Commentary on Chapter 4 of Lila - An Inquiry into Morals - by Robert M. Pirsig
(Italics indicate direct quotes from Lila)
Ostensibly, much of this chapter is about what is wrong with the Anthropology, and more specifically, the anthropology Franz Boas, reflected in the approach of this soft science to this day. The problem is that Boas is a 19th century Victorian scientist trying who created a hard science approach to anthropology – the “objective” approach…and it’s this very objectivity the bugaboo of Dusenberry, who is deep in with the Indians in a personal way – they are like family.
When Dusenberry dies of brain cancer, Phaedrus feels all the more badly that he was never able to arrive at some way to help him organize. But Phaedrus himself had “enormous problems” which we presume is his psychiatric breakdown and hospitalizations.
But six years later, after publication of a successful book, most of these problems had disappeared. When the question arose of what would be the subject of a second book there was no question about what it would be. Phædrus loaded his old Ford pickup truck with a camper and headed back into Montana again, to the eastern plains where the reservations were.
As you’ve probably guessed, though, Phaedrus is an uneasy conversationalist. So he doesn’t get very far with the Indians, who appreciate the friendly authenticity and true camaraderie of Dusenberry. Not only does Phaedrus not have Dusenberry’s gift of gab...and not the same type of vested interest.
Dusenberry could sit there all weekend and gab on and on with them about their families and their friends and anything they thought was important, and he just loved that. That’s what he was really in anthropology for. That was his idea of a wonderful weekend.
But Phaedrus wants to get a handle on Anthropology situation. After all, he owes a big debt of gratitude to Dusenberry and the Indians for that altering evening. He has some desire to carry on Dusenberry’s legacy, but what he really wants is to get to the bottom of his insight that the unique American personality and especially the idea of individual freedom is something we derived from the Indians. So he has decided this will be the subject or at least will significantly influence his next book. He goes back up the mountain into the high country that has been so fertile for the mind.
It felt good to be back in the stunted pines and wild flowers and chilly nights and hot days again. He enjoyed the ritual of getting up in the morning in the freezing camper, turning on the heat, and then going for a jog up a mountain trail. When he came back for tea and breakfast the camper would be all warm and he could settle down to a morning of reading and note-taking.
That sounds like a Zamm nature moment, doesn’t it? Which brings up an interesting contrast: what we really don’t see in this book at all is that Thoreau-like communing with nature so essential to Zamm. Besides occasional references to the unpredictable dynamism of wind and water, nature does not have a starring role in Lila. This may be another reason it’s a less appealing book for many. And even here, the potential experience yields a sobering insight, not a lofty transcendence. But again, insight is insight. It’s just as valuable to find warmth in the freezing cold as it is to jump off a hot stove.
Phædrus saw with disbelief at first and then with growing anger that the whole field of anthropology was rigged and stacked in such a way that everything he had to say about Indians would be unacceptable. There was no question about it. Page after page kept making it clearer and clearer that there was no way he could continue. He could write a totally honest, true and valuable book on the subject, but if he dared call it anthropology it would be either ignored or attacked by the professionals and discarded.
Phaedrus is an academic, and he knows the sacrifice you make stepping outside that system. The aggravation here isn’t so much that he couldn’t write this book…he just knows that the chance if it being irrelevant is high without a system to back it up. Ultimately, we’re grateful Pirsig chose that path ultimately. But would he have? Security is a seductive thing.
It is not anthropology when someone with no training or experience spends one night on a reservation in a teepee full of Indians taking a hallucinogenic drug.
Interestingly, our present-day psychedelic revolution is doing its level best to make a static pattern out of that dynamism Phaedrus experienced. It is indeed not only academic but almost institutional. Psychedelic stocks, production and implementation, are hot. And the insight Phaedrus had in that session was the equivalent of a PhD in Anthropology. But its methodology had yet to be pinned down.
And now that entheogens have entered academia, that their use are becoming institutionalized, what next? Will we use them for insight into becoming the sort of people who can take humanity in the right direction, or will we embrace them for their ability to control anxiety so we can manage difficult coworkers?
This chapter introduces a key concept of the MoQ, in terms of describing the stagnation of institutions and offering an explanation as to why this happens. Before they become an “institution”, the very definition of an established pattern, they may begin with Quality ideas and a golden telos…teetering in the sweet spot when the dynamic begins to coalesce into a beautiful pattern full of promise…but time takes it further away from its source. Without the natural vitality powerful dynamic/static dance, as the Dynamic, no longer needed, fades, the static must sustain its own life alone. But how? With a barrier. A wall.
What it always means is that you have hit an invisible wall of prejudice. Nobody on the inside of that wall is ever going to listen to you; not because what you say isn’t true, but solely because you have been identified as outside that wall. Later, as his Metaphysics of Quality matured, he developed a name for the wall to give it a more structured, integrated meaning. He called it a cultural immune system. But all he saw now was that he wasn’t going to get anywhere with his talk about Indians until that wall had been breached
When something loses its dynamism, it seems in this book (and I may be wrong about this) that one reason might be the wrong path taken sometime back. That’s not to say there isn’t value in the path taken, but now it’s time to go back to the source and reintegrate it.
The key to getting through the wall lay in re-examining the philosophical attitudes of Boas himself.
By the time Phædrus finished reading about Boas he was confident he’d identified the source of the immune system he was up against, the same immune system that had so rejected Dusenberry’s views. It was classical nineteenth-century science and its insistence that science is only a method for determining what is true and not a body of beliefs in itself
The bizarre think about 19th century science is that it was so powerful and effective. The Victorians stood at the threshold of the effectively final taming of nature by science, the atomic age was just around the corner. Yet, unlike the moderns, they still lived in the real world, had a tangible relationship with nature, and their experiments were attempts to finally fully understand her. But in doing so, these Victorian scientists set up the scene for scientific outcomes to be abstracted into theoretical chess pieces, and the theories themselves being so powerful, to be considered axiomatic and universal structure of everything. The nail in the coffin of subjectivity, so to speak.
Patterns of culture do not operate in accordance with the laws of physics. How are you going to prove in terms of the laws of physics that a certain attitude exists within a culture? What is an attitude in terms of the laws of molecular interaction? What is a cultural value? How are you going to show scientifically that a certain culture has certain values?
You can’t.
Science has no values. Not officially. The whole field of anthropology was rigged and stacked so that nobody could prove anything of a general nature about anybody. No matter what you said, it could be shot down any time by any damn fool on the basis that it wasn’t scientific.
So science “officially” doesn’t have values. And Boas and the like embraced this delusion like religion. After all, the messiness of values creates a problematic modality in that things cannot be measured reliably. The problem is that the behavior of human beings absent of value is meaningless. Everything we do is directed by value, and therefore the only reliable way to “measure” the subjective is how what is perceived to be of high or low Quality. Without Quality, value, there is no subjective. Without the benefit of value as a legitimate rubric, this means that these “scientists” have to agree on rules as to how to ‘evaluate’ their subjects.
The whole field seemed like a highway filled with angry drivers cursing each other and telling each other they didn’t know how to drive when the real trouble was the highway itself. The highway had been laid down as the scientific objective study of man in a manner that paralleled the physical sciences. The trouble was that man isn’t suited to this kind of scientific objective study.
But why exactly can man not be studied objectively? You’ll love this it’s so obvious:
Objects of scientific study are supposed to hold still. They’re supposed to follow the laws of cause and effect in such a way that a given cause will always have a given effect, over and over again. Man doesn’t do this. Not even savages.
That idea that anthropology has no values Phædrus marked down in his mind as the spot. That was the place where the wall could best be breached. No values, huh? No Quality? This was the point of focus where he could begin an attack.
Anthropology from an objective standpoint can’t work. People are dynamic admixtures of multiple selves. The only human state that can be studied like a biological specimen is dead.
So what anthropologists are trying to do is make every possible effort to keep the “science” “objective” even if it means the result is over cautious and absolutely useless. You can’t report on someone’s actions on a day-to-day basis without trying to figure out what it actually means, what the motivation is, what the context is, what their community means, what their childhood was like.
The thing about humans, unlike animals, is their actions MEAN much more that survival and procreation (granted those values are necessary). One has to understand, through a necessarily muddy lens, why they are doing it. And they are always, always doing something because it has a value….and unlike animals, those values while arguably indirectly related, are not directly related to survival and procreation, unlike animals. And it also throws a wrench in , by the way, evolutionary behaviorism because there are so many layers removed from those basic biological drive. Some of the things people do exhibit universal values, and to compare them in this sense is much more interesting. It’s also forbidden in this Victorian objective scientific system.
A science without generalization is no science at all. Imagine someone telling Einstein, You can’t say E=mc2. It’s too general, too reductionist. We just want the facts of physics, not all this high-flown theory. Cuckoo. Yet, that’s what they were saying in anthropology.
Data without generalization is just gossip. And as Phædrus continued on and on that seemed to be the status of what he was reading.
In other words, in order to be objective, all these anthropologists can do is report on their “savage” what he’s doing like He sits down cross-legged in a circle form with other Indians from his community. then he picks up a log reed with a bowl on the end, he fills the bowl with dried leaves, he lights the leaves on fire then sucks in on the other end of the reed. He passes the reed with the lit bowl to another Indian. Now how is this helpful without inferring that this is a spiritual ritual which has a purpose beyond what is able to be observed?
He left the mountains near Bozeman with boxes full of slips and many notebooks full of quotations and the feeling that there was nothing within anthropology he could do.
Then, he stumbles upon something remarkable to him. An article about a very unique individual. William James Sidis, who entered Harvard at age 11.
But after graduating from Harvard, the Boy Wonder pursued his own obscure and seemingly meaningless interests.
Sidis is reviled, and taunted and eventually wins an anti-defamation lawsuit. He dies, and his obituary characterizes him as a failure. Phaedrus is already obsessed with this man for obvious reasons. Two geniuses, totally misunderstood, driven to pathological states by their insights. But Phaedrus is not prepared for what he’s about to discover about Sidis lost work:
It looked as though way back in the thirties Sidis had been on exactly the same thesis about Indians. He was trying to tell people some of the most important things that could be said about their country and they were rewarding him by publicly calling him a fool and failing to publish what he had written
Sidis is like Phaedrus whose brilliance is not understood, whose discovery is considered “a fool”. You could say the same thing about the MOQ. While a lot of people liked ZaMM for a lot of reasons, I am not sure it was for the philosophy itself – the paradigm shifting metaphysics. Lila had a relatively minor impact in comparison….even though it clarified a theory that said some of the most important things about and could make much better sense of our being in the Universe...not to mention the universe itself.
The problem wasn’t that it wasn’t true. The problem was that nobody was interested.