The Never-Ending Quest for Zen

This story first appeared in the November/December 2024 issue of Hagerty Drivers Club magazine. Join the club to receive our award-winning magazine and enjoy insider access to automotive events, discounts, roadside assistance, and more.

Reading Robert Pirsig’s description of a road trip today, one feels bereft. In his 1974 autobiographical novel Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he describes an unhurried pace over two-lane roads. Thunderstorms take the narrator and his companions by surprise as they ride through the North Dakota plains, registering the miles in subtly varying marsh odors and in blackbirds spotted, rather than in coordinates ticked off.

Most shocking, there is a child on the back of one of the motorcycles. When was the last time you saw that? The travelers’ exposure—to bodily hazard, to all the unknowns of the road—is arresting to present-day readers. And this exposure is somehow existential in its significance: Pirsig conveys the experience of being fully in the world, without the mediation of devices that filter reality or smooth its rough edges for our psychic comfort.

If such experiences feel less available to us now, Pirsig would not be surprised. Already, in 1974, he offered this story as a meditation on a particular way of moving through the world, one that felt marked for extinction. The book, which uses the narrator’s road trip with his son and two friends as a journey of “inquiry into values,” became a massive bestseller, and in the decades since its publication has inspired millions to seek their own accommodation with modern life, governed by neither a reflexive aversion to technology, nor a naive faith in it.

It must be said, the book is very long and tends to get more abstract and heady as you go along. I read the first half of it at age 16, then again in my 40s, and never did finish it. I suspect this is the case for many. But the book inspires devotion, nonetheless. It is a touchstone worth revisiting, as it helps us to see that the questions we ask today about technology are not entirely new.

At the heart of the story is the motorcycle itself, a 1966 Honda Super Hawk. Hondas began to sell widely in the United States in the 1960s, inaugurating an abiding fascination with Japanese design among American motorists. The company’s founder, Soichiro Honda, raised the idea of “quality” to a quasi-mystical status, coinciding with Pirsig’s own efforts in Zen to articulate a “metaphysics of quality.” Pirsig’s writing conveys his loyalty to this machine, a relationship of care extending over many years. I got to work on several Hondas of this vintage when I ran a motorcycle repair shop in Richmond, Virginia. Compared with the British bikes of the same era that inspired them, the Hondas seem more refined.

In the first chapter, a disagreement develops between the narrator, Robert, and his riding companions, John and Sylvia, over the question of motorcycle maintenance. Robert performs his own maintenance, while John and Sylvia insist on having a professional do it. This difference becomes a festering point of tension between them on their roadside stops. Eventually it becomes clear that for John, the technical details of his own motorcycle have merged with a fuzzy symbol he carries around in his head: “technology,” understood as a dehumanizing force. John finds himself at once dependent on this force and oppressed by it, and this tension makes him prone to rage against his own bike when it refuses to start, despite his furious and futile work upon the kick-starter.

This happens a lot, due to his own refusal to meet the bike halfway and learn its mechanical niceties. At one point, John confesses that such episodes “just turn me into a monster inside.” Probing his riding companions, Robert comes to understand that John and Sylvia’s attitude of noninvolvement with “technology” is emblematic of a wider phenomenon that was then emerging, a countercultural sensibility that seeks escape from The Man and all his works: “the whole organized bit,” “the system,” as they put it. The solution, or rather evasion, that John and Sylvia hit on for managing their revulsion at technology is to “Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here.” The irony is that they ride their motorcycle out into the countryside to escape this “death force” that is trying to turn them into “mass people,” and it is precisely in these moments that they find themselves most intimately entangled with The Machine—the one they sit on. This dependence is an affront to their own sense of themselves as cultural dissidents. The problem, then, cuts rather deep. They are living a contradiction.

Today, we often use “technology” to refer to systems whose inner workings are assiduously kept out of view, magical devices that offer no apparent friction between the self and the world, no need to master the grubby details of their operation. It all takes place “somewhere else,” just as John and Sylvia wished. Yet this very invisibility has opened new avenues of surveillance and manipulation. Big Tech now orders everyday life more deeply than John and Sylvia could have imagined in their techno-dystopian nightmare. Today, on a road trip to “get away from it all,” one would likely depend on GPS, prompting digital ads tailored to our destination. The whole excursion would be mined for behavioral data and used to nudge us into profitable channels, likely without our even knowing it.

When John and Sylvia say “Have it somewhere else. Don’t have it here,” they are referring to things like belching smokestacks and the various works of industry that they concede to be necessary but do not understand. All they know is that such things mar their view.

Bourgeois bohemians such as John and Sylvia would soon come to command the heights of the economy and culture. Coincidentally or not, industry was outsourced to lands far from view. Meanwhile, with increasing class segregation by zip code, those who maintain the physical infrastructure that we all depend on also became less socially visible. In retrospect, we may wonder what role the counterculture of the ’60s and ’70s might have played in hardening a class divide between those who traffic in symbols and meaning, and those who work in the economy of things. There are fewer sites of mingling between the classes, where they might become acquainted. The military once was such a site (the draft was universal), but military service too was an object of revulsion to those who staked their class identity on the possession of finer moral qualities.

We don’t know what Pirsig, who died in 2017, thought of these developments, as he refrained from most interviews after publishing a second novel, Lila, in 1991. But his narrator has left us a way out that can be reclaimed by anyone venturesome enough to try it: He patiently attends to his own motorcycle, submits to its quirky mechanical needs, and learns to understand it. His way of living with machines doesn’t rely on the seductions of effortless convenience; it requires us to get our hands dirty, to be self-reliant. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, we see a man maintaining direct engagement with the world of material objects, and with it some measure of independence—both from the purveyors of magic and from cultural despair.

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Matthew B. Crawford, the author of Shop Class as Soulcraft, writes about the intersections of cars, culture, philosophy, and technology at his Substack, Archedelia.

If you enjoyed this article, read his other piece for Hagerty Media, titled, How Working on Your Own Cars Is a Radical Act, right here.