[MD] Where have all the values gone?

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Erin]
To me this advice always make being a more private sound like a bad/selfish 
thing.  Maybe private people are home meditating rather than getting drunk 
in a pub, why is that wrong to be private.  Just  being social doesn't mean 
they are being good.

[Arlo]
Of course I never said that meditatating in private was "bad", or that 
public drunkedness is "good". My point is about the sum total of our daily 
activity. Over the past century it has increasingly become confined to 
private space. "Private space", of course, does not imply abject solitude, 
but it does imply (and demand) an increasingly narrow audience. We are 
told, for example, that the Greatest Thing We Can Do is to care only about 
ourselves and ignore or de-value others. Indeed, we are told that there are 
only TWO options, (1) care only about yourself, and (2) care only about 
others. Your response to my post indicates a belief that we must be either 
"all public" or "all private". Certainly there were people back then who 
valued their privacy, and meditated, just as there are people today who 
value public-space engagement. The question is, on a societal level, why 
have we not only flipped on our values, but we demand dichotomy in the 
dialogue?

The "moral pilgrims" who engaged publicly were not exclusively "public". 
There was a private sphere of engagement in their lives too. What we are 
seeing is the slow eroding of public engagement through a language that has 
vilified any notion of "public" or "community" into forms of pure evil. 
This is forced on us daily by a media and culture that has become dependent 
on inflated "private ownership" to fuel the engine of consumerism. Lawrence 
Lessig wrote a book a year or so back called "The Future of Ideas" that 
challenged the consumerist dogma that all "ideas" should be, and HAD to be, 
"privately owned". His argument (simplistically) is that out of desire to 
reward the creator, we have stifled creativity by assuming that "monetary 
reward" is the sole end of the creative process. Although he was not 
arguing against a reward or protection for the creator, he stressed the 
value of an "intellectual commons" that must balance the "intellectual 
ownership of ideas".

That's kind of a digression, but symptomatic of a consumerism that trumpets 
its mantra at us day and night, through ads and media, and through a 
political ideology that has sided with consumerism (in its proclamation 
that any form of community or public ownership is inherently "evil").

[Platt and Khaled mention "craftsmanship"]

[Platt] I don't know about ALL the values, but one I particularly agree 
with and admire is "crafsmanship" or the pursuit of beauty and excellence. 
It's an ongoing process of striving always to make the next _______ (fill 
in the blank) better than the last one. Craftsmanship applies to all 
endeavors, whether solving a business problem, teaching a class or writing 
a post to the MD.

[Khaled] First thing that comes to mind when I hear that term is Time. The 
time it takes to make something with pride. Well time is money and in the 
end this Quality products is not cheap. Which brings us to the next 
question of affordability ( we have been down this path before ), profit 
margins, China labor, wall mart distribution and so on.

[Arlo]
ZMM is largely about "craftmanship", and ideas about why we got away from 
it and how we can begin a return to it. It surprises me, Platt, that you'd 
mention this when you largely ignore or deny much of what ZMM says.

Three short paragraphs from ZMM sum this up quite nicely.

"The real ugliness is not the result of any objects of technology. Nor is 
it, if one follows Phædrus’ metaphysics, the result of any subjects of 
technology, theÊpeople who produce it or the people who use it. Quality, or 
its absence, doesn’t reside in either the subject or the object. The real 
ugliness lies in the relationship between the people who produce the 
technology and the things they produce, which results in a similar 
relationship between the people who use the technology and the things they use.

Phædrus felt that at the moment of pure Quality perception, or not even 
perception, at the moment of pure Quality, there is no subject and there is 
no object. There is only a sense of Quality that produces a later awareness 
of subjects and objects. At the moment of pure quality, subject and object 
are identical. This is the tat tvam asi truth of the Upanishads, but it’s 
also reflected in modern street argot. "Getting with it," "digging it," 
"grooving on it" are all slang reflections of this identity. It is this 
identity that is the basis of craftsmanship in all the technical arts. And 
it is this identity that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. 
The creator of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The owner 
of it feels no particular sense of identity with it. The user of it feels 
no particular sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phædrus’ definition, it 
has no Quality.

That wall in Korea that Phædrus saw was an act of technology. It was 
beautiful, but not because of any masterful intellectual planning or any 
scientific supervision of the job, or any added expenditures to "stylize" 
it. It was beautiful because the people who worked on it had a way of 
looking at things that made them do it right unselfconsciously. They didn’t 
separate themselves from the work in such a way as to do it wrong. There is 
the center of the whole solution."

Consider how Marx expressed a very similar sentiment, "Let us suppose that 
we had carried out production as human beings. Each of us would have in two 
ways affirmed himself and the other person. 1) In my production I would 
have objectified my individuality, its specific character, and therefore 
enjoyed not only an individual manifestation of my life during the 
activity, but also when looking at the object I would have the individual 
pleasure of knowing my personality to be objective, visible to the senses 
and hence a power beyond all doubt. 2) In your enjoyment or use of my 
product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious of having 
satisfied a human need by my work, that is, of having objectified man’s 
essential nature, and of having thus created an object corresponding to the 
need of another man’s essential nature. ... Our products would be so many 
mirrors in which we saw reflected our essential nature." Karl Marx, 
Comments on James Mill's Elements of Political Economy, in Jon Elster (ed.) 
Karl Marx: A Reader. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 31 - 35.

"Identification" with the object of one's labor is key to both Pirsig and 
Marx. And to restate an important sentence in ZMM, "And it is this identity 
that modern, dualistically conceived technology lacks. The creator of it 
feels no particular sense of identity with it. The owner of it feels no 
particular sense of identity with it. The user of it feels no particular 
sense of identity with it. Hence, by Phædrus’ definition, it has no Quality."

It is also interesting to me, Platt, that you argue so vocally for 
Wal-Mart, when it is the "craftsman" who is most negatively impacted by 
such establishments. Khaled rightfully points out that "craftsmanship" 
brings a higher "cost". But, should craftsmanship be what's important, and 
not bottom-line cost, you would likely get your meats at a local 
butchershop, from a butcher that puts time and pride into his/her craft, 
rather than from an establishment that effectively removes the "craft" and 
provides low-quality, low-cost goods on the basis on "price" and nothing more.

A long, long time ago, Ant made the astute observation that while a 
Buddhist-like craftsman could likely find craft in turning screws on an 
assembly line 10 hours a day for little pay, for the vast majority of the 
rest of us, can we really "identify" with an activity such as that? In the 
primary "solution" offered in ZMM, identification appears to be 
inextricably linked to a freedom to follow the contact between labor and 
object based on the Quality moment ("The material and the craftsman’s 
thoughts change together in a progression of smooth, even changes until his 
mind is at rest at the exact instant the material is right."). Such a 
freedom to act is seldom to rarely found in our workplaces. Labor, Pirsig 
argues, must be reunited with art ("We have artists with no scientific 
knowledge and scientists with no artistic knowledge and both with no 
spiritual sense of gravity at all, and the result is not just bad, it is 
ghastly. The time for real reunification of art and technology is really 
long overdue.").

With work-labor relocated to the factory, for the first time in history 
"work labor" and "home labor" became distinct. Second, by an increase in 
the mediation of machines in labor activity, the focus of labor became 
increasing on the means and not the end-product. To risk stating the 
obvious, all of human activity is mediated, either symbollically (e.g., 
language) or materially (e.g. tools and artifacts). However, prior to the 
factory, labor activity was more centered on the product, and the 
utilization of tools was guided by direct contact with the object of one's 
labor, from inception to completion. In the factory, labor activity became 
more centered on operating the machines, that would have contact with the 
object. These two significant labor alterations led Marx to his concept of 
"labor alientation". This is important because it directly parallels the 
idea that "artistry" is important in production. In the arts, although the 
activity is mediated by paints and brushes, the primary locus of the 
activity is on the object of creation, over which the artist has full 
control. In modern production modes, the activity is focused nearly 
exclusively on the mediating objects, and the laborer has little to no 
contact with the object of creation, and certainly no control over its 
final form.

As Khaled implies, I believe that "craftsmanship" will return only when 
people have a greater scope to "value" than bottom-line cost. So long as 
"money is the measure of all things", how can one have a dialogue about 
"craft"?

Arlo