Seeking The Good Mechanic

FIFTEEN YEARS ago a venerated, thick-jowled and white-haired English Man of Letters and Amateur Scientist named Sir Charles P. Snow delivered a famous lecture at Cambridge University. The title of the lecture was The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Sir Charles's message was that English and, in fact, all of Western society no longer possesses a "common culture." We are divided into scientists and nonscientists, and between us we no longer speak the same language. Since science dominates our lives and prospects, he pontificated, the scientific ignorance of politicians, businessmen, and everyone else except scientists themselves, promises to be devastating. Sir Charles's solution: Future scientists ought to read books, and more important, other students should receive at least the rudiments of a scientific education. I first read this lecture-essay for a Nat Sci course in my freshman year, and at the time I wanted to say to this world authority, "So what's new, boobala?"

Having learned about important differences between English and American education--in England students begin specializing around puberty--I still think Sir Charles's solution runs pretty thin. Even if it has some substance the problem of humanizing technology runs deeper than the universal enforcement of General Education requirements. Besides, it's still not clear to me how anyone's simply understanding the Second Law of Thermodynamics would relieve the devastation of a life riveted to the assembly line at Lordstown.

Sir Charles's special whipping boys are writers. He claims that not one American writer "with any class" has grappled seriously with technology or offered anything more constructive than a "scream of horror" at industrialization. There's enough truth in that; it's found in a string of American writers from Thoreau to Henry Miller who wouldn't object to being labelled "Natural Luddites."

But Thoreau was a natural scientist as well as a machine-breaker and Henry Miller, though he studied (on his own) enough science to pass ten Nat Sci courses still passionately wanted to dynamite the whole industrial face of Brooklyn and let the splinters fall into the polluted Hudson River. Familiarity didn't breed anything but contempt.

So the problem does not seem to hinge on simply endowing writers along with the various national elites with an acquaintance with science and technology. I do not know just what the hinges are.

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A FEW MONTHS ago an unknown American Man of Letters and Scientist named Robert Pirsig, an academic outcast, a thin and dishevelled middle class American who rides a BMW and makes a living writing technical manuals, published a first novel entitled Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The book is a major signpost on the cultural road we have been glancing at, a massive imaginative inquiry into technology, the philosophical foundations of science and their bearings on American life. It uncovers and explores certain important hinges that lie rusted in the region of unexamined values and beliefs.

Heavy stuff for a novel. And not the kind of material you would expect to clothe an autobiographical account of a motorcycle journey west from Minneapolis to the coast. Pirsig, in fact, doesn't describe the book as a novel at all but as a "series of lecture-essays--a sort of Chautauqua."

Chautauquas were a form of adult education for farmers and tradespeople that flourished in the last half of the nineteenth century. They were a cross between the travelling tent-show and the camp-meeting. They were the country relatives of the Lyceum lectures where Whitman exhorted and praised the "common man" and Emerson taught him philosophy. Pirsig's harking back to this old American institution, his one man revival of that vein of democratic oratory is not sentimental. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance offers intellectual challenge, a real critical education in the philosophy of science that sounds the concrete language and experience of contemporary "common man:"

Talk about rationality can get very confusing unless the things with which rationality deals are also included... That's all the motorcycle is, a system of concepts worked out in steel.

But this "study" is not merely a layman's guide to technology; it examines the diverse ways modern man relates to his mechanical environment: through embittered helplessness that generates awe and estrangement, through indifference and waste, through blind utilitarian lens and through care and insight. The attitudes are realized in narrative and description as well as in the strands of Pirsig's philosophic discourses.

The last of these attitudes--care and insight--are embodied in the "good mechanic's" relation to the machine. Here enters the "Zen" of the title, in the attentiveness and patience, the carefully attained identification with his work that characterize a good mechanic: "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." The good mechanic becomes our own down-home counterpart of the Zen archer.

PIRSIG IS unabashed and maybe naive in his echoes and borrowings. He mines ideas, allusions, archetypes and symbols not only from Zen, but from Greek, German and Christian mythology, from films and novels of the American Road and from the scores of scientists and philosophers who populate his "talks." After setting Aristotle in a historical context he inserts him into American experience by likening the philosopher to a "third-rate technical instructor, naming everything, showing the relationships among the things named, cleverly inventing an occasional new relationship... and then waiting for the bell so he can get on to repeat the lecture for the next class."

The blatantness of Pirsig's borrowings, his Americanizing of Aristotle and the Zen archer will appear vulgar to some readers. To me the borrowings are signs of a vital writer, maybe a myth-maker. The "good mechanic" resonates in my own experience; he brings to mind a good friend, a mechanic and scientist.

Like the Chautauqua and Lyceum orators, Pirsig is an inveterate moralist. In common with Emerson and the other nineteenth century American Romantics he bemoans the predicament of manufactured man and extolls "self-reliance" and "gumption" and the kind of knowledge that is not to be found in books but only at the cutting edge of experience. But Pirsig also recognizes that "self-reliance" has become the philosophy of American greed and reaction and that the familiar Romantic exhortations about experience and immediacy do not penetrate very far into technology nor into its scientific underpinning. For him the problem is that these two realms of knowledge stand opposed. The "scientific method" for all its contributions to modern life remains "emotionally hollow, esthetically meaningless and spiritually empty." And Romantic knowledge stands outside shouting obscenities and muttering about human value spontanity and grace. Pirsig's chautuaquas trace this division of knowledge backward into antiquity. Then they move forward into a "root-expansion" of scientific thinking. He attempts a synthesis that unites Romantic and Classical knowledge and overcomes their fatal opposition.

BENEATH HIS POMPOSITY and seeming scorn Sir Charles was in earnest. And he probably did search hard for a writer probing the same problems that engaged him. I wonder if he would have embraced Robert Pirsig delivering his own "talks" from the seat of an old high-miler. I do not know enough about science or philosophy to assess Pirsig's originality from that perspective, but he did not write the book to be weighed in as a philosopher. The autobiographical threads that connect his chautauquas possess the urgency of self-revelation. An attempt to exorcize and thrash the "ghost of rationality" haunts Pirsig's story, and his personal quest animates the intellectual odyssey. The book's roots in common experience enable one to follow and savor its course.

The good thing about a Chautauqua is that you can understand it as well as your neighbor and share it with him; that is Pirsig achievement. In the only decent sense of the word, he has class.