Lila

I've been reading Lila, Robert Pirsig's sequel to Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. While not a political book, the main thrust of the philosophy gave me the language to address the Foley situation, so I wanted to share it with you.

If you've read Zen, or know someone who has, you might well imagine the mired depths of the philosophy in Lila. Like the Prez once said about his job, "It's hard." I'm going to try to break it down in as few sentences as possible.

There are three main systems in the human condition: biological, social, and intellectual.

Biology came first, obviously: before there were towns or clans, there were people. And the biological system carries great weight; in Lila, there is a humorous description of the narrator's "biology" taking over his "intellect" as it shuts him down for sleep. "Tomorrow [his cells] would need him when they got hungry, and they would turn him on to find some food..." He compares this to a computer, that biology is the hardware while the other systems, such as intellect, are the software that runs on it.

Biology is also our impulses, such as sex and eating, as well as crime, consumerism, dancing, and so on. It is what our bodies want, despite our intellect. Many of these biological impulses are good for the hardware: eating and sleeping, for example. My mother once said of sex, "If it was as boring as brushing your teeth, no one would do it and there wouldn't be babies." Sex in fact might be one of the highest biological systems because it perpetuates the body into another body. One might also think of biology as the "wild" part of ourselves, the part that wants to gambol and gamble, fight and take flight. Take away society's mores, take away the intellect's reasoned choices, and what is left is biology.

Biology run rampant in a group of people is of course anarchy. So as people began to band together, they created society to control the biology. You just can't go around killing people. Your biology might impel you to do so, but society steps in and says you can't, and puts you in jail. Laws are created to control biology.

But society can run rampant too. Pirsig uses the Victorian society as an example of society with too much control, which led to repression. (Pirsig absolves them however by asserting that all they were doing was saying Society is more important than the Individual, and putting the good of society above all else. Not a sin, just a difference of priority.) Taking it farther, the Nazis and other totalitarian society systems exert(ed) total control over the individual. This clearly can't stand any more than anarchy.

The last system is intellect. Intellect, the system of the free-thinking mind, looks for example at the Victorians and asks, "Why?" Why are these rules the way they are? Why can't I live how I want? Who died and made you the boss of me? And so come the Bohemians, the Beatniks, the Hippies, and the Slackers. Each group is a group of "contrarian" (Pirsig's word) intellectuals reacting to the repression of their societies, and asking "Why?" This is why totalitarian systems tend to jail dissidents and intellectuals-- the intellect is a threat to a society that says, "Don't question, obey."

Intellect is there to control society by making sure that it doesn't go haywire. The Great Writ of Habeas Corpus is one example-- an idea created to keep society from locking up your biology for no reason. The Constitution is a intellectual endeavor to create a society and give it functions and limitations over the biological system of the People.

The systems are dependent on each other, but Pirsig also puts them in a hierarchy of control: society is there to control biology, and intellect is there to control society. (And of course without biology, no people, no society or intellect-- it's kind of like rock-paper-scissors.) Biology will, without society, turn naturally to anarchy. Society will, without intellect to guide it, turn naturally to totalitarianism as the epitome of society's control. Intellect will forget to eat if biology doesn't rumble the tummy. Everybody has a job.

Here is the crux of the matter, and the reason this philosophy applies to how I'm feeling about politics these days.

Rep. Foley acted on his Biology (in this case, a deviant biological impulse). That's the first bad thing that happened.

But Society, in the form of the Republican leadership, failed to control Foley. Both as the management of the system of society called Congress, and as the management of our system of society called The USA, they failed to stop and correct the deviant biology that sprung up in their midst and threatened young members of the society.

Biology will out, they say-- I had a boss tell me once, "Every employee will try to get away with whatever they can, including you. It's their nature. It's up to you as a manager to rein them in, and it's my job to rein you in." Yes, Foley did something bad. But the society that fails to correct biology is even more at fault, because they weren't fighting the fog of biological impulses in Foley's head like he was. It was their job to rein him in, and they failed.

The Republican-controlled society has also tried to control intellect by secrecy (just don't let the Intellect know what's going on), and by squashing dissent. If you think of our Society as an entity, its imperative is to rise to dominance. It is therefore the fault of Intellect (philosophers, ethicists, dissidents, Democrats) that we have not made any inroads in controlling this Society. It is our job to rein them in. It's our job to defend Habeas Corpus, to curtail the domestic spying program, to correct our foreign policy. If Intellect fails to step in and parent Society, we are doomed to totalitarianism.

Maya Angelou said after 9/11, "Now is the time for thinkers to think." It was at our own peril that we ignored that admonition.

Well, sometimes you read something and it's so clear to you-- and then sometimes you read Pirsig. (Joke.) What I mean is, sometimes an idea can be clear and you wish you could tell more people about it. I hope that I made some sense. I'd love to hear comments on this!