Freedom and Order

Excerpt from Robert Pirsig's Lila.

Freedom. That was the topic that would drive home this whole understanding of Indians… Of all the contributions America has made to the history of the world, the idea of freedom from a social hierarchy has been the greatest. It was fought for in the American Revolution and confirmed in the Civil War. To this day it’s still the most powerful, compelling ideal holding the whole nation together.

And yet, although Jefferson called this doctrine of social equality “self-evident,” it is not at all self-evident… There is no “self-evidence” in European history that all men are created equal. There’s no nation in Europe that doesn’t trace its history to a time when it was “self-evident” that all men are created unequal. Jean Jacques Rousseau, who is sometimes given credit for this doctrine, certainly didn’t get it from the history of Europe or Asia or Africa. He got it from the impact of the New World upon Europe and from contemplation of one particular kind of individual who lived in the New World, the person he called the “Noble Savage.”

The idea that “all men are created equal” is a gift to the world from the American Indian. Europeans who settled here only transmitted it as a doctrine that they sometimes followed and sometimes did not. The real source was someone for whom social equality was no mere doctrine, who had equality built into his bones. To him it was inconceivable that the world could be any other way…

The Indians haven’t yet lost this one. They haven’t yet won it either… the fight isn’t over. It’s still the central internal conflict in America today. It’s a fault line, a discontinuity that runs through the center of the American cultural personality. It’s dominated American history from the beginning and continues to be a source of both national strength and weakness today… this conflict between European and Indian values, between freedom and order…

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A depression always came over him when he came East like this… He was a Midwesterner and he shared the prejudices of many Midwesterners against this region of the country. He didn’t like the way everything gets more stratified here. The rich start looking richer and the poor start looking poorer. What was worse, they looked as though they thought this was the way thing ought to be. There was no sign it was going to change.

In a state like Minnesota or Wisconsin, you can be poor and still feel some sense of dignity if you work hard and live fairly cleanly and keep your eye on the future. But here in New York it seemed as if when you’re poor you’re just poor. And that means you’re nobody. Really nobody. And if you’re rich you’re really somebody. And that fact seemed to explain ninety-five percent of everything else that went on in this region.

Maybe he was just noticing it more because he’d been thinking about Indians. Some of these difference are just urban-rural differences, and the East is more urban. But some of these differences reflected European values too. Every time he came this way he could feel the people getting more formal and impersonal and… crafty. Exploitative. European. And petty, too, and ungenerous.

Out West among the Indians it’s a standing joke that the chief is the poorest man in the tribe. Every time somebody needs something he’s the one they go to, and by the Indian code, “the generosity of the frontier,” he has to help them. Phaedrus didn’t think you’d see much of that along this river. He could just imagine some strange riverboat man pulling up at Astor’s mansion and saying, “I just saw a light on and thought I’d stop in and say ‘hello.’” He wouldn’t get past the butler. They’d be horrified at his impertinence. Yet in the West [or in most areas of Palestine, I found] they’d probably feel obliged to invite him in.

It just got worse and worse around here. The rich got glitzier and glitzier and the poor got scuzzier and scuzzier until you finally got to New York City. Homeless crazies hovering over ventilator grates while billionaires are escorted past them to their limousines. With each somehow accepting this as natural.