place at my alma mater (can I call it my alma mater if I'm still enrolled? ) and I've met some of the people involved with the author and the story.
But I do really think it's a great piece of literature. I think the whole premise of philosophy being intertwined with something so everyday and mundane as a motorcycle is brilliant.
And yes, I do make a point of giving a copy to the Jatraqueros I meet. Even more of a reason for you all to come visit! Posts: 8504 | Registered: Aug 1999
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I reread ZatAoMM about every 6 years and love it. Some of my favorite passages -- the ones that resonate with the way I think about life and work -- are the ones about 'quality'. He actually manages to be transcendental in the very concrete realm of motorcycle mechanics. It's an effective trope.
I also always feel a little squeamish in the 2nd half (I won't spoil anything) wondering if the book is in part a disguised tirade against his particular experience in academia, which went so sour. But the essential humanity of his struggle, his relationship with his son and with his machine, and ultimately his humility, win me over every time.
Great book. And a positive influence for my having eventually gotten into motorcycling myself. I have had zen moments with my bike, for example washing it, and noticing little things, maybe a missing nut or a loose whatzit. There is no substitute for simply being with a machine, in the moment, lucidly aware and utterly honest. You can't pretend it's working if it isn't.
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Strider, If you give page numbers, it would be easier, at least for me, to run down the context for the quote.
One aspect of this quote that interested me is the meta character it takes on. The basic quote is partially about the problems with taking effects of things a separate events to be dealt with reference of even understanding of the systems that drive them. The best you can hope for with this orientation is a comptence without meaning. You know what buttons to push, but you don't know why they are the right ones to ush. You don't understand what they do.
The part that I'm talking about is something that isn't explicitly made here. He jumped right from the idea to the highest level of it. You can get to the same place by using a progression with more detailed increments.
Start out with the motorcycle. The friend is agressively apathetic about repairing and maintaining it. You could get angry or exasperated at him for this, but there's much more to see. Why is he aggressively apathetic? Because he's got a approach/avoidence thing (or love-hate) with technology in general. But why? At least, in part because of his schooling. But why is the schooling like that? Because of the educational philosophy of his culture. And so on, until you reach what the author is aiming at, the whole tradition of western thought.
You can play the progression game in our culture and, if you're rigorous enough, this is almost always where you're going to end up. Problems that occur consistently across our culture are generally expressions of parts of our tradition of thought. There are instances of specific defects or diseases where this isn't necessarily the case, but I think these are much rarer than people like to assume.
It's like medical problems. Someone has a problem with their stomache. You could focus in on just that part of the stomache. Say there's too much acid. You pop an antacid and Boom! the problem goes away. But it comes back the next day. You can keep taking antacids, or you can look at the wider context. So you look at the whole stomache, and you see that it's not functioning normatively. If you look futher, you can see disturbances in the whole digestive system. Even further, and the whole body is somewhat out of whack.
In preventative medicince (and psychotherapy), a lot of effort is put into promoting healthy G (for global) factors. For example, keeping in shape, not smoking, not drinking to excess, sleeping right, eating right, etc. People who have strong G factors get sick a lot less and less severely than people with weak ones. In fact, this isn't just true for bodily factors. The alreadly classic Nun study has shown that people with strong mental G factors (in this case, positive outlook as assessed by expressed positive emotions) also get sick less and less severely, and just overall live longer than people with weak ones. This is what the field of (I love this name) psychoneuroimmunology has been saying for years now.
The point that I'm trying to get at is that, just like in the body example, sicknesses in society are generally not isolated incidents in themselves, but rather the effects of fundamental weaknesses in our way of approaching the world that are exposed by unfavorable environmental stresses. Even though, just like in the medical example, specific parts of the whole in which the disorder manifests itself are more relevant and visible in regards to the probelm, it is still the weakness of the whole that really makes it as possible or severe.
This is why we talk about the addictive personality type. These people have weaknesses of which their addictions are mainly symptoms (as well as exacerbating factors). This is why we talk about the prejudicial personality. It's not the object of hatred that is the determining factor, but rather the weaknesses in the haters themselves.
Likewise, this is why we talk of the art of loving to say that love resides not in the loved object, but as a developed ability of the lover.
We're always looking for the One Big Lever or Drug or Truth or Whatever to fix our problems in society. Our basic approach to almost any problem is to apply the global reward/punishment structure at the perceived site of the problem. You can call it the "invisible hand", or grades, or conditional approval, or reward contingencies. We even go so far as to get angry and violent toward or try to bribe and cajole inanimate objects. Or we play the Vedantic game with what we call god, offering up "right" behavior for good outcomes or blaming bad things on our failings. The simple fact is that, as long as we continue to ignore the systems that these thing take place in, they are going to keep happening, and we're not even going to know why.
Bah, I'm not being clear here. I'm a man trying to prove that depression isn't a disease, but rather a natural outcome of our way of methods of dealing with the world. Anyway, there you go.
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I too have a lovely copy from Annie...and it's one of the next few in line to be read. Thanks for the comments everyone...and thanks for the book Annie!! Posts: 6415 | Registered: Jul 2000
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I love it that the ads at the bottom of the page are for motorcycle things. Why not philosophy? <laughs>
There are ideas in this book that I think about every day when I am working. Quite often in the course of my job I am troubleshooting machinery, or computer systems, or something of that sort. Or else I'm trying to understand how something works in order to use it in a design.
There is a confused, muddled feeling of not knowing what the heck is going on, not understanding anything. It's rather unpleasant. One's first impulse is to avoid that feeling by shelving the whole thing. I got this in Calculus class sometimes too, I remember. "This makes no sense." Or in the case of machines, "this can't be happening. It's doing something that it should not do. It CAN'T be doing this. How can it possibly be?"
I remember in ZatAoMM, he talked about this feeling being the one you should actively encourage. That it is always the feeling you have right when the truth is trying to find the right crack by which to seep into your brain. The truth knocks on the door and you say "go away, I'm looking for the truth!" So it goes away. <laughs> I will never forget that idea. It's completely true, and I deal with it daily in my work.
That feeling of muddle, when you are floundering around with no theory of what is going on. That is the point at which the cutting edge of understanding is applied to the chaos of ignorance. Where the diamond meets the vinyl. I think he had a metaphor about the engine of a train, but it's been so long now that I can't remember.
Anyway, though that feeling is still not fun, I understand now that it is to be sought. It is the place where things are happening. And I never lose the joy of the aha that eventually comes. The joy of finding things out. Posts: 2843 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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This is something I try to model for my students.
A little while ago, I was teaching division of fractions, and I started with the idea of "what does it mean to divide by one-half? I know what it means to divide in half, but by one-half? I'm a math teacher and I still don't know what that means."
So I started a "think aloud" looking at a division problem, and worked myself in a complete circle:
Since a fraction is actually a division problem, you could write 1/3 ÷ 1/2 as (1÷3) ÷ (1÷2) which got me right back to 1/3 ÷ 1/2. The kids thought I was nuts.
Then I tried it the other way, by turning the whole thing into a fraction, instead of a division problem. About this time one kid (who already knew the "stay change flip" rule tried to get me to use that. I asked him "why?" and he couldn't tell me. About 10 seconds later the fraction I had written on the board had turned into a multiply by the inverse equation, and he looked at me and said "Isn't that what I just said?" I said, yes, but now you know how we got there.
For the rest of the kids, I wanted to show them that the reason these rules exist is that at some point, someone was just as confused as they were, but they played with it until they got something they could work with.
BTW, current educational philosophy refers to this condition as "cognitive disequilibrium" and claims that learning can't occur without it.
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Wow, that's cool! I used to ask my nieces to explain things to me when they were very small. I wanted to know what were their current theories about how things worked. I would be all puzzled saying "how can it be that the sun sometimes is way up high and other times it's sideways and sometimes it's gone entirely. What keeps moving it all the time?
She said Jesus moved it around constantly. Also that it was stuck to the sky with scotch tape. It was fun to just ask and see what she said, and then take her theories forward by asking, "okay, so how is it that this can happen in that case?"
What is great is they never say "I don't know." Like college professors, they always will have some kind of answer. <laughs> That lesson is the one we teach them that they've truly learned. I wonder if people like Richard Feynman were the ones who were taught early to think, "I don't know the answer to that. Let's see how we might can figure it out." Posts: 2843 | Registered: A Long Time Ago!
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Anne, the train metaphor is about knowledge. There is all the knowledge stored in the train, and then there is the progress of knowledge, representing the leading edge of the train. Too many people, he says, are running through all the train cars looking for things that aren't there, when they need to be out in front looking ahead.
I think. It has been a little while since I read my copy, which I kept after it was required reading in college.
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Mabus, please call me Anne Kate. Anne doesn't sound like me. Yes, that was it, you're right! Thanks for reminding me how the metaphor went.
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Jeez, are we going to discuss specific passages or are we going to tackle the whole book? Stider started this because he's working his way through it. I came looking for it because the self-defeating nature of science section ties in with what I'm trying to say on the complexity thread and I was hoping he had reached that point.
In my tenure at Hatrack, there have been very few sustained book discussion threads. I think that, besides being unfair to Strider, doing a quick dump of your surface impressions of this book is going to lead to another book thread that quickly self-destructs.
I guess this is a plea to focus on the specific passages. This is an extremely complex book. You'd be amazed at what you can get out of just little snippets of it, if you drill down into them.
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Hey, just wanted to say that I'm sorry that I started this thread and then disappeared for a few days while the thread grew. So I take part of the blame that the thread hasn't stayed on track, as I wasn't helping it along at all.
But back to the topic...
quote:The point that I'm trying to get at is that, just like in the body example, sicknesses in society are generally not isolated incidents in themselves, but rather the effects of fundamental weaknesses in our way of approaching the world that are exposed by unfavorable environmental stresses.
Okay, so given this what do you think about what Anne Kate said regarding the quote. I agree with your assessment. But what does that mean for trying to fix the problem? the problems is more fundamental then the effects, and find the causes is what's important. But do you do what Anne Kate suggests and create the new structure in parallel with the old one and trust that people will eventually choose the right one, leaving the old one to die slowly? Do we have that faith in ourselves? I don't know, if we did we wouldn't need leaders and decision makers, because everyone would know what's best all the time. But most people don't.
But i think even this is off track from the quote. Because i think the main thing that passage was trying to get across was that in our society we tend to look at things from the point of view of the effect, and don't bother with determining the cause. So all we do is put some band aids and duck tape on a faulty structure with no care for the fact that eventually that duck tape will fall off. And we tend to do this in many aspects of our society.
posted
Strider, Anne Kate and I disagree greatly on "human nature". The idea she is expressing is the marketplace of ideas. I think that, if you assume that people can generally be trusted to make rational decisions aimed towards maximizing their long term self interest (as I'm pretty sure Anne Kate does), then the marketplace of ideas is a very good model to put your faith in.
I don't believe that this is true. I'm pretty sure that Pirsig doesn't either. At least, when I'm talking about the problems inherent in our very way of thinking, I'm implying the people's very perceptions of what is good and bad for them is screwed up. And that's assuming that either people will naturally choose their long term interests over their short term or that the two are largely equivilent. I don't believe that this is the case. Also, there are always many many people who try to serve their interests by destroying the confidence and discernment of the "masses".
I was having a disagreement awhile ago with Storm about this and I don't think he got this point. There's a reason why mass movements that improve things take the form of revolutions against something. For the majority of people, they are trying to get away from things, not going towars them. There are a few people who are true believers trying to usher the brand new day in, but the majority of people are just looking to get a better life for themselves in a very short sighted way. It's my experience that nearly all systems within a given culture begin to look pretty much the same after a while. That is, they take their form or rather grow into the form encouraged by their culture, rather than the ideals that they claim to profess.
For me, the reasons for this sameness and the other problems are tied up in the underlying problems in the way we view the world and the goals of life. As such, true change will come when we adopt new ways of looking at the world, not when we come up with the super happy way of running things.
To bring this back to the quote, the system, the fundamental underlying system I think affects everything is inside the individual person, but is largely determined by system of thought that we use to parse the world. The best structural system in the world is going to fail or be disliked if our heads and the goals that we put our efforts toward are sick.
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I don't necessarily think people know what is good or bad for them, but what I am absolutely indisputably positive of is that OTHER PEOPLE have even LESS authority to decide what is good for someone than they do themselves. Therefore I hold to the marketplace of ideas, because we must allow free agency to flourish, and people must make their own choices, for any sort of happy decent life to be possible. Anything else is just oppression, which I think most everyone (besides the Taliban) will recognize as a big step backwards. In other words, when you FORCE someone to lead a better life, this is more evil than them freely choosing to lead a life less good.
This is not to say that some systems don't tend to encourage and foster worse solutions than others. For instance, communist systems (and working for the government or government sanctioned monopolies in free societies) encourage people to do less and less real work (since trying to accomplish things always makes waves and upsets people whereas doing nothing is perfectly acceptable), (and since nobody is ever fired for incompetence or poor performance, and since there is no downside to failing to serve your customers.) Then the necessity of pretending to be doing something which is entirely meaningless makes people miserable and irritable, and they become unpleasant and tyrannical to those around them as well. Thriving competition, on the other hand, will put companies which operate like this out of business in no time, and free all these miserable people to have a chance at finding better positions elsewhere.
The same thing is true in every sphere of human communities. There are better and worse systems which turn out to encourage better or worse outcomes. So I'm very much in favor of fine tuning and experimenting with the best systems for all sorts of things like economics, trade, social welfare, education, criminal corrections, etc.
What I reject utterly, though, is any sort of system in which some group or class gets to decide for some other set of people what would be good for them, what professions they should pursue, what education they should get, how their families should be arranged, in what manner their children should be raised, or any such thing, no matter how well motivated. This is nothing but tyranny, and always has quite evil results.
[ May 31, 2004, 09:15 PM: Message edited by: ak ]
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THe problem I always run into while decrying capitalism or democracy or the makretplace of ideas is that I'm unwilling to accept that better equals good and that I have a strong belief in the possiblity for positive progression in human development. We all know that there are bad things with the current systems we have. These are structural, built into the system. I believe that our current system, though better than many, is by no means a good or a sane one and that our people, while in many ways better than others are themselves neither good nor sane.
And yet, I do believe that it is well within people's capacity to be good and sane. However, our current guiding mythologies have as a central proposition that people are evil and selfish. Not suprisingly, they result in people who are evil and selfish.
As to introducing a competing system, I don't trust any system that appeals to a large mass of people in the same way that I wouldn't trust the recommendations of a large group of 5 year olds or mental patients. The majority of people in our culture are extremely immature. Not only do they not choose the right, they don't even choose or pursue that what is good for them or will make them happy. Given new systems they will choose ones that give them more access to the crappy things that they live for now: comfort, television, feelings of superiority, brain death, somebody (be it a celebrity or politician or religious leader) or something that they can surrender their responsibility to. We live in the horror of a Milgram world, where people aren't evil, they're just incapable of not shocking you to death if someone in authority tells them to. We live in a world where the most engaged in activity (watching TV) actually makes people on average less happy.
No, the marketplace of ideas has led us to where we are now and has left a trail of my intellectual forefathers' tortured and mutilated bodies. I have no faith in it nor do I have faith in the mass of people. I only have faith in what people could easily be. To skip ahead a bit in Zen, I am a devotee of no man, no system. I am devoted to quality. In our world, that makes me an outsider, even a rebel. I don't believe in the enthroning of Less Bad. If that's all you offer, I want to know what comes next. Diogeneses didn't search the world for the man who lied least. He was looking for an honest man. I'm looking for an honest world. I'm not content to accept anything less.
That's the best we can hope for with the marketplace of ideas. Evolution. Bah! I prefer intelligent design. Quality is the opposite of democracy.
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quote:What I reject utterly, though, is any sort of system in which some group or class gets to decide for some other set of people what would be good for them, what professions they should pursue, what education they should get, how their families should be arranged, in what manner their children should be raised, or any such thing, no matter how well motivated. This is nothing but tyranny, and always has quite evil results.
In large part I agree, except I think that children should be raised by adults. That speaks directly against this idea. They are a class of people who options are in large part decided by another class of people, called parents. No one (or very few anyway) has a problem with this.
So then tell me, what's the difference between a child and an adult. I reject that it's a matter solely of age. And yet, that's how we are supposed to treat it. People who are immature are always going to be controlled by others. It's just in our society, this control isn't overt. People who are unwilling to take responsibility will find responsibility taken from them. It's just in our country we can pretend that this isn't true.
We lost something very important when "adulthood" became something that just happened rather than something that you had to achieve.
I don't support elitist groups because our society is set up such that some of our sickest people end up in positions of power. However, populism in a world of immaturity is largely the same thing, just with less certain direction. The mass of men are ruled from outside, and while we can't be sure what actions we're going to take, we can be pretty sure that they are going to be unhealthy.
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Incidently, I really do like most of the things that Anne Kate has said here and that she is one of the few people who had something to say about this book other than she liked it. I certainly don't want anyone (especially her) to think that I'm trying to pee on her parade.
If there were people here who were willing and able to say such interesting things as Anne Kate, this thread wouldn't be doomed to die reasonably soon.
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Sorry, Squicky...I do have better things to say than just that I liked the book. Unfortunately, I haven't been logged on long enough while I was awake enough to say them. Maybe tonight.
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Mabus, Oh man, don't feel like you have to appologize or post something abut the book to please me. I mean, if you want to (and probably that's why you are going to post), by all means go ahead, but i don't want anyone to value what I said as any more than the petulant whining that it was. I've long ago realized that this place isn't what I'd like it to be. It's just that sometimes I have relapses.
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quote:People who are unwilling to take responsibility will find responsibility taken from them. It's just in our country we can pretend that this isn't true.
I think a more important issue is not when people aren't willing to take responsibility, but when that taken responsibility is misguided or worse, ignorant. Someone unwilling to take responsibility hands that over to others that are. Hitler took responsibility for what he believed was right. But it just so happened that he believed killing anyone not like him was right. And I guess this is more directed at Anne Kate, but what would've been your suggestion for that situation? Let Hitler have his concentration camps and continue to kill innocents, eventually people will see that his form of government isn't the best one and adopt a new one. I'm assuming not. But in essence isn't that what your view is saying? I'm sure all the slaves during years there was slavery in America would disagree with you that it's better to just wait it out and let people eventually choose the right choice. They would've wanted to someone to say, "hey, this is wrong, and we're changing this". I know i'm over simplifying things here, but my point is that it's very easy for many people to suffer if we choose a method of allowing people to realize for themselves over time what other people already know to be true.
quote: We lost something very important when "adulthood" became something that just happened rather than something that you had to achieve.
interesting point. And while i agree with you, what's the alternative? How do we apply what you said to life?
new passage to come soon. Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote: So then tell me, what's the difference between a child and an adult. I reject that it's a matter solely of age. And yet, that's how we are supposed to treat it. People who are immature are always going to be controlled by others. It's just in our society, this control isn't overt. People who are unwilling to take responsibility will find responsibility taken from them. It's just in our country we can pretend that this isn't true.
Interesting "always" statement here...could this be a problem with our rationality, that we feel this is inevitable? Hmm...that came out snarky-sounding; I don't mean it that way.
I think the difference between raising children and trying to alter a society in the way you suggest is that our children are growing up in a society we already live in and understand. No matter what society we think is best, we haven't lived in it; it's a hypothetical. We don't know that it is good, and worse, we don't know how to socialize people into it properly.
During the early 19th century, hundreds of alternative communities were formed across the US by theorists of all kinds. Some were extremely religious, some atheistic. Some promoted total celibacy, others "communal marriage" embracing everyone in the community. Some were minor alterations or otherwise fairly sane; some made Heaven's Gate look rational.
All these communities have one thing in common: they failed. Most simply dissolved or died out. A smaller number discarded their unusual practices and reassimilated into society at large. A tiny handful cling to existence today, but I doubt whether one could call that success. None of these groups proved better than the mainstream, either at spreading their society or at making people happier and better off.
Given our record with revolutionary attempts like these, I would say that the risk of failure is much too high to give anyone, however benevolent, the reins of imposed social change. I am not convinced there is any "rationality" better than the one we have. And if it does exist, at least for the present it is clearly beyond our grasp.
(How was that for a serious post? I'm awake now. I confess that I have tended gradually away from joining in serious discussions because I tend to get roasted these days.)
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New passage I came across I wanted to discuss.
Chapter 13. Page 134. towards the bottom.
This quote comes during the section where Persig is describing Phaedrus while he was teaching at the university. And is describing the intensity with which he would teach his lectures, and how it was odd given that he himself didn't believe in what he was teaching.
quote:You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
I think this passage struck me because i'm not sure I agree with it. I think i understand what he's trying to say. In that you don't *need* to have that kind of intensity with something you are sure of. But something you doubt you will put your effort into much more to make it true, or prove it, or you know...I'm not really sure where's he's going. Is he making a statement that anyone with that sort of intensity must be faking it, or decieving themselves? Are they trying to fool others or themselves?
Or am I missing his point here? or thinking too much into it. Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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The problem with his way of thinking is that he fails to mention the fact that *everyone in the world* believes the sun rises everyday. NOT everyone believes that we need to pray to Allah every day, etc. If you have big enough factions disagreeing with something that you believe to have fundamental truth, of COURSE you're going to be passionate about it.
We rise to meet those kind of challenges
edit: plus, duh Mr. Motorcycle Maintenance Man...those beliefs *are* in doubt -- by other people. cheeze whiz.
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Mabus, Obviously I disagree with your assesment. That's not actually the interesting thing for me, though.
Rather, it's the, to mee, odd way you seem to be regarding "human nature". I mean, seriously, new stuff won't work because other new stuff didn't work in the 1800s? How crazy is that? For any other type of propsed new system other than a human centered one, no one would even take such a objection seriously. The world we live in is almost unthinkably different than that of the 1800s, not just quantitatively, but in countless qualities as well.
For me, it is only by viewing "human nature" as completely independent from the situation that the human being finds himself in could you say this and keep a straight face. However, I find this assertion as absurd as the initial one.
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Stider, I always took what he's talking about to be not so much only intensity, but rather fanaticism. There's a big difference about being passionate about something and being fanatical about it. To put it another way, if you really are confident about something, you don't feel the need to defend it. Someone believing otherwise might be regarded with curiosity, exasperation, or contempt, but never with anger. Like I said, quality is the opposite of democracy. If you are truely sure, their divergent belief is no threat to you, even if they represent the entire rest of the world.
Consider the absolutely terrible job most people do when they try to convince other people to believe as they do. You could look at that and say that people are just screwing up, but I don't actually think that this is the case. When they repeatedly engage in the same exremely low success rate behavior without questioning, it's time to look at what other purpose they could actually be aiming for. For me, it seems obvious that rather than trying to convince other people, they are largely trying to convince themselves. They are powered not by their conviction in their truth, but rather by fear of the doubts that they have in it. Fanatacism comes from the lack of confidence, not its presence.
Of course, there are instances where other people's beliefs can directly affect you. For example, through most of western history, someone publicly (or even privately) believing as I do about certain things was at high risk for being tortured and killed for their beliefs. In this case, the threat could come from realistic threats to the person and/or the expression of their truth, but when we're talking about just someone else believing something different, than reacting to this as a threat betrays one's own weakness.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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When you ask, "what do I think we should do about it?" you're asking about my life's work. I could literally write for days on it. In fact, the only reason I'm here right now is because I'm taking a break from writing for days about it.
In regards to the adulthood question, I think that it's partially a matter of changing our guiding myths or if you prefer cultural attitudes towards "audlthood" as well as supporting those organizations that actively promote freedom as related to responsibility. From a personal standpoint, stop believing that someone is an adult because they are 18+. From an organizational standpoint, there is a way of approaching things such that (to flip the Spiderman phrase) "with great responsibility comes great power". There's a sick idea in our culture and it's organizations that power comes first, followed by responsibility and trust. Rather than it being we should trust those who have power, it should be we give power to those we trust. Of course, were this the case, I feel that very few of our leaders would have qualified for their positions.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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quote:if you have big enough factions disagreeing with something that you believe to have fundamental truth, of COURSE you're going to be passionate about it.
but an important part of that quote or of the surrounding passage was that the character himself was fanatical about what he was teaching and yet at the same time doubted it. Did not believe in it. And was trying to reconcile why he would be so fanatical in teaching it and doubt it also. And what he came up with was that there was no reconciliation needed. and thus the quote.
quote:They are powered not by their conviction in their truth, but rather by fear of the doubts that they have in it. Fanatacism comes from the lack of confidence, not its presence.
okay, but if that's the case Squick then are you saying that anyone that is fanatical about a belief or cause deep down really doubts that belief? Is that what he's saying? And if so can you help me understand it better. Because while I understand why someone who is sure about something has no need to be fanatical, I don't think that that implies that all fanatacism stems from doubt. And if that is what Persig is saying i'm suprised he doesn't give more proof or discuss it further. he just lays it out there and goes on. And that's unlike him.
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Strider, It's been my experience that you can tell really confident people specifically because they lack fanaticism. The most accomplished scientist (well, maybe second) that I've worked with told me when I starteed that he was trying to disprove his own theory and wanted my perspective because I wasn't as tied up in why it was right as he was. I agree with Pirsig here as a truism. For me, the hallmarks of fanaticism are anger and defensiveness. Fanaticism carries with it, to me, an air of desperation. In my own life, I've found that whenever I've gotten fanatical/angry about something, my reaction can be traced by my doubts. I don't know much more explanation I can give here. I obviously don't have hard and fast proof that all fanaticism looks like this, but all cases that I've seen have.
To apporach it from another way, consider persuasion. For me, if you really believe that what you believe is true, then your main task isn't to convince people of what you believe, but rather to make them better able to see the truth. It's like the reason that all Hindu prayers start out invoking Ganesh, the remover of obstacles. When it's much more important to you that someone accepts your idea as true rather than truely understanding it, then I think you're just showing that you need social support for the things that you want to believe are true but have serious doubts about.
There's a classic cult study that I don't feel like looking up right now. Pretty much it was a doomsday cult, but without the posion kool-aide and such. The thing is, leading up to the doomsday, they just about shunned attention, preferring to gather in a reclusive compound. It was only after the zero hour had come and gone that they suddenly turned into heavy prostelityzers. When world ceased to end and the aliens or whatever didn't show up, it became necessary for them to get other people to accept that the world was going to end but that the aliens prevented it. External proof to quell internal doubts.
I don't know how convincing that was. It makes perfect sense to me.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Squicky, I am not so sure that even in 200 years we have learned that much about human nature or about what kinds of societies work. We study psychology and sociology, but we still are at the stage where no two social scientists agree. Compare the situation with physics, or chemistry, where virtually everyone holds to the same basic model. Think how long we've had the periodic table, for instance. But there is no periodic table of different societies, let alone an understanding of their underlying structure.
Despite that we have tried out literally hundreds of societal forms, some on a large scale, many more on a small--testing hypotheses by scattershot, as it were. Some have survived in terms of a century or more; many others have not. No doubt more will fail, and it's possible that in another hundred or fifty or twenty years democracy will go under too. But we have so little understanding of underlying causes that we can't predict much of anything at all.
I realize that a lot has changed since 1800. Maybe there are social structures that would work now that failed then. But once again, we don't know. We don't even know when we might know. Until we have some idea, or until what we are living in begins to fail in blatantly obvious ways, it's foolish--and criminal--to run experiments unless every adult involved is in voluntarily.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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No, it makes sense to me too. I guess I understand that someone who is sure of themselves has no need to be fanatical, and for the most part wont be, and I also understand that someone with doubts can act fanatical as a way to make up for it. But what I guess i'm having trouble accepting is the blanket statement Persig makes about it. That it's necessarily a 1 to 1 relationship. But I do get the drift now.
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Mabus, I wasn't talking about social science (although, as a social scientist who agrees with other social scientists, I disagree with your assessment and wonder how you came about it.) I was talking about the new opportunities available in a world where, for example, the main method of transportation is not walking. The idea that any system that failed in a world where severe periodic starvation were just part of what you had to accept would necessarily fail in one where this is not the case was to me patently absurd. That you could suggest it in earnest, I think, tells me a lot more about you than it does about the state of the world.
Society is in constant change. The advent of the internet marked a significant change in our culture. Heck, the current elevation in gas prices likewise fostered many changes. The question is not so much are we choosing to allow society to change or not, but rather are we content for change to society to happen along non-directed, evolutionary lines, To take it even further, who do we trust to try to make changes to our culture. The culture of advertising, of a marketed capitialistic economy, has a profound effect on society.
You can sit in a boat and command the waves to stop. You can even convince yourself through self-deception that they have. But still your boat is going to be moving, pushed by the waves and driven by those at the wheel. It's up to us who those people at the wheel are, where they are trying to take us, and what kind and how good ar the maps they are using.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
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Squicky, I have no doubt that which systems would work and which would fail has changed quite a bit. But that does not mean that we know which systems fall into which category. In an atmosphere of ignorance, it may well be better to let society random-walk its way through different options than to give someone the reins and let them drive in a direction that could very well be totally inappropriate.
You could be right that my knowledge of social science is inadequate and out of date. Until I have the opportunity to update it, however, I can only recall what I learned in school--that there are several dissenting schools of social science and that their analyses of what kinds of society are best are very divergent. That suggests to me that we know relatively little and that handing control to any like-minded group of people is dangerous at best.
Posts: 1114 | Registered: Mar 2004
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Strider, I was thinking about this in relation to other things, and I realized that my ideas of moral education closely parallel what we're talking about. That is, when people do something wrong, it is often seen as necessary that you punish them for this, and that this will stop them from doing it again. I don't trust this model. Rather, I think it teaches them 1) not to get caught, 2) fear of punishment is the reason to do the right, and 3) punishment, especially by the use of force, is an acceptable primary method of dealing with things.
Now, don't get me wrong, my parents spanked me and I intend to spank my children, if a situation that deserves it comes up. However, if it was just a spanking, I'd be against it. I think seeing this as the entirety of dealing with the situation is short-sighted. Instead, it needs to be treated as a symptom of a deeper problem, or, if you like, a manifestation of an underlying system. In the way I see moral education, it should be this underlying system that you are looking to correct, and not the specific instances of disapproved behavior.
This changes things because, instead of focusing on suppressing the negatives, a large part is given to encouraging the positives. That's why I talk so much about maturity and adulthood. Kids want to become adults. They yearn for it (although they are also frightened by it). We can teach them that adulthood is about power (the power to punish, for example) or we can teach them that it is about responsibility.
This is partially why I volunteer with Boy Scouts, despite all of it's authoritarian/prejudicial elements. It is quite simply one of the few organizations left who takes seriously the goal of turning boys into men. Sports has turned into all about winning, no matter what methods, and the celebrity worship of extremely immature "stars". Schools teach kids to conform and to view each other as competition and thus hate each other.
Anyway, I had some very vivid lessons in how to and how not to encourage maturity during my own tenure as a Boy Scout. Some of our adult leaders were of they "shout at you, criticize any mistake, and step in and do it for you if you're not doing it right" type. A few were of the "I'm here so you don't die and to give help and advice if I'm asked for it" type. They let us screw up and made us accept the consequences of screwing up. And we were better for it, not in the short run, but definitely in the long run.
And that brings me to second passage we talked about. I think it comes down to trust and confidence. They trusted us and had confidence in us, not that we could do things right, but that we could learn to do things right. They didn't think that we were mature men, but they believed, quite strongly that we could turn into mature men. And, unlike the boys who got yelled at and everything done for them if it looked like they weren't doing a good job, we did.
So, a learned a lesson from this. They weren't desperate to make us men. They didn't paranoidly look for any instance where we would screw up and then take over. They made sure we didn't kill ourselves in our more or less natural path towards maturity. And they made sure we knew that the extra trust and freedom we were given was directly tied to the responsibility we had shown before. They weren't fanatics about making us into men. The fanatics killed the maturity in people. They let me get into difficult, uncomfortable situations and work my way out with as little help as they thought I needed. And that was just what I needed.
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