Pure social Quality?

In his book Lila, Robert Pirsig talks at length about Static and Dynamic Quality. Dynamic Quality always tugs on us, pulling us forwards. Static Quality freezes and consolidates the gains made by Dynamic Quality. And Pirsig argues that Static Quality exists on four different levels. (He confuses his picture by introducing the term "evolution" throughout, but his theory has nothing to do with any kind of evolution.) These levels are: inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual. The inorganic level is the level of raw matter and energy, "stuff". Better than this (i.e., higher in Quality) are living organisms. Then living organisms group together into social structures (bee hives, chimpanzee troops, human societies). And finally at the highest level there are intellectual entities like thoughts and ideas. All of these levels are in some sense "made of" Quality, but they all express Quality in different ways.

They also experience Quality in different ways. This leads to conflict between the levels. Social structures inevitably try to curtail or repress the biological impulses of their members; but then intellectual structures critique and reform social institutions. It also means that something can be perceived as good at one level, but bad at another.

One example that Pirsig discusses at great length is the Victorian attitudes towards sex. Pirsig classifies the Victorian perspective as one of pure social Quality, which was horrified by the thought of unrestrained sexuality. But at the biological level, of course, sex is both necessary and valuable. He goes so far as to say that, "from [our] cells' point of view sex is pure Dynamic Quality, the highest Good of all."*

This got me to wondering: where do we find "pure Dynamic Quality, the highest Good of all," at a social level? Pirsig himself thinks it is Celebrity, or Fame. He writes:

Celebrity is to social patterns as sex is to biological patterns.... This celebrity is Dynamic Quality within a static social level of evolution. It looks and feels like pure Dynamic Quality for a while, but it isn't. Sexual desire is the Dynamic Quality that primitive biological patterns once used to organize themselves. Celebrity is the Dynamic Quality that primitive social patterns once used to organize themselves ….

When you look back into the very first writings in the history of the Western world, the cuneiform writings on the mud tablets of Babylon, what are they about? Why, they're about celebrity: I, Hammurabi, am the big wheel here. I have this many horses and this many concubines and this many slaves and this many oxen, and I am one of the greatest of the greatest kings there ever was, and you better believe it.**

It's an intriguing idea, but I think there is a more basic phenomenon that he has missed. Think about sex for a minute. Lust is all-consuming. When you are in the grips of lust it orients your thought, your speech, and your action. It has its own logic: there are things that look personally reasonable through the lens of lust, that you look back at the next day in mystification: "What was I thinking?" But also it can be a way of life. This is the story of Don Juan, the fictional libertine who devotes his whole life to seducing women. I hope I don't need to add that there are people in real life who try to live this way too, with greater or less success.

In other words, to be a credible stand-in for Dynamic Quality at some static level, a phenomenon has to be broad enough to generate a whole world of experience. It has to be able to orient you totally. It has to have its own logic, and it has to be able to inspire a way of life. I think this is more than we can ask of Celebrity. What is more, consider that sex (Quality from the biological level) opens the door to the next level up, to the social level, at least for us. Sex not only creates new life, but sexual attachment binds us to each other in a way that contains the germ of society. So whatever it is that stands in for pure Dynamic Quality at the social level should open up doors to abstract thought and intellection, to the intellectual level. I'm not sure I believe that Celebrity forces a lot of hard thinking, either.

However, most crucially, social Quality does not have to be any respecter of the biological level. Pirsig is clear that higher levels curtail or discipline lower levels as often as they enhance them. Probably a lot more often.

There is a phenomenon that meets all these requirements. It is WAR.

War binds and unifies and organizes social patterns. War takes over thought and speech.*** War has its own logic. War inspires a way of life: there have been many over the years who have found their callings as warriors. And war certainly demands of us the ability to think at the highest level: first to develop tactics, then strategy, and finally diplomacy and politics and law.

But war is destructive of life! So it is. I have noted above that this fact does not stand in the way of my thesis.

But war is destructive of everything! General William T. Sherman famously said, "War is hell." True, all true. But plenty of participants have also found it inspiring like nothing else in their lives. Ernst Jünger's Storm of Steel is clear about both the horror and the thrill of trench warfare on the Western Front in World War I.   

Of course, any metaphysics is just a way of seeing things. There will always be another metaphysical system, and another way of seeing the same phenomena anew. But I think there is a lot to be said for understanding that Mars is as powerful a god as Venus. And for those who want to avoid wars, it would be prudent to understand how embedded they are in human experience.   

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* Robert Pirsig, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (New York: Bantam Books, 1991), p. 202.

** Ibid., p. 256.  

*** See Thucydides, on how the revolution in Corcyra corrupted everyday speech; or George Orwell's essay, "Politics and the English Language."