As a motorcycle enthusiast, I am often asked if I have ever read “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance” by Robert Persig. After numerous inquiries and replies that I had not, I finally gave in and read it. The experience was…enlightening.
Written in 1974 and belying its title, it’s actually one of the most widely read philosophy books ever written. To quote the author’s preface notes, the book…”should in no way be associated with that great body of work of factual information relating to orthodox Zen Buddhist practice. It’s not very factual on motorcycles either.”
What it is is an exploration of values, a deep dive into the definition and nature of “quality”, and a retelling of one man’s decline into, rise from, and pending return to, schizophrenia as he and his son travel by motorcycle across the northern United States. I heard full college courses have been devoted to the exploration of this one book.
I loved it.
On my second read through, I was struck by the author’s particular insights about what he called the differences between “primary” and “secondary” America. It has nothing to do with the divisive usual suspects of today: race, gender, politics, religion, social status, etc., and yet it really landed with me. Perhaps I was struck by the profound relevance for our nation today even though it was originally penned 40 years ago in an era when many of these issues were as topical and divisive as they are now.
This excerpt occurs as Robert and his son are about to enter into Northern California from Oregon, encountering a much denser population than that to which they had become accustomed over the past week.
“The traffic is so heavy we don’t have time to look up…Lonely people back in town. I saw it in the supermarket and at the Laundromat and when we checked out from the motel. These pickup campers through the redwoods, full of lonely retired people looking at trees on their way to look at the ocean. You catch it in the first fraction of a glance from a new face—that searching look—then it’s gone.
We see much more of this loneliness now. It’s paradoxical that where people are the most closely crowded, in the big coastal cities in the East and West, the loneliness is the greatest. Back where people were so spread out in western Oregon and Idaho and Montana and the Dakotas you’d think the loneliness would have been greater, but we didn’t see it so much.
The explanation, I suppose, is that the physical distance between people has nothing to do with loneliness. It’s psychic distance, and in Montana and Idaho the physical distances are big but the psychic distances between people are small, and here it’s reversed.
It’s the primary America we’re in. It hit the night before last in Prineville Junction and it’s been with us ever since. There’s this primary America of freeways and jet flights and TV shows and movie spectaculars <and today, I would add social media >. And people caught up in this primary America seem to go through huge portions of their lives without much consciousness of what’s immediately around them. The media have convinced them that what’s right around them is unimportant. And that’s why they’re lonely. You see it in their faces. First the little flicker of searching, and then when they look at you, you’re just kind of an object. You don’t count. You’re not what they’re looking for. You’re not on TV <today, the Internet>.
But in the secondary America we’ve been through, of back roads, and Chinaman’s ditches, and Appaloosa horses, and sweeping mountain ranges, and meditative thoughts, and kids with pinecones and bumblebees and open sky above us for mile after mile after mile, all through that, what was real, what was around us dominated. And so there wasn’t much feeling of loneliness. That’s the way it must have been a hundred or two hundred years ago. Hardly any people and hardly any loneliness. I’m undoubtedly overgeneralizing, but if the proper qualifications were introduced it would be true.
Technology is blamed for a lot of this loneliness, since the loneliness is certainly associated with the newer technological devices—TV, jets, freeways, and so on <Internet, social media> — but I hope it’s been made plain that the real evil isn’t the objects of technology but the tendency of technology to isolate people into lonely attitudes of objectivity. It’s the objectivity, the dualistic way of looking at things underlying technology, that produces the evil. That’s why I went to so much trouble to show how technology could be used to destroy the evil. A person who knows how to fix motorcycles—with Quality—is less likely to run short of friends than one who doesn’t. And they aren’t going to see him as some kind of object either. Quality destroys objectivity every time.
Or if he takes whatever dull job he’s stuck with—and they are all, sooner or later, dull—and, just to keep himself amused, starts to look for options of Quality, and secretly pursues these options, just for own sake, thus making an art out of what his is doing, he’s likely to discover that he becomes a much more interesting person and much less of an object to the people around him because his Quality decisions change him too. And not only the job and him, but others too because the Quality tends to fan out like waves. The Quality job he didn’t think anyone was going to see is seen, and the person who sees it feels a little better because of it, and is likely to pass that feeling on to others, and in that way the Quality tends to keep on going.”
Read the book, and several important themes emerge. Quality. Excellence. Initiative. Care. People, not technology objects. These things often get steamrolled as unimportant, old fashioned, and outdated under the “damn the torpedoes” onslaught of shiny, new, and modern. (I’m looking at you, AI.)
As a nation awash in mental health challenges, substance abuse, factions, conflict, and divisiveness, feel free to draw your own conclusions, but the phrase, “They don’t want you. You’re not on TV.” hits pretty hard in today’s screen/text/remote/isolated culture. Is it possible at least one of the answers to at least a part of America’s current woes actually comes down to choosing Quality and Simplicity over Convenience and Complexity? Something to think about.
Yes, Persig’s book is a deep thinker disguised as a novel, but I found great value in this book — enough to read it a second time to more firmly grasp the concepts. It’s worth the trip. As we motorbike-types like to say, “It’s not about the destination, it’s about the ride.”