It might be time now to really do some thinking about the past year’s election, now that the anger has subsided a bit. What was really going on in the election was a conflict between two differing views of reality. Many pundits said that George W. Bush got elected on moral values. This is a part of the truth. In fact, this nation is divided between two differing camps, each with a differing set of values, visions and assumptions about how the world works.

Having read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance years ago, I was trying to explain to a friend today what it was about. I realized that I didn’t remember it very clearly and finding it on my bookshelf today, I decided to read it again. Some books are worth reading more than once. This one is worth rereading repeatedly. Over ten years ago, I loaned my first copy to someone and never got it back, so I went and bought another just to have it on my bookshelf. I began reading this new copy for the first time.

I came across a passage in it that is relevant today as it was when it was written. It is about conflicting visions of reality, one of which was based in the sixties hippie movement. Here it is:

"That’s the dimension [John]’s in. The groovy dimension. I’m being awfully square talking about all this mechanical stuff all the time. It’s all just parts and relationships and analyses and syntheses and figuring things out and it isn’t really here. It’s somewhere else, which thinks it’s here but’s a million miles away. This is what it’s all about. He’s on this dimensional difference which underlay much of the cultural changes of the sixties, I think, and is still in the process of reshaping our whole national outlook on things. The names "beat" and "hip" grew out of it. Now it’s become apparent that this dimension isn’t a fad that’s going to go away next year or the year after. It’s here to stay because it’s a very serious and important way of looking at things that looks incompatible with reason and order and responsibility but actually is not. Now we are down to the root of things."

"What we have here is a conflict of visions of reality. … That’s really why [John] got upset that day when he couldn’t get his engine started. It was an intrusion on his reality. It just blew a hole right through his whole groovy way of looking at things and he would not face up to it because it seemed to threaten his whole life style." Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig, pp. 53-54.

While the conflicting visions of reality described by Pirsig in the book are different from those espoused by the Democrats and Republicans in the election over the last year, they are related and the conflict is similar. Pirsig says that the cultural changes of the sixties were here to stay. In fact, since he wrote the book, those cultural changes have become the culture for half of America. It has been a growing cultural perspective for the last 40 years and has permeated American society, mostly in urban areas and among the educated middle and upper classes. Much of the growth of conservatism over the past twenty years can be explained as a reaction among rural and traditional Americans to the growth of this new cultural perspective, not as the remnants of the old conservatism that the hippies protested against.

Aside from how these differing views came to be, the important thing to realize is that they are conflicting views of reality and seem to have little common ground. This is a dangerous and unfortunate situation for American society. Because the one’s vision of reality is an intrusion on the other’s reality, they each seem to threaten the other’s whole life style.

We need to get past this illusion and find the common ground between the red camp and the blue camp. As Lincoln put it, a house divided against itself cannot stand. America has some profound challenges ahead of it and must face the challenges united, not as a slim majority ruling over an equally sized minority.