Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenace is a book with considerable currency among the engineers I've met. The HackerNews cryptid and friend of mine known on the internet as Ludicity mentions it an awful lot on his blog, Daniel Sidhion has written considerable amounts about the romantic and the classical view of software on his blog (both of these people are in the webring, by-the-by), and you'd be hard-pressed to find a serious engineer who hasn't at least heard about it. However, I'd never read it myself.
I've also, at the beginning of this year, taken possession of a 400 cc Honda Shadow (or well, my partner has, anyway), and learning to ride that has taken up a considerable amount of time of late. In doing so, I've been learning bits and pieces about the mechanics of a motorcycle, which has been fascinating and I cannot recommend enough.
It was with this context in mind, therefore, that I recently read a copy of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance that I found in a second-hand bookshop last Friday evening. I was expecting a text primarily about craft, care and quality. To my surprise, while these are notable themes, they weren't, on my reading, what the book is primarily about.
Minds divided against themselves
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is, in my reading, a book about integrity and coherence. The central thread of the book is Pirsig trying to make sense of fragmentary memories left behind by a ghost he calls Phaedrus: the person whom he was prior to a significant mental breakdown (which the text attributes to excessive thinking about Quality in the capitalised sense, but which, to my mind, can be probably attributed to abuse by academics) which, this being the sixties, was treated by electroconvulsive therapy deliberately used to obliterate or suppress the old personality and memories. The book tracks Pirsig/Phaedrus as he reconstructs the philosophy of Quality that he had built before the break, and eventually rebuilds both parts of his memories into a unitary self once more. This, to my mind, is what's fundamentally interesting about the book.
While this kind of electroconvulsive therapy has fortunately gone out of vogue, the idea or feeling of a mind being split against itself and the feeling of incoherence or self-betrayal that comes with it is one that's all too common in the year of our lord 2024. There's a personal angle to this: while I've not lost any of my memories in the same way that Pirsig had, the memories of me prior to transition feel like they belong to a different person. The feeling of being a different person trying to reconstruct someone who no longer exists, with all the grief and the pain associated with that, and the encounters with people whom you know you're meant to relate to but just don't, is deeply relatable. Especially given that my transition was not easy and has resulted in me no longer speaking to my parents or much of my family, the feeling of having a part of oneself torn away is very real, and has consequently been top-of-mind for me for a very long time.
That awareness of lacking parts of yourself brings to light the fact that this, in so many smaller ways, is our reality in this world and in our work. The modern technical workplace requires you to split yourself into pieces on a regular basis after all. There's the part of you that is an engineer, that cares about your craft and is fierce in protecting it. There's the part of you that's a worker, that's expected to submit to your betters and listen to what they have to say and under no circumstances think about the work you're doing. There's the part of you that's a consumer, for whom all of this is meant to be irrelevant, and for whom all you're meant to care about is what you buy. And finally, if you're lucky, there might be the part of you that's a citizen, and who's meant to be politically engaged in the world. The modern technical workplace quite consistently tears all of these apart from each other, and all of these parts are expected to do different things and behave in different ways. You-as-engineer is meant to be doing and thinking in profoundly different ways from you-as-employee, and when the two come into conflict, there's no question of reconciliation or finding alignment between the two: you-as-employee dominates every time. And while I'm unusually sensitive to this tearing-apart-of-the-self, I genuinely don't believe that anyone can live through this without suffering somewhat. We are, all of us, drowning in incoherence and lack of integrity.
The opposite of this, is what I'd call integrity: living in such a way that everything you do comes from the same place in you, and that place being the place that you want it to be. Much as a person can have integrity or live with integrity, made things can have integrity as well: in the case of things, they have the sense that the design all comes from the same place, and that that place is a good one. Integrity, in that sense, is a key component of Quality in Pirsig's description. A work or a person with integrity is basically coherent. The search for Quality in work is primarily a search for integrity, and the desire to do good work, is, more than anything, a desire to maintain personal integrity. The steadfast opposition of the tech industry and the workplace to anything resembling integrity thus explains a lot of the pain that we suffer in this world of ours.
The fact that the tech industry is opposed to integrity also explains a lot about the otherwise incomprehensible opposition to Quality that we see in so many workplaces. The industry cannot stand integrity, and will do everything it can to break it. The expectation to produce bad work is thus, all too often, a deliberate goal of the industry, if not a conscious one. It's not that they want bad work, but they want you to tear yourself apart and compromise yourself more than they want good work, and if sacrificing good work is necessary, so be it. And so we're left with people who are broken, missing or betraying parts of themselves, and miserable for no clear reason.
Pirsig/Phaedrus speaks about the consequences of this early on in the book, in the context of ghosts. We and the industry are both haunted by the ghosts of parts of ourselves that we've had torn from us, or, in the case of some more troubling people, deliberately cast off (there's something to be written here about the plot of the Elden Ring DLC, with Kindly Miquella casting off parts of himself that he really shouldn't have, but I'll leave that for later). After all, the ghosts of integrity and Quality, as with Phaedrus and his memories, don't go away that easily.
Social media and its consequences
While part of this haunting and the pain of being torn apart comes from questions about how and in what conditions things are built, by far the most damage and the greatest haunting comes from what is built. OpenAI's models, cryptocurrency, social media, the advertising industry... these are all deeply haunted technologies: technologies that come from a void of integrity, and through which the ghosts of dead integrity come forth to torment us.
Pirsig, in the text, is neutral-to-positive on the matter of technology: he writes about John and Sylvie seeing it as a kind of all-encompassing death force that's slowly consuming the world with a level of detachment, sympathetic to it but believing it to be fundamentally self-defeating. I wonder whether he'd feel the same way in 2024: I suspect not, and I believe that this is because of something he might not have anticipated. In this year of our Lord 2024, many of us still see technology as an all-encompassing death cult, but we've come to think that this is a good thing. We've come to believe that tearing ourselves apart in the pursuit of this death cult, sacrificing integrity and thus inevitably Quality in pursuit of something, is a good or at least inevitable thing. I think that this initially started as a reaction by techies to being denied access to Quality in the 80's and 90's, and the corresponding development of an ideology lionising themselves. After all, when you've been forced to sacrifice your integrity for the sake of other people for long enough, it's not that hard to conclude that maybe you should sacrifice your integrity for your own benefit. That, I believe, led to silicon valley culture and the associated cult of superiority that comes from technology and being able to understand it, and thus eventually to the elevation of technology and software as a good in its own right. Unfortunately, this has led to some very dark places.
Pirsig doesn't speak much about what technology's for: I suppose that even as far back as the seventies, that wasn't much of a question, and the telos of most technology was, on the face of it, pretty obvious. Pirsig's Quality is thus, in so many ways, oriented around whether technology and our relationship to it does what it's meant to do. These days, however, what a technology is for is a prime determinant of integrity and Quality. Blockchain, after all, is impeccably well-engineered. From that perspective, it is a very high-Quality piece of work. The lack of Quality, in this case, lies entirely in what Pirsig would call the romantic view of the technology: the fact that literally the sole valid use-case of this technology is crime and fraud. Similarly, generative AI is, in some ways, a genuinely impressive technological feat, and I'm sure it's very well-engineered: unfortunately, it's being used primarily to shield rich people from those they exploit, replace artists with AI slop so bad that it almost has negative Quality and once again, scam people out of their money. These technologies are consistently ones that admit the ideology of technological progress and superiority and that admit good engineering in the narrow sense, but that only a deeply fucked-up person who lacks integrity and has fundamentally damaged themselves could find useful or good.
In this climate, we find ourselves consistently encountering technologies that lack integrity in and of themselves. And I think that this, far more than anything else, is why we suffer so much. We know on some level that what we works on lacks integrity in a way unprecedented in any other time. We know that even if we our work does hold integrity and is of high Quality, the odds are that what we're doing it for lacks Quality and integrity on a fundamental level. It is, in my experience, almost impossible to maintain the feeling that one is acting with integrity in such a situation, and as the quantity of shit increases, gradually drowning us all, it becomes increasingly hard to maintain Quality and integrity, or even, for that matter, recognise what it is.
Identifying Quality is hard, and part of the fundamental conflict in Zen is the attempt to talk about Quality or integrity without defining it, or even being able to definitively experience it in ways that are consistent between people. There is, however (and I'm honestly quite surprised that Pirsig didn't pick this up as a metaphor), one place where anyone can experience integrity and Quality directly, and that's what I wish to discuss in the next section.
Untuning the sky
From harmony, from Heav'nly harmony
This universal frame began.
When Nature underneath a heap
Of jarring atoms lay,
And could not heave her head,
The tuneful voice was heard from high,
Arise ye more than dead.
John Dryden, A song for St Cecilia's Day
One striking thing that I've noticed about everyone who cares for integrity and Quality is that they all have a deep love and appreciation for music. At the very least, they're active and engaged listeners, and most people with genuine care for integrity make music or play an instrument, at least at an amateur level. I don't believe this to be a coincidence, and nor do I believe it to be a coincidence that the workplace where I was far-and-away the happiest and did my best (early) work (Marshall Day Acoustics), was made up almost entirely of musicians or people who cared about music. This was the only place where I've worked where I was happy, and it was also the only place where I've worked where I ran into colleagues at the Opera.
Music is the purest expression of integrity and Pirsig's Quality. It is the meeting point of art, science and mathematics, and it's one of the very few places in the world where a noticeable lack of Quality will still cause people to protest. The discipline of music requires exacting technical skill, and even an amateur can hear a note out of place or a timing issue with ease. For a professional, or for someone with more training, this sense becomes heightened to the point where perfect execution is the only thing that's good enough. And it can't just be some parts of it that reach great heights: everything has to be perfect, and everything has to fit together. This is of just as much importance in composition: a new composer or one that's simply not skilled can very easily write music that's repetitive, leaden or just flat dead.
At the same time, this need for exacting skill does not reduce the capacity for creativity in music in the least. Different conductors will interpret the same piece of music very differently: Furtwängler, von Karajan and Böhm all have strikingly different interpretations of Beethoven's Fidelio, to give just one example. Old, stale genres can be refreshed and radically changed while keeping their fundamental essence, as with Bernstein's Candide. And above all, the sheer range of music that the world and humanity has given us... the capacity for creativity that we have within the bounds of Quality is nigh-on limitless (though don't listen to Stockhausen if you can avoid it).
Above all, in music you can directly hear and feel a lack of integrity or Quality in a piece. You can directly sense when a piece doesn't fit together, when the quality of performance is poor or when the performers are disharmonious. It's almost impossible to train this out of someone, and I think the only way to do it is quite possibly simply to never show them any good music. Even the most mediocre pop music has flashes of artistic beauty and Quality in it: however much the music industry tries to crush and flatten it, music with no integrity to it at all would be unlistenable.
And it's not just a metaphor: I honestly believe that the part of the brain that senses integrity and Quality is the same part of the brain as that one that senses and experiences music. Bad code, for example, feels actively discordant to me. It feels like someone's dropped a box of tuning forks from a tall building. Moreover, I can often make good design decisions by looking for what choice would be the most harmonious, and I know from personal experience that a lot of scientists think this way. In the extreme, music creates and destroys the world: the incipit from Dryden's Song for St Cecilia's Day above (or for that matter, Tolkien's myth of the music of the Ainur) encapsulates this neatly. I'd like to say that it's a neat metaphor, but honestly? I think this might actually be how the world works.
It's thus no surprise that so many of the people who've created the world we live in are both literally as well as figuratively tone-deaf. Their lack of exposure to art and especially music has left them with a stunted sense of integrity and Quality, undeveloped by lack of use. They build things that, even when they work, are ugly and degrade our world (Instagram and LinkedIn come to mind here: they are disharmonious, ugly tools, no matter how well-engineered they are). As they and their creations eat more and more of the world, it even feels to me as though they're literally untuning the sky and taking the world apart.
I can't say whether or not Pirsig would approve of this reading, or whether this metaphor is useful, even if it's true. Nonetheless, for those of who care about integrity and Quality, following harmony is a good idea. We are, in the end, here to make music, and to make the piece we create together one that's as harmonious as possible.
P.S.
I've just registered that my repeated repetition of integrity and Quality in this text makes me sound like Ignatius J. Reilly from A Confederacy of Dunces persistently ranting about Theology and Geometry. I don't know what to think about that, but I'm a little concerned.