Zen and the art of plumbing engineering

By Timothy Allinson, P.E.,
Murray Co., Long Beach, Calif.

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good —
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

Most of you reading this article probably remember hearing of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, written by Robert Pirsig in 1974. Many of you might have actually read it. The book was quite unique in many respects. It was rejected by 121 publishers before being published by Bantam Books and becoming a best seller, setting a world record for “most rejections of a best seller,” according to the Guinness Book of World Records. Since then it has sold more than four million copies.

The book has little to do with Zen Buddhism and only touches on motorcycle maintenance as a metaphor in the study of values and the search for inner peace. I found myself thinking of this book while sitting in a meeting the other day, listening to a discussion on quality control. One of the primary focal points of ZAMM is the concept of quality. The book suggests that there really is no such thing as quality, arguing that quality is an undefinable value — the knife-edge of experience, known to all. I briefly contemplated pointing this out in my meeting but then thought better of it, as it surely would not have been well received.

“To truly experience quality,” Pirsig has been quoted, “one must both embrace and apply it as best fits the requirements of the situation. Such an approach would avoid a great deal of frustration and dissatisfaction common to modern life.” And common to plumbing engineering, I might add.

In the pursuit of quality, Pirsig describes two approaches, namely “classical” and “romantic.” The classical approach requires continual attention and rational problem solving skills to deal with challenges when they arise. The classicist strives to know the details, understand the inner workings and master the mechanics (of motorcycle repair, plumbing design or any other discipline).

In contrast, the romanticist lives in the moment, interested mostly in gestalts, or absolutes, which cannot be described merely by the sum of their parts. The rational world of the classicist appears ugly to the romantic.

It seems that every engineering firm has an array of classical and romantic personalities. I believe that both are essential for any office to function properly. I could be accused of playing the role of the romantic, flying at high altitude, with a small army of classicists entrenched in the details of both the design and CAD operations necessary to produce a set of construction documents. The romantic is the manager, slave to meetings and e-mails and at the front of the firing line should things go awry. Managers, by necessity, are romantics by Pirsig’s definition.

Another interesting concept in ZAMM is the gumption trap, which, as the name implies, is an event or mindset that can cause a person to lose enthusiasm on a project. Sound familiar? Pirsig separates gumption traps into two different categories, namely setbacks and hang-ups.

Setbacks are the result of external circumstances that foil progress on a project, such as architectural changes, client changes or schedule changes. Hang-ups, in contrast, result from internal factors, such as an error that necessitates work to be redone, a problem that is difficult to sort out or a lack of enthusiasm for the nature of the project at hand.

Setbacks are probably the easier of the gumption traps to resolve, since there is an external party to communicate with and come to resolution with on how the revised scope or schedule will be resolved. Whether it’s the architect, client, general contractor or your boss, communication is always the key to resolving a setback. That may not make it easy, but at least there is a known starting point.

Hang-ups can be harder to resolve, since the forces at play are internal and communicating with yourself can be harder than communicating with another. Rekindling motivation in the face of adversity can be very hard indeed. Shifting mental gears from dull and tedious drudgery to an enjoyable and pleasurable challenge is all dependent on attitude — the classical ideal — mechanical work to achieve an inner peace of mind, according to ZAMM.

Ultimately the ideal is to embrace both the classical and romantic states of mind. While this might not achieve a Zen-like nirvana, it at least carries the potential to bring with it a higher quality of life in both work and play.

Pirsig expands on his philosophical concept of the Metaphysics of Quality in his follow-up novel, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991). In this second book, Pirsig breaks down quality into two categories, namely static quality (patterned) and Dynamic Quality (unpatterned). The concept is that knife-edge Dynamic Quality becomes habituated, developing into the four patterns of static quality. These four patterns are inorganic (non-living things), biological (living things), social (behaviors) and intellectual (ideas). This pattern development, Pirsig argues, accounts exhaustively for all of reality.

Still reading?

An example of this pattern development might be the Big Bang (for those who believe in it) representing an unpatterned Dynamic Quality event, followed by evolution — not just traditional biological evolution, but evolution as the moral progression of static patterns of value. Each of the four static patterns has an increasing level of moral value. The bird that develops flight is a biological advancement over the inorganic pattern of gravity, and there is elevated morality in biological patterns above their subordinate inorganic patterns. Similarly, the development of intellectual patterns, such as civil rights, is a moral development, because intellectual patterns have higher moral value than the societal patterns that preceded them. Thus Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality accounts for not only biological evolution but also for the evolution of society and intellect as well.

Surely by now you are thinking, What does this all have to do with plumbing engineering? Well, not much from a practical standpoint but a great deal from a philosophical one. Plumbing engineering is an example of Pirsig’s Metaphysics of Quality. Plumbing engineering falls into what would be defined as an intellectual pattern that overcame the social pattern of dumping sewage in the street. This in turn overcame the biological pattern of human waste and the inorganic deaths that resulted from its mishandling. So in the realm of the Metaphysics of Quality, plumbing engineering holds the highest order of moral development as an intellectual pattern that has transcended society, biology and the inorganics that preceded it.

Timothy Allinson is a senior professional engineer with Murray Co., Mechanical Contractors, in Long Beach, Calif. He holds a bsme from Tufts University and an mba from New York University. He is a professional engineer licensed in both mechanical and fire protection engineering in various states, and is a leed accredited professional. Allinson is a past-president of aspe, both the New York and Orange County Chapters. He can be reached at laguna_tim@yahoo.com.