A sense of decorum

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Having a sense of decorum, you know, having the notion of dressing appropriately, especially in public, no longer applies for a significant portion of the American public. Just go to Walmart to see people in garb designed to show just how so many decide to let it all hang out with nary a care in the world. Now channel this notion in trying to define quality, an essence incredibly difficult to describe but able to be understood if one has the wherewithal to know what quality is when one sees it for the very first time.

Back in the days when Americans were flying frequently—which was not so long ago—did you notice how our fellow citizens dressed for travel? An awful lot of them showed up at the airport in their jammies, sometimes even clutching pillows. This told me something: there was no longer any distinction in our society between being in a public place and being in the family room at home. Now it was all just one big mish-mash of being where you happen to be in whatever way you want to be there.

Perhaps the slovenly costumes in airports were a subconscious reaction to being treated like hostages rather than customers by the airlines—that’s how you dress if you’ve been stripped of your dignity. But surely it also had to do more generally with the condition of public space in our country, which had degenerated into little more than one big demolition derby from sea to shining sea. Much of the time spent outside the house, Americans were in their cars, that is, in little mobile privacy pods, traversing public space as rapidly as possible, say the commercial highway strip, which had little meaning, except as a sort of psychological punishment. Hence, just about every place outside the home, except wild nature, took on some repellant quality. 

By contrast, in European cities daily life was still organized cognitively pretty much the old way, with very clear semiotics denoting a sharp distinction between what is public and private. Living quarters might be comparatively meager in European cities, but an abundance of cafes, bistros, and other gathering places served as public living rooms, some of them quite luxurious. So, the result was democratizing: luxury for all, at the cost of a cup of coffee. And all of this civic infrastructure was assembled in an armature of streets that were psychologically rewarding to spend time in, along with excellently designed parks, large and small, woven in through that fabric of streets and blocks.

With Pirsig, quality is intrinsically connected to morals as to have morals is to have ethics and a sense of what's right, something forever destroyed by Vietnam as civility, along with quality, began to fray due, in large part, to the fact the catastrophe of Vietnam was based on a lie. 

The main goal of this book is to develop a complete metaphysical system based on the idea of Quality introduced in his first book. As in his previous book, the narrative is embedded between rounds of philosophical discussion. Unlike his previous book, in which he creates a dichotomy between Classical and Romantic Quality, this book centers on the division of Quality into the Static and the Dynamic. According to the novel, the known universe can be divided into four Static values: inorganic, biological, social, and intellectual. Everything in the known universe can be categorized into one of these four categories, except Dynamic Quality. Because Dynamic Quality is indefinable, the novel discusses the interactions between the four Static values and the Static values themselves.

Upon reading Lilia, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance comes to mind as The Tao is to assume nothing and accept the fact change is the only constant, the basis of not only Pirsig's take on dynamic quality being an undefinable essence but also on the act of creation itself, a process of being and not thinking until the act is complete.

Many of these discussions are tied together by the story of the narrator's own past self, who is referred to in the third person as Phaedrus (after Plato's dialogue). Phaedrus, a teacher of creative and technical writing at a small college, became engrossed in the question of what defines good writing, and what in general defines good, or "Quality", which he understands similar to Tao. His philosophical investigations eventually drove him insane, and he was subjected to electroconvulsive therapy, which permanently changed his personality.