debitage
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 15.6.02
The next few chapters of the book basically invalidated everything I was saying in my earlier post. Pirsig's refusal to define Quality leads him to lose his grasp on what exactly it is. At the moment there are three "definitions" floating around. First is, as I mentioned before, "goodness." This keeps popping up even though he's made arguments that in some ways parallel much of what I said earlier. The second idea as to what Quality is is presented as a third thing in the subject-object duality. But when you look more closely at how he constructs his "new" metaphysics, he is essentially just name-swapping. Quality is a new name for external reality, and objective reality is made to mean our internal models of how Quality works. Then he switches back to the "goodness" idea to talk about how we discriminate among facts. His point of entry is the question of where hypotheses come from. His conclusion is that there's a moment between when we sense something and when we understand it, and in that moment we are directly experiencing Quality (as reality). So why do some aspects of Quality suggest themselves as likely hypotheses? He rejects, without explanation beyond that it seems to lead to people seeing only what they want to see, the idea that it has anything to do with our understanding of the world. Rather, he says we notice them because of Quality (as goodness). He then offers (on the basis of the appeal of elegant theories to mathematicians) harmony as a third idea of what Quality is. It seems at the moment that he's in some way implicitly equating harmony with goodness. And because Quality also refers to everything that actually exists, he seems to be saying that reality is good and harmonious. Pirsig seems to be advancing the weird notion that we notice certain bits of Quality because they have Quality -- which is akin to saying we notice certain dogs instead of others because the ones we notice are dogs. A universal cannot be used to discriminate. An analogy with the idea of size can perhaps make some sense of this. We notice some things because (among other reasons) of their size. But this does not mean that we notice things because they have size, since everything has a size. We notice them because they're big -- that is, because they have a certain type of size. Based on this theory (which is subject to change when Pirsig takes Quality on a new tangent), he is essentially saying that we select the raw material for thought from reality on the basis of its harmoniousness. Which seems an awfully restrictive and non-universal explanation. It remains a much more likely proposal that it's not something about reality itself that makes us notice it, but rather the relationship between the facts and our understanding. Different people notice different things.
"I am a typical SF liberal jackass no one listens to because I live in San Francisco and everyone knows San Francisco is a totally useless noncity full of weirdo snobby leftist tree-hugging pro-choice intellectual wine-drinking peacenik tofu-suckers who practice yoga and smoke a lot of legal pot and are all just mad because Gore lost and Bush hasn't spontaneously combusted just yet and everybody seems to have a nice shiny new gun except us. But more than anything else, the absolute worst thing that can apparently be said about me among the spurts of hate mail I invariably receive whenever one of my more politically charged columns pokes at the oozing sores of rage over at some right-wing Web site, is this: I must be gay. Really, really gay." An amusing article about hate mail, in which Morford at times gives as good as he gets. I think the proliferation of "fag" as an insult probably reflects the readers' lack of creativity as much as it reflects their "virulent homophobia."
14.6.02
I can start picking at the notion of Quality through Pirsig's demonstration of its existence. He states that, while we can't define what Quality is, we all know it when we see it. The point is made through the story of the narrator's time as a writing teacher. To demonstrate to the members of his class that they already know what Quality is, he reads them selections from several essays and asks them which one has more Quality (essentially, which is better). Since one example is incoherent while the other is clearly reasoned, the class is nearly unanimous in its assessment of Quality. Through this empirical demonstration, he says he has shown that Quality exists and we can tell when it's there. But literary quality is perhaps the best demonstration that value judgement is subjective. It is a plainly verifiable fact that, even within a single culture, you'll have a tough time getting an agreement as to which works of literature are the highest quality. This fact leads us to one of two conclusions. Either some people are wrong about what Quality some works possess -- which disproves the idea that we know Quality when we see it -- or Quality is a subjective notion. I can't prove the latter at the moment, but either conclusion weakens Pirsig's argument. Further, he asserts that Quality is best left undefined. He sees it as a huge breakthrough when he gets his students to stop trying to follow rules on how to write, and simply asking them to do whatever seems to lead to the most Quality in their work. I don't dispute this result, but I don't think it says anything about the definability of Quality. Shifting focus from following the correct means to securing the best ends will certainly lead to better ends. The difference he sees between defined means and vague ends is due to the means/ends distinction, not the defined/vague distinction. Defining those ends will make them more attainable. I've written enough articles to know that the best results occur when you can say explicitly what you mean to accomplish with your writing. Take my seahorses story for National Geographic, for example. I significantly improved the quality of my work when I stopped trying to work in anything interesting I had learned about seahorses, and focussed on discussing their mating habits. I got more quality when I clearly laid out what the criteria for a quality seahorses article. Brainstorming -- writing without a clearly defined purpose -- can be invaluable in generating ideas as to where to go (indeed, the vaguer first draft of the seahorses story brought up a second direction I could have gone with it, which I reworked into a separate sidebar), but you can't write a whole piece that way.
But I only really figured out today what the real problem is. The book is designed for people who are traveling to Finland and need to be able to speak a bit to the locals, so it's very much dialogue based. It builds up the language from polite chitchat -- Chapter One was greetings, Chapter Two was "where are you from?," Chapter Three will be telling the time. I'm filling my head with idioms, but what I'm really thirsting for is the basic structure of the language. I turn each page hoping to see a table of pronouns and the conjugations for a regular verb. I'm not so interested in "Hi, how are you? I'm fine, and you? Pleased to meet you." when I haven't learned "I speak. He eats. You walk." Maybe the problem is the reason I want to learn a new language. I don't plan on going to Finland anytime soon, and I have no illusions about ever being able to speak the language (especially given how poor my Spanish still is). What I want to see is the structure of the language, how people working in a totally different language family put things together. But until then: Olen amerikkalainen. Puhun englantia, espanjaa, ja vähän suomea. Olen Palmertonista, mutta nyt asun Washingtonissa. Olen työssa National Geographic.
13.6.02
"They say that in ancient times there was a great number of books written upon speculations as to the nature of the Deity, and upon the forms of belief or worship supposed to be most agreeable to Him. But these were found to lead to such heated and angry disputations as not only to shake the peace of the community and divide families before the most united, but in the course of discussing the attributes of the Deity, the existence of the Deity Himself became argued away, or, what was worse, became invested with the passions and infirmities of the human disputants. "For," said my host, "since a finite being like an An cannot possibly define the Infinite, so, when he endeavours to realise an idea of the Divinity, he only reduces the Divinity into an An like himself." During the later ages, therefore, all theological speculations, though not forbidden, have been so discouraged as to have fallen utterly into disuse."
An alarmed Bush Administration has reprimanded the Attorney-General, John Ashcroft, over his remarks, according to a leak to the USA Today newspaper." I think this article speaks for itself.
11.6.02
"There was not an actual plan," Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said at a news conference yesterday. "We stopped this man in the initial planning stages." Administration officials have come under considerable criticism in recent weeks for mishandling clues to the Sept. 11 attacks. They stressed yesterday that foiling the alleged plot involved substantial cooperation between the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. "He [al-Qaida leader Abu Zubaida, currently in US custody] described this guy only generically, probably in a way he didn't expect would lead us to him," one senior official said. "But based on other information we had developed, we were able to track him down."" They've had al Muhajir in custody since early May, so it's quite obvious that the timing of this announcement was politically motivated. The administration has been taking a lot of flak for not putting together the clues about September 11, and for trying to keep us in gung-ho September 12 mode by issuing uselessly vague warnings about future attacks. So they announce that they foiled a specific plot, to make us feel like the threat is real and they're successfully defending us. But if you read deeper into the coverage of what happened, the dirty bomb suspect arrest undermines the defense the government has used against critics of its handling of September 11. Their mantra has been "the information we had was too vague." The problem is, the information they had about al Muhajir was pretty vague, too -- Wolfowitz even said there wasn't an actual plan yet, so there were no specifics to be had. Yet we still caught this guy. How? Coordination among agencies and piecing together different strands of evidence. On a slightly different topic, the Post reports this tidbit: "After concluding that building a case would be difficult, prosecutors believed they were running out of time. They faced a secret hearing Tuesday before a judge, officials said, and turned in recent days to another option: transferring him to military custody." So they didn't think they could convict him in a regular court, the way the Constitution says they have to (which sort of undermines the validity of the arrest and makes the announcement look even more obviously political posturing). So they forget the fact that he's an American citizen and hand him over to the military. Lovely.
10.6.02
In an interview with the Roman Catholic monthly magazine 30 Giorni (30 Days), Cardinal Oscar Rodriguez Maradiaga accused much of the US media of being anti-Catholic and of persecuting the Church in their cover of the pedophilia scandals." This doesn't seem like the best thing to be saying if you're a possible successor to the Pope. I'm sure I'm not the only person who is getting his first impression of Cardinal Maradiaga from this story, and it's not a good impression. Being an effective world leader -- especially in the single most respected office in the world -- requires diplomacy that's distinctly lacking here.
9.6.02
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Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance update: