• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 306 0

psychologists’ own view of the matter (or rather, outside the purview of their discipline as they conceive it), this cognitive capacity seems to be rooted in a moral capacity. It isn’t captured by the psychometrician’s IQ tests, nor by the reductive view of intelligence as mental “processing power,” as though the data of experience were simply given to us, the way they are to a computer, ready for processing. In the real world, problems do not present themselves unambiguously. Piston slap may indeed sound like loose tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly attentive to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is an ethical virtue.

Iris Murdoch writes that to respond to the world justly, you first have to perceive it clearly, and this requires a kind of “unselfing.” “[A]nything which alters consciousness in the direction of unselfishness, objectivity and realism is to be connected with virtue.”13 “[V]irtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.”14 This attempt is never fully successful, because we are preoccupied with our own concerns. But getting outside her own head is the task the artist sets herself, and this is the mechanic’s task, too. Both, if they are good, use their imagination “not to escape the world but to join it, and this exhilarates us because of the distance between our ordinary dulled consciousness and an apprehension of the real.”15 This is the exhilaration a mechanic gets when he finds the underlying cause of some problem. There seems to be a connection between the idiotic Halloween skeleton that I drew and the idiotic mechanic’s misdiagnosis of Pirsig’s motor. Likewise, there is a connection between the skeleton that Tommy drew and Chas’s discovery of the root cause of the worn cam lobes.

Any discipline that deals with an authoritative, independent reality requires honesty and humility. I believe this is especially so of the stochastic arts that fix things, such as doctoring and wrenching, in which we are not the makers of the things we tend. Similarly, in art that is representational, the artist holds herself responsible to something not of her making. If we fail to respond appropriately to these authoritative realities, we remain idiots. If we succeed, we experience the pleasure that comes with progressively more acute vision, and the growing sense that our actions are fitting or just, as we bring them into conformity with that vision. This conformity is achieved in an iterated back-and-forth between seeing and doing. Our vision is improved by acting, as this brings any defect in our perception to vivid awareness.

Idiocy as an Ideal

If occasions for the exercise of judgment are diminished, the moral-cognitive virtue of attentiveness will atrophy. The institutionalized carelessness of Taylorized work, from the assembly line to the electronic sweatshop, would reform us all in the image of Pirsig’s idiot. We have to wonder, then, whether degraded work entails not just dumbing down but also a certain unintended moral reeducation. Recall that shortly after the advent of the assembly line, one observer noted that

Scientific managers . . . have complained bitterly of the poor and lawless material from which they must recruit their workers, compared with the efficient and self-respecting craftsmen who applied for employment twenty years ago. 16

We have all had the experience of dealing with a service provider who seems to have been reduced to a script-reading automaton. We have also heard the complaints of employers about not being able to find conscientious workers. Are these two facts perhaps related? There seems to be a vicious circle in which degraded work plays a pedagogical role, forming workers into material that is ill suited for anything but the overdetermined world of careless labor.

These thoughts should inform our choices as consumers. It may or may not make sense to have an engine rebuilt by your local mechanic, in narrow economic terms. You may be better off buying a rebuilt engine from one of the chain