There is a book that was an enormous hit in the 1970’s titled, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.” It sold millions of copies and was written by Robert M. Pirsig. Although it was perceived as an attack on conservatism at the time of its release, it is not. It is a deeply conservative book.
It’s a story about the author and his son taking a motorcycle trip across the country. It’s interspersed with his flashbacks of a time he had an actual psychological break and was hospitalized, even getting electrotherapy. It’s a travelogue scattered with philosophical musings and investigations into what it was that made him go crazy about philosophy in the first place.
The central idea of the book is that there is this thing called Quality. You know what it is; I know what it is, but it’s undefinable. When you try to define Quality in any particular situation, you can have a very hard time. But, you still know what it is. You know deep in your own heart that Beethoven is higher quality than Cardi B. Everyone knows that. Any attempt to say that’s not the case is garbage; it’s postmodernist nonsense.
Pirsig writes that the idea of “Quality” has been lost. Why has it been lost? He breaks it down with reference to Greek philosophy, explaining there was an attempt to separate the True from the Good. That was because if there was no way to find the Good, then presumably Truth could get lost.
Pirsig says we should stop running away from the undefined term, stop pretending that you can define a term that is undefinable like “Quality” or “the Good.” You can pretend you can categorize it; you may think you can nail it down like a butterfly on a piece of paper. But you can’t.
You know what it is in your heart because the way that we interact with the universe is through the prism of that Good, of that Quality. And it’s not entirely subjective, meaning springing from you alone; it is between you and the world. That’s why there’s widespread agreement on what amounts to Quality in a variety of areas across human life.
What he hints at but doesn’t actually say is that the Good, that Quality, is God — that system of values is, in fact, the divine. How we interact with the world is through that prism. It’s where religion fills the gap.
There is such a thing as a higher value, and that higher value is what orients you. Science is not that higher value because science has no values. The empirical cannot bridge what they call the “is-ought gap” from what is — things around you in the universe — to what you ought to do. Pirsig says that’s an artificial gap in the first place because the way that you actually address the world is always going to be oriented through a particular perspective of Quality.
When you take in your sense perceptions around the world, you are discriminating among sense perceptions. You’re not taking in everything around you at an equal rate. If you did, you’d go crazy very quickly, which means there’s automatically an orientation process that is happening between you and the universe.
And that orientation process, says Pirsig, is Quality, which puts back together the True and the Good, because it turns out that they are, in fact, enmeshed with one another: You can’t actually see the True unless you acknowledge the Good.
It’s riveting reading. I highly recommend it.