Zen and the Art of Government

Feb 27

I’ve heard it said that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. I’ve also heard that people these days are pretty stressed out, and I have to wonder if that’s because we’re all being so damned vigilant. The subtitle of every other news article is some variation on “HERE’S WHY YOU SHOULD BE WORRIED.” It hardly seems to matter what the article is about: whatever it is, it’s probably worrisome. And there are worries enough to satisfy every preference. If you’re on the left, you get to be VERY WORRIED about climate change and fascism. If you’re on the right, you get to be VERY WORRIED about climate fascists. If you're in the center, you get to be VERY WORRIED about how worried everybody else is, because worried people usually turn into fascists, who are very worrisome. And if your politics are more bespoke, don’t worry: the algorithm can find something scary just for you. Have you heard of the Extreme Center?

Somehow I doubt Thomas Jefferson (or whoever it was) had any of this in mind when he was counting liberty’s true cost. If the price of liberty is eternal vigilance, surely the price of vigilance can’t be anxiety, not least because anxiety is very bad for liberty. Anxious people crave security and are willing to pay any price for it. If we love liberty, we ought to be especially vigilant against anxiety, so we don’t end up trading our birthright for a mess of pottage. This means maintaining a distinction between the two moods, which are clearly pretty easy to confuse – much to the delight of various “thought leaders” who make their money by “raising awareness” and whose real business is to get us all so frazzled that we can’t do any thinking. So how can we tell the difference?

Note first that people who recommend Jeffersonian vigilance have in mind one threat to liberty in particular, and that’s something called “the government.” I proudly share this traditional American distaste for Big Brother, but I also see a lot of my fellow Americans confusing a proper vigilance against overweening government with an aimless anxiety that ironically leaves them more vulnerable to government’s liberty-squashing ambitions. So I’d like to draw the distinction between vigilance and anxiety in this context specifically. What does it mean to be vigilant but not anxious about government?

Governments are institutions, and institutions are best understood as tools. It is incomplete but not false to think of government as a machine, and the machine metaphor is especially helpful if we are trying to distinguish a vigilant from an anxious attitude toward government. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Persig reflects at length on the difference between his own relationship with his motorcycle and that of his friend John. Persig takes an interest in how his machine works, and when it has trouble, he takes pleasure in the work of figuring out how to fix it. He is vigilant about it. But John is only interested in what his machine can do for him, and when it breaks down, he wants nothing to do with it. John thinks the motorcycle should work for him, and he’s offended by the notion that he should ever have to work on the motorcycle. A malfunctioning motorcycle is nothing but frustration: he doesn’t even want to think about it. John is vigilant against such intrusive thoughts. But John isn’t unique, and it’s not just motorcycles. Persig observes that “this peculiar attitude of theirs . . . extended to other things. . . . It’s not the motorcycle maintenance . . . It’s all of technology they can’t take. . . . To get away from technology out into the country in the fresh air and sunshine is why they are on the motorcycle in the first place.”

John’s attitude toward his motorcycle, and toward technology in general, mirrors many Americans’ attitudes toward their government. Government is supposed to work for us: we should not have to work on the government. And government is just supposed to work. We don’t think of our government as a complicated piece of machinery that requires regular maintenance, and it doesn’t occur to us that there might be an art to maintaining it, along with a certain kind of pleasure that comes with practicing that art.

Yet John’s attitude makes a kind of sense. Eventually Persig understands that what John resents is not so much technology itself as “a kind of force that gives rise to technology, something undefined, but inhuman. . . . Somewhere there are people who understand it and run it but those are technologists, and they speak an inhuman language when describing what they do.” And John just doesn’t feel welcome in their realm. “What you see is the NO TRESPASSING, KEEP OUT signs and not anything serving people but little people, like ants, serving these strange, incomprehensible shapes.” John is not really pigheaded; he is alienated. His willful ignorance is a coping mechanism. It’s an attempt to maintain some self-respect in the face of a thing which in theory he controls, but which in reality seems to control him.

John’s attitude makes especially good sense when the technology in question is not a 1966 Honda Super Hawk, but our federal government in the year 2025. Aside from the literal “no trespassing” signs that now keep the people well away from “the People’s House” (did you know that before World War II, anybody could just walk right on to the White House lawn?), the message that government is Not For You is communicated in a thousand quiet ways that easily drown out all the loud demands that you Make Your Voice Heard by yelling about stuff online. The core of the not-for-you message is that government is too complicated to be tinkered with by anybody but a “trained professional.” The idea is that in the old days things were simple enough that Average Joe or Jane citizen could understand them, but the affairs of a modern government are – as Walter Lippman put it, a hundred years ago – “altogether too numerous, too complicated, too obscure in their effects to become the subject of any continuing exercise of public opinion.” Most of what government does now must be left to experts: those “technologists” who “speak an inhuman language in describing what they do.”

But if we can sympathize with John’s attitude toward a government that has only gotten more “inhuman” since Lippman’s time, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance insists that the better response to an alienating machine is to get to know it better. Instead of running away from what alienates you, move closer until it’s no longer alienating. It might feel at first like you’re “trespassing,” but trespass enough and that feeling will go away. Read the manuals, learn how it works, take ownership of your stuff. Work calmly and patiently and keep a sense of humor. Enjoy the process as much as the outcome. Learn to like knowing how the sausage gets made as much as you like eating the sausage. And then, if you think the sausage might be improved, you’ll have some idea about how to improve the sausage-maker.

Thinking of our government as a machine helps us to keep it subordinated to its proper ends. The fact that we have disagreements about which ends are proper, and that a lot of the machinery of our own government is itself devoted to working out those disagreements, introduces some interesting chicken-and-egg problems for political theorists. But I think we can put theory to one side and agree that whatever its purpose, it makes little sense to think of government as an end in itself. Government is a means, not an end. At the same time, the activity of using these means might be something worth pursuing for its own sake. Thinkers from Aristotle to Arendt have insisted that this is true: we are “political animals,” and the point isn’t to overcome that animal instinct and arrive at some utopia where government has withered away and all that’s left is what Saint-Simon called “the administration of things.” That would make us not more but less than human, and a key implication of the Aristotelian argument is that those who do not have the opportunity to participate in their own governance are for that reason diminished.

A lot depends, however, on what all gets included in this activity called “governing.” To his credit, John doesn’t reduce his motorcycle to a tool for getting from point A to point B (a way of thinking that would eliminate the motorcycle itself if a more efficient means of transport were available). In this he is more imaginative than those who think of government as a way to get from point A (the unsatisfactory status quo) to point B (where all your preferred policies have been enacted), and would prefer to skip the slow grubby process of argument and compromise – perhaps by outsourcing deliberation to an “unbiased” algorithm. John is imaginative enough to grasp that the point of going from point A to point B is to enjoy the ride. Similarly, many Americans might agree that government is a tool and also see that using the tool to “secure the blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our posterity” is an activity that we can engage in for its own sake. That’s important, because it keeps us vigilant against the idea that liberty is a product which we might be able to “secure” through some more efficient means – like turning production over to the technocrats. Liberty is not a product in that sense: it is not a product that can be separated from the process of “producing” it. That’s Jefferson’s point: we secure liberty by working to secure it, and that work is “eternal.”

But John doesn’t go far enough: he thinks of riding as the beginning and end of the activity in question. He rides his motorcycle for the sake of riding it, but he does not think of working on the motorcycle as a crucial part of the ride. And, like John, many Americans who are otherwise vigilant against threats to liberty are not so quick to understand that the activity of governing is just as crucially constituted by the less cinematic arts of keeping things in working order. It’s easy to think of riding a motorcycle as an experience of “zen.” One can even imagine riding a motorcycle into glorious battle against one’s political enemies. But Persig’s book is about maintaining a motorcycle.

This oversight bedevils the populist movement that has recently ridden back into Washington. I think the populist impulse is potentially salutary, insofar as it aims to tear down those “no trespassing signs.” As long as we are comparing government to a machine, consider the way so many of our machines have changed since the days of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. The increasing complexity of the machinery of government has been mirrored by an increase in the complexity of actual machinery. Many have remarked that it is no longer possible, in many cases, to open up the hood of your car and fix it yourself. There are too many computers. Indeed, in many cases, users are actually prohibited from working on their own machines, on pain of being disconnected from the “service agreement.” One result of not being able to work on your own devices, many of which are literally “black boxes” that cannot be taken apart and put back together again, is the loss of capacities for doing so. Those who are concerned about this loss of capacity, and who are in particular concerned about the opportunities for taking advantage of people that this loss of capacity puts into the hands of giant corporations, have begun to push for so-called “right to repair” laws. At its best, populism means pushing for a similar “right to repair” our broken government.

But the populism we have seems to fall short of its own ideal, in the same way that John falls short of Persig’s ideal. At one point, Persig takes his bike into the shop, because in this case he “thought it wasn’t important enough to justify getting into it myself, having to learn all the complicated details and maybe having to order parts and special tools and all that time-dragging stuff when I could get someone else to do it in less time – sort of John’s attitude.” But Persig regrets his decision, because the mechanics ruin the bike. This shows him another layer of the attitude in question. “Why did they butcher it so? These were not people running away from technology, like John . . .They were the technologists themselves. They sat down to do a job and they performed it like chimpanzees. Nothing personal in it. . . . In their own way they were achieving the same thing John [was], living with technology without really having anything to do with it.” Populists are incensed by precisely this lack of care. It’s not just that the technocrats who run the government machine don’t want “the people” messing around under the hood. It’s that the technocrats who justify their “no trespassing” signs on the grounds that the people are too careless are themselves so obviously careless, so clearly disinterested in their work. They style themselves as “the adults in the room,” in contrast to the “childish” populists who don’t know what they’re doing and just want to burn it all down. The virtue of the current populism is to see through this charade. Its vice is to conclude that seeing through the pretense of personal concern is the same thing as being personally concerned.

Thus, populists too often confuse the anxiety of realizing that there are no actual “adults in the room” with the vigilance of an actual adult. The Internet, God bless it, has made it harder and harder not to realize that the adults have left the building. The fact that experts have too much power is only part of the problem: what’s worse is that the experts with power don’t really care about their work. But the Internet has made all of us careless, left and right, technocrat and populist. It’s made all of us anxious to preserve whatever power we have against the political enemies who want to take it from us, and that same anxiety has made us less and less vigilant about the work of citizenship itself.

When Persig visits the shop where the mechanics are working on his bike, a radio is blasting the whole time, and he remembers this when he tries to understand their failure. “The radio was a clue. You can’t really think hard about what you’re doing and listen to the radio at the same time. Maybe they didn’t see their job as having anything to do with hard thought, just wrench twiddling. If you can twiddle wrenches while listening to the radio that’s more enjoyable.”

Twiddling wrenches while anxiously listening to the radio – or doom-scrolling social media– is a pretty good description of how most of us live these days. Eventually, some of us are going to have to turn off the radio and get to work – patiently and calmly, with a strong sense that all that “boring” governance stuff the technocrats have been doing (or not doing) is part of politics, and that politics is for everybody, not just for technocrats. It’s part of what it means to have a motorcycle.