[MD] Dynamic Development at all costs?

[Arlo Bensinger]

[Platt to Chris]
If you find it less than satisfactory, you are 
probably of a mind that  considers the average 
individual too stupid to know what's good, or at 
least that you know better what's good than she does.

[Arlo]
In ZMM, the same book you draw your quote from, 
Pirsig talks about the cultural blindedness of a 
people conditioned not to see Quality.

"The result is rather typical of modern 
technology, an overall dullness of appearance so 
depressing that it must be overlaid with a veneer 
of "style" to make it acceptable. And that, to 
anyone who is sensitive to romantic Quality, just 
makes it all the worse. Now it's not just 
depressingly dull, it's also phony. Put the two 
together and you get a pretty accurate basic 
description of modern American technology: 
stylized cars and stylized outboard motors and 
stylized typewriters and stylized clothes. 
Stylized refrigerators filled with stylized food 
in stylized kitchens in stylized houses. Plastic 
stylized toys for stylized children, who at 
Christmas and birthdays are in style with their 
stylish parents. You have to be awfully stylish 
yourself not to get sick of it once in a while. 
It's the style that gets you; technological 
ugliness syruped over with romantic phoniness in 
an effort to produce beauty and profit by people 
who, though stylish, don't know where to start 
because no one has ever told them there's such a 
thing as Quality in this world and it's real, not style." (ZMM)

He continues, "Along the streets that lead away 
from the apartment he can never see anything 
through the concrete and brick and neon but he 
knows that buried within it are grotesque, 
twisted souls forever trying the manners that 
will convince themselves they possess Quality, 
learning strange poses of style and glamour 
vended by dream magazines and other mass media, 
and paid for by the vendors of substance." (ZMM)

Thus Pirsig felt that the problems in the West 
could only be solved by a "Quality" 
Enlightenment, a metaphysical revolution that 
would open the eyes of the masses to see Quality.

Are we beyond that point? Are the masses now 
seeing Quality? Near the end of ZMM, Pirsig 
comments, "I know what it is! We've arrived at 
the West Coast! We're all strangers again! Folks, 
I just forgot the biggest gumption trap of all. 
The funeral procession! The one everybody's in, 
this hyped-up, fuck-you, supermodern, ego style 
of life that thinks it owns this country. We've 
been out of it for so long I'd forgotten all about it." (ZMM)

Are we still in that gumption trap? Are we 
"grooving it"? ""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." (ZMM)

What changes in production and consumption have 
occurred since ZMM's time? Are our products today 
built in shops where identity is fostered? Do our 
modern factories no longer divide "art" from 
"manufacture"? "The ancient Greeks never 
separated art from manufacture in their minds, 
and so never developed separate words for them." (ZMM)

In short, have we overcome Pirsig's 
acknowledgement that, "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." (ZMM).

Because I would imagine when we, as a people, 
achieve this Quality Enlightenment, our world 
will be drastically different. And the so-called 
"evil" social programs the people have enacted to 
stave off the ills of an unregulated market based 
on an SOM Weltanschauung, will likely no longer be needed.