Month: March 2021

Chapter 62

“Why did the ancient Masters esteem the Tao?

Because, being one with the Tao,

when you seek, you find;

And when you make a mistake, you are forgiven.

That is why everybody loves it.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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Our default understanding of the “real world” is not of a game to be played, or an adventure to be had, but more like a test to be passed. Nature is seen as indifferent to our concerns, and unforgiving of our mistakes. Hell is our culture—there is always a “hell” in any culture, no matter how secular—is something as poorly defined as it is inevitable: failure. Success and failure stand in for heaven and hell and, as is fitting for a culture that inherited its achievetron ethos from the Protestant work ethic of Calvinism, since no one can know who is saved and who is damned, status anxiety reigns supreme.

Because the Dao is not something that can be attained, it is not something that can be lost. There is nothing that can get you kicked out of the Garden.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 61

“When a country obtains great power,

it becomes like the sea:

all streams run downward into it.

….

A great nation is like a great man:

When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.

Having realized it, he admits it.

Having admitted it, he corrects it.

He considers those who point out his faults

as his most benevolent teachers.

He thinks of his enemy

As the shadow that he himself casts.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

---

After the Cold War, democratic capitalism appeared to be the last man standing at the “end of history,” and the U.S., it’s most powerful example, bestrode the world as the sole superpower. But 9/11, the Great Recession, and the resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism at the fringes of the West and beyond point to a troubling prospect: history—the perennial struggle between great powers and competing ideologies—is back. History didn’t stop; it was just on holiday.

The narrative emerging now is that the U.S is in or entering into a new cold war with China, a competition between democratic capitalism and authoritarian capitalism destined to fall into what historian Graham Allison “Thucydides’ Trap.” The conflict is real, but we must beware the story we tell about the conflict, since stories can become self-fulfilling prophecies. China is a big fish, but the time to focus on fish has passed. We can no longer ignore the sea.

The Big Story of the 21^st century is not about a clash of civilizations, but of civilization against itself. Climate change is the transcendent challenge for humanity, the call of history, the summons of the sea. We will rise to meet it—as a country and as a civilization—or it will rise to swallow us whole. For centuries we have been trying to control nature and bend it to our will. But as C.S. Lewis remarks in his classic The Abolition of Man, “man’s conquest of nature turns out to be nature’s conquest of man.” Francis Bacon’s adage that “to conquer nature, you must obey her” must be put to a use he never would have imagined. Nature will be our great teacher in our attempts to save ourselves, as we figure out how to unlock the power of the sun, the wind, the earth, and the atom in order to switch from what energy scientist Amory Lovins calls “fuels from hell” to “fuels from heaven.”

Climate change is the shadow cast by civilization. Humanity is not the enemy, as some environmentalists believe. But if we wish to clean up the mess we have made of the planet, we have to clean up our collective psyche and do some shadow work, quit blaming other nations, stop projecting our faults onto them, and take up arms in the great struggle of our time. Ronald Reagan famously remarked that if only aliens would arrive from outer space, it would help us unite across nations and focus our hostility outward. How funny, then, that the threat with that potential to unite humanity proved to be not extraterrestrial, but terrestrial.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 60

“Give evil nothing to oppose

and it will disappear by itself.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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From the standpoint of the cynicism that passes for wisdom that we call common sense, “loving your enemy” and “turning the other cheek” seem naïve and foolish. What could be more intuitive than opposing evil with good?

But from the Daoist point of view, good and evil are points of view that generate and reinforce one another. Like Buddhism, Daoism tends to see “evil” as a product of delusional states of mind, and the most important form of evil you contend with is in yourself. So long as you deny or repress your dark side, you will project it onto other people, or malevolent forces, outside of yourself, and you will more and more identify as a good soldier fighting the good fight. Paradoxically, you are not possessed by demonic spirits, but by your own perceived “goodness.”

But facing your inner demons, confronting your shadow—running toward the monsters under the bed of consciousness—helps you see its other half—and yours. And then when you look outward, you will not see evil people, or enemies, but split human beings, divine animals like yourself doing the best they can. And then you can work with them, and they will be willing to work with you, because you are no longer projecting your shadow onto them. The “mutually assured projection” that dominates much of our social life is not even a zero-sum game; it’s a tragedy of the commons where we all end up worse by pursuing our perceived self-interest. We pursue it poorly because we are confused about who we are.

If you do not give evil the resistance it expects, it will fall forward onto the ground before you, and you will see its backside. And it will be afraid, because the front it was projecting will be revealed precisely as a front.

But one of you has to go first.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 59

“For governing a country well

there is nothing better than moderation.

The mark of a moderate man

Is freedom from his own ideas.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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When Hillary Clinton selected Senator Tim Kaine as her running mate in 2016, he made his public debut on Meet the Press. One of the first non-questions he was asked by David Gregory was “Some people worry that you’re ‘too boring.’” Kaine replied—with wide-eyed enthusiasm, ironically—“Yes, I’m boring!” Donald Trump was many things. Boring was not one of them.

Ever since JFK, boring has not played well in American politics, but Trump represented the near total fusion of politics and entertainment. Amid the carnage of his presidency compounded by the chaos of the pandemic, many Americans had a moment of clarity: desperate for deliverance from the unbearable volatility of Trump’s America, they pulled a George Costanza, and “did the opposite.” They traded the tantrums of Trump for the boredom of Biden. There is arguably no virtue in which Trump is more lacking—and which Biden has more of in spades—than moderation. He is precisely how Plato described the tyrant: ruled by lawless appetites and utterly lacking in self-control.

An excess of moderation is what his monkish, seven-almond-eating former boss, President Obama, was criticized for. But as Aristotle would point out, you cannot have too much of a virtue, since a virtue is precisely a mean between two extremes. Obama did not have too much moderation, but not enough courage and, despite his formidable intelligence, not enough wisdom. As Oscar Wilde said, “Everything in moderation, including moderation.”

Wilde was likely talking about the need to go on a bender every now and then (or more often than that), but another way to understand his aphorism is that moderation and boldness are not mutually exclusive. Moderation does not mean constant caution or risk-aversion. For Plato, the cardinal virtues work together—the truly moderate person is just, wise, brave, and moderate. That means that in a desperate time, the moderate man is willing to take desperate measures, and because he has “freedom from his own ideas,” he will know when that time has arrived. He will throw caution to the wind when the wind threatens to tear his house apart. He will abandon “bipartisanship” when one party is acting in bad faith. He will know when to distrust his own inclination to play to the middle, seek consensus, and find common ground. He will know when to go big, and how big to go.

Because he is believed to be boring—because he is moderate—he can do big things.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 58

“When the will to power is in charge,

the higher the ideals, the lower the results.

Try to make people happy,

and you lay the groundwork for misery.

Try to make people moral,

and you lay the groundwork for vice.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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The phrase “will to power” makes our modern minds run immediately to Nietzsche, yet Nietzsche would agree with the second and third assertions Lao-tzu makes here.

“Man does not pursue happiness,” Nietzsche quipped. “Only the Englishman does that.” For Nietzsche, “happiness” was the watchword and the value worshipped by modern materialistic liberal societies. He described modernity as the “religion of comfortableness,” preoccupied with health and the preservation and prolongation of life. The “death of God,” for him, was not just about the waning of Christian belief in a secular society, but of the absence of grounds for heroism and great sacrifice. For the ancients, a transcendent source of meaning was supplied to us; in the modern world, we have to create it. And that’s hard. So most of us settle for “happiness”—a little pleasure in the day, a little pleasure in the evening.

And that pursuit of “happiness,” Nietzsche thought, is what “morality” amounts to. Both were characterized by conformity and mindlessness. To be a moral person in the modern world didn’t require the cultivation of character and the acquisition of the virtues; it meant more being nice to people, tolerating moral and religious differences, following the law, and paying your taxes. To be happy is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

But Nietzsche thought this recipe—the basic formula of classical liberalism—produced thin soup that would not satisfy the human soul. A politics bent merely on physical security and economic prosperity does much for the body, but little for the soul. It would produce “misery” in the form of loneliness and spiritual confusion, and “vice” in form of violent reaction of the animal spirits seeking expression and release from the dull conformity of bourgeois life. The problem is not that these ideals were “too high” but too low.

Indeed, this “Fight Club” interpretation of Nietzsche—if it feels good do it, rage against the machine, punk rock, fuck the system, be an iconoclastic nonconformist Nietzsche—merely reflects our impoverished modern understanding of power. Joe Biden likes to drop the line that we should lead not by the example of our power, but by the power of our example. For Lao-tzu, true power—and for Nietzsche, the most mature form of the will to power—is mastery over yourself, not over others. You lead others by leading yourself, and you lead yourself by following something greater than yourself. The man who dominates others is a slave to his desires; the man who serves others is free from them. The highest form of the will to power is the skillful harnessing and channeling of de—which gets translated, variously, as virtue, power, or virtuosity.

The true Nietzschean is not an “underman” rebelling against social conventions, but an “overman” who has mastered the rules of social grammar but knows how and when to break them.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 57

“If you want to be a great leader,

you must learn to follow the Tao.

Stop trying to control.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts,

And the world will govern itself.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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The gnomic character of the Daodejing makes it a kind of spiritual and philosophical Rohrschach blot. For instance, it’s not terribly hard to read a kind of vague libertarianism into the Daodejing: Lao-tzu as the free spirit on the fringes of society rolling his eyes at all of Confucius’ oppressive rules. But this would be a mistake.

Libertarianism is a schizophrenic ideology. For one, it attacks the institutions that make its liberty possible; it free rides off of a system it wants to dismantle. For another, it presumes a level of control over one’s life of which most people aren’t capable. For another, if implemented it would result in a domestic and global anarchy that would infringe on the liberty it prizes above all. For another, it is a uniquely American ideology produced by a rare set of historical and geographical circumstances. It’s desire to secede from the body politic to form a paradise is like colonialism in reverse, an extension of the voyage to the New World. If the Singularity is the Rapture for geeks, the libertarian island paradise is the New Age for socially liberal capitalists. In the end, the libertarian’s quarrel is not with government, but with reality itself. There is a reason libertarian billionaires are obsessed with New Zealand, psychedelics, and space.

But most importantly, libertarianism doesn’t see itself as an ideology (to be fair, few do). A good rule of thumb: ideology hides best where it is most decried. This is true not just for many Marxists, but many on the Right who see Marxism where there is none.

Ideology is a secular form of idolatry. It is worshipping a set of ideas about the world, elevating the human power to understand and control the world above the world itself. It presumes a lack of faith in other people to determine their destiny, and a lack of trust in the world to right itself.

We see this taking shape in the debate about the American Rescue Plan, which is an assault on the Reaganomic ideology that has dominated for the last 40 years. Reagan didn’t actually govern like this, but the ideological cult that formed in his wake was committed to the following creed in a manner that can only be deemed theological: Taxes must be cut. Regulations must be slashed. Budgets must be balanced. Work must be incentivized. Inflation must be kept at bay. The market must decide. As these things tend to go, the dogma was somehow followed both slavishly and selectively.

But when the winds change, the great leader—of even just a decent one—pays heed and changes course. He embarks, as FDR said, on a process of “bold, persistent experimentation,” not with blind faith in the power of government to fix and control everything, but mindful of his or his predecessor’s errors, and with trust that something will work—that if we “follow the Dao” and fumble through the darkness, we will stumble into light and “the world will govern itself.”

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 56

“Those who know don’t talk.

Those who talk don’t know.

Close your mouth,

block off your senses,

blunt your sharpness,

untie your knots,

soften your glare,

settle your dust.

This is the primal identity.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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We all know the adage that actions speak louder than words, but Daoism goes further: non-action (wuwei) speaks louder than actions. Or, as the American Buddhist saying goes, “Don’t just do something, sit there!” In this chapter, we find the closest thing to explicit meditation instructions there is in the text.

Our attempts to escape the labyrinth of our everyday problems—our words, thoughts, and actions—often tie us up in knots, kick up dust, and create echo chambers, compounding the problems. How much of our speech and movement floats on a cloud of fallacy and fear? Our way out is not to try another string, move in a different direction, or find the magic words to find, approach, and unlock the exit.

The thread of Ariadne is already at our feet. We just need to stop, sit, and let our eyes adjust to the darkness. The flaw was not in the labyrinth itself, but in the the manner and premise of our search. That flaw, that hairline fracture, that crack that emerges into consciousness—that is the thread.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 55

“He who is in harmony with the Tao

is like a newborn child.

Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,

but its grip is powerful.

….

The Master’s power is like this.

He lets all things come and go

effortlessly, without desire.

He never expects results;

thus he is never disappointed.

He is never disappointed;

thus his spirit never grows old.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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That powerful grip, evolutionary biologists will tell you, is a vestige of our primate inheritance. When we lived in the trees—and when we were hairy—and needed free hands to move from branch to branch, we would have needed a way to hold onto infants—or they would have needed a way to hold onto us. A baby death-grip on the hair of his mother’s belly is pretty adaptive in such circumstances.

Without that powerful grip, it’s hard to imagine how we would survive, let alone achieve a good grasp of reality itself. As we grow, that physical clinging becomes mental and emotional clinging, and over time, our greatest asset becomes our greatest liability. Once we fall out of the garden of the eternal present—don’t forget that Eve grasps the fatal fruit—and become aware of time and death, we begin trying to get a grip on the future in the form of expectations. To let go of expectations is to come to grips with reality in an entirely different sense.

The first half of life is getting a grip. This is easy, since biology and culture program us for it. The second half is letting it go. This is hard, because you can only do it on your own, and it is not a matter of doing.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 54

“Let the Tao be present in your life

and you will become genuine.

Let it be present in your family

And your family will flourish.

Let it be present in your country

And your country will be an example

To all countries in the world.

Let it be present in the universe

And the universe will sing.

How do I know this is true?

By looking inside myself.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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This is one of the few chapters in the text that suggests in injunction to meditate, and that such meditation is the gateway to realizing—that is, knowing and manifesting—the Dao. It reflects the idea of “interbeing,” the commonplace notion that everything is interconnected, that we are a “single garment of destiny.” But talk about interconnection tends to focus on the external, macro-world. And this obscures something important.

Last week I was teaching Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, the Ur-text of modern political philosophy and, arguably, the godfather of classical liberalism. The original cover of the book pictures a Gulliver size king looming over a quaint little city, sword in one hand, scepter in the other. But if you look closely at him, you will notice something funny: his armor. Each link in his chain mail is a person. His armor—what protects him from challenges to his power, what enables him to freely wield the sword that protects the city—is composed of the people. Only through their unity and cooperation is there a leader, a state and, therefore, the possibility of a peaceful life—at all.

Nietzsche took this idea and applied it to the psyche. The individual is not, strictly speaking, an individual, but a chaotic collection of drives. It is a counterintuitive idea that even a little introspection shows to be undeniable. For Nietzsche, the whole game of being human was a creative project of finding out how to best organize, integrate, and channel the energies of our drives—our karmic inheritance—in concert with the forces outside of us. As scholar Graham Parkes puts it, hitting upon the existential essence of music, for Nietzsche the ultimate task was “composing the soul.”

You know when your soul is composed, or when you’re in the presence of someone whose is. You spontaneously attract, or are attracted to, anything or anyone that strays into your orbit. They obey the inverted gravity of your field. Chaos and entropy are gently conducted and incorporated into the ongoing song.

If you let your inner universe sing—if you look hard and long enough inside yourself—the outer universe will take care of itself.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 53

“Stay centered in the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper

while farmers lose their land;

when government officials spend money

on weapons instead of cures;

when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible

while the poor have nowhere to turn—

all this is robbery and chaos.

It is not in keeping with the Tao.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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As the protests and riots that swept the nation last summer got inevitably got caught and spun about in the current of the culture wars, the journalistic spotlight—or the eye of Sauron, depending on the media conglomerate—briefly settled on a new booked called In Defense of Looting. The Martin Luther King, Jr., quote, “A riot is the language of the unheard” zipped around social media. Activists insisted that liberalism is white supremacy. Looting, vandalism, and outright violence were ignored, downplayed, or excused by much of the mainstream media. Of course, this was prime rib red meat for the Right; you could not conjure superior images or themes to trigger the amygdala of the conservative brain than the chaotic scenes surrounding the BLM protests. The Democrats are lucky the optical fallout only cost them Florida, rather than the White House.

It is tempting to assume that Daoism is a natural ally of the Left, and at some level it is, but it’s complex. King also said “Every time there is a riot, George Wallace wins.” I recently taught his legendary “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in which he presents what you might call his practical philosophy of protest. He outlines four steps to a successful protest movement: 1) fact-finding to prove the presence of injustice, 2) negotiation with the opposition, 3) purification, and 4) nonviolent direct action.

The most important of these—and the most difficult—is the third step. It involves a kind of ascetic training in order to prepare your soul and body for verbal attacks and physical assaults, to purge yourself of all hatred and resentment of your oppressors, to cultivate compassion for them as human beings possessed by a hateful ideology—all in preparation to put one’s body on the line for the cause of justice. By absorbing the violence into yourself and letting go of the desire for revenge, you put an end to the samsaric cycle of violence and retribution. You have to be willing to let yourself be destroyed so that you do not destroy in kind. You have to, in short, “stay centered in the Dao.”

It may surprise to hear that St. Thomas Aquinas, the moral philosopher in chief of the Catholic church whose Natural Law theory informs much conservative thinking, agreed that poverty in a rich society was “robbery and chaos.” The poor man with a starving family who steals food when there is plenty to go around is not, strictly speaking, stealing; he is taking what he is owed. Private property rights are important but not absolute; they are subordinate to the right to the means to life, what Catholic social teaching calls the “universal destination of goods.” That doesn’t mean looting is legitimate, but it does mean that it is a symptom of a socioeconomic system out of balance.

King, of course, anchored his quest for social justice in the Christian tradition, but any tradition will do. If you don’t have a secure foothold in the “grounded position,” you’ll be in the “floating position,” easily knocked off balance, seized by passion, or swept up in the mob mentality. The more firmly you are rooted in the ground, the less you will need to push, and the more powerful your pushing will be. The less you divide the world into saints and sinners, winners and losers, oppressors and oppressed—the more you keep in view that you are part of a “seamless garment of destiny”—the more you will be able to reweave the social fabric, rather than tearing it even more.

“Stay centered in the Dao.” But lean to the left.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 52

“In the beginning was the Tao.

All things issue from it;

All things return to it.

….

Seeing into darkness is clarity.

Knowing how to yield is strength.

Use your own light

And return to the source of light.

This is called practicing eternity.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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The translator is here clearly alluding to beginning of the Gospel of John, which alludes to the beginning of the book of Genesis. But the message of the Dao is subtly different from that of the Bible, or at least its standard interpretation.

When God creates in Genesis, it is out of and in opposition to chaos—we are told that that there is a “formless” void, “darkness,” a “deep,” and “waters.” God then brings intelligence and order into being, separating the waters into those “below”—the sea—and “above”—the sky (think about it—if you’re living 4,000 years ago and water falls from the sky, you’d probably conclude that the ceiling was leaking). This separation clears the space for a cosmos. When human beings violate the cosmic order in the Noah story, the watery chaos rushes back in; the implication is that God is keeping the chaos at bay, that we depend on Him for our survival, and that yielding to the darkness is evil.

In the Tower of Babel story, this human overreach takes the function of humanity trying to build a stairway to heaven; supposing that pooling their intelligence and resources, they can escape their mortal condition and become like God. Whether it is Adam and Eve (the fruit), Cain (his brother’s life), or the builders of Babel (bricks and mortar), humans get into trouble when they, literally, take matter into their own hands, when they play at being God, when they are “practicing eternity.”

But the Dao is the “Word” and the darkness. Seeing into darkness is clarifying because it shows us the limits of what we know and who we are. Using your own light means recognizes its limits, and the blind spots veiled in darkness, and the source, therefore, of future growth and development. Darkness, in fact, is the “source of the light.” Think about what that means: creation is not a dead event that happened in the distant past, but a living process coming toward you out of the future. Yielding to it, leaning into the unknown, gives you strength.

You can dredge the same message out of Genesis, but it takes a lot of work. Perhaps that is perfectly fitting given the structure of creation—six days for labor—practicing time—one day for revelation—practicing eternity.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

 

Chapter 51

The Tao gives birth to all beings,

nourishes them, maintains them,

cares for them, comforts them, protects them,

takes them back to itself,

creating without possessing,

acting without expecting,

guiding without interfering.

That is why love of the Tao

is in the very nature of things.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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Loving human beings is hard in a loveless world. Ever since the advent of romantic love among the troubadour poets in the Middle Ages, the romantic has been entangled with the tragic. In the Christian context, the fire of romantic love was kept from consuming the soul because the noble lady was—in theory, at least—the occasion for awakening the poet’s love for divine beauty. He was not just attracted to her, but through her. Sexual love, and even human love, pales in comparison to divine love; the erotic, in this register, is not merely a biological category but a cosmic one.

But in a secular age, running the same program crashes the computer. It places on the beloved a burden that she cannot bear. It’s a lot of pressure to be a soul mate in a soulless world. It’s the inverse of the classical Biblical error of trying to be like God: treating your beloved like a Goddess. It’s paradoxically dehumanizing.

What if this delusion that subtly suffuses today’s default approach to romantic love were based on a deeper one—namely, that love is a merely human, all too human thing? What if, instead, Eros is somehow the engine of evolution? What if the universe were really the Dao, Gaia, the Cosmic Mother, in whose Agapic embrace we can rest? What if, trusting in that background, romance could then be what it should—us playing our part in Lila, God’s play, participating in the divine dance?

I don’t know whether any of that is True. But isn’t it pretty to think so?

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 50

“The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows he is going to die,

And he has nothing left to hold on to:

No illusions in his mind,

No resistances in his body.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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When I was learning how to practice zazen, the style of seated meditation in Zen Buddhism, one of the best pieces of advice I got was to aim for a posture in which you can be physically relaxed, but mentally alert. It’s a hard posture to pull off.

When we are physically relaxed, our minds tend to drift, dull, and doze. Many a meditator nods off. When we are mentally alert—say, tearing through our inbox at work—we tend to tense up, clench our jaws, crane our necks, bunch up our shoulders and upper back. Put another way, when we are physically relaxed, our minds flood with illusions, and when we are mentally alter, our bodies tighten with resistance.

Relax the body. Focus the mind. See what the moment shows you.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 49

“The Master has no mind of her own.

She works with the mind of the people.

…

The Master’s mind is like space.

People don’t understand her.

They look to her and wait.

She treats them like her own children.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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We Americans are allergic to the paternalism of antiquity. Whether it’s the philosopher-kings of Plato or the junzi of Confucius, we are wont to read the ancient approach to politics as unacceptable because it doesn’t respect the modern values of freedom and equality. Nobody tells us what to do!…especially not high-minded, overeducated bureaucrats who think they are smarter and better than us. But this prejudice against paternalism rests on an immature view of adults and children.

To treat people like your own children is not to condescend to them, but to respect them. It is not to impose your vision of the good on them, but to claim a stake in their own flourishing. It is not to fill their minds with your ideas, but to empty them (“people don’t understand her”) so that they can think for themselves. It is not to coerce them to behave in accord with your rules, but to grow the space between stimulus and response (“wait”) so they can act with inner freedom. It is not to make yourself feel superior, but to encourage them to not feel inferior—or superior—to anyone. To treat people like your own children is not to regard them as childish, but to help them become more childlike.

Paradoxically, without a little paternalism, people won’t be truly free, and won’t treat each other equally.

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New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”

Chapter 48

“In the pursuit of knowledge,

every day something is added.

In the practice of the Tao,

Every day something is dropped.”

~ Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao Te Ching: A New English Version (New York: Harper Perennial), 2006.

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In the Christian tradition, Jesus is the “Christ”—the savior—because he empties himself. The Greek word used to describe this action is kenosis. We would do well to let more of the kenotic spirit into our modern lives.

Increasingly today, the upper middle class preoccupation with lifestyle design, from influencer culture to self-help books, has taken on an ascetic character. From Headspace to the Four-Hour Workweek, from Minimalism to Marie Kondo, the last decade was dominated by the desire to optimize, eliminate, simplify, automate, and reduce “friction.” Andrew Taggart brilliantly profiles the demigods that populate our social imaginary, what he calls “secular monks”:

Secular monks inherit from Calvinism the veiling of the transcendent—in their case, the veiling of the very possibility that the transcendent could ever disclose itself. They inhabit an epistemically uncertain world and suffer existential anxiety and loneliness. Above all, they commit to work—to working on themselves and on the world—as the key to salvation. Practitioners submit themselves to ever more rigorous, monitored forms of ascetic self-control: among them, cold showers, intermittent fasting, data-driven health optimization, and meditation boot camps.

Perhaps it should not be surprising that a knowledge economy is suffused with a gnostic ethos. The cliché that our consumer society is plagued by something called “materialism” is wrong. Consumerism expresses a profound contempt for the body, for physical objects, for the earth, preferring the frictionless realm of cyberspace or the promised land of Martian colonies to the filthy business of life on earth. It chases “less” with the mindset of “more,” driven by an escapist ethos built on an extractive economy. The knowledge economy—or the gnostic economy—rests on a dangerous dualism between spirit and matter. Cyberspace depends on servers, servers depend on electricity, and electricity depends on matter, energy, and earth.

The ascetic only superficially resembles the kenotic, though both are characterized by spiritual ambition.

Where the ascetic is moved by desire, the kenotic is moved by compassion.

Where the ascetic wants to escape reality, the kenotic revels in it.

Where the ascetic ascends, the kenotic descends.

Where the ascetic is all discipline, the kenotic is abandon.

Where the ascetic is Apollonian, the kenotic is Dionysian.

Where the ascetic saves, the kenotic spends.

Where the ascetic clings, the kenotic lets go.

Where the ascetic wants control, the kenotic says yes to chaos.

Where the ascetic sees a logic of scarcity, the kenotic sees one of abundance.

Where the ascetic says let’s move to Mars, the kenotic says earth is enough.

If the ascetic spirit drives the knowledge economy, what would an economy of the kenotic spirit look like?

Perhaps a wisdom economy?

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