Chapter 3: Hushing
“So the wise soul governing people would empty their minds…keep people unknowing, unwanting, keep the ones who do know from doing anything.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
Here we see Lao-Tzu seem to embody the very patriarchal ethos he defines himself in opposition to: Confucian conservative command and control. Hardly the hippie libertarian trickster of latter day New Age culture encouraging you to embrace your funk.
But that presumes that the one governing thinks they are in the know, and that is precisely what is denied here. Much like Plato proposed in the Republic that the ones who should rule are the ones who don’t want to rule, Lao-Tzu is saying that the ones who think they know how to rule are the ones who must be kept from power. When you read the Yeats quote today, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity,” it’s natural to think of the mainstreaming of conspiracy theories today and the demagogues who fan its flames. Ironically, the attack on the “administrative deep state”—that is, the people who actually know what they’re doing—comes only ostensibly from the ignorant and uneducated. For they know a great many things that we don’t.
They know that Obama is a Muslim born in Kenya; they know that “Benghazi” [sic]; they know that COVID 19 was leaked from a lab in China; they know that Bill Gates arranged for microchips to be embedded in your skin through the vaccine; they know that the 2020 election was stolen. They know all of these things with passionate intensity, for knowing, in this sense, simply is passionate intensity. What started as the Tea Party, a noisy band of low libertarian, garden-variety anti-government barkers, and metastasized into the Trump Party (there can be no doubt that that is exactly what the GOP now is) actually started a long time ago: as the “Know Nothing Party” of the 1950s: nativist, isolationist, anti-intellectual, rooted in yeoman gnosis. It is what George Packer, in his essential essay in this month’s Atlantic, calls “Real America.”
Those of us in “Smart America” think we know better. But believe it or not—I suspect you may not because you are likely a Smart American—“I believe in Science” and “Science says” are a stone’s throw from “’Cuz Hillary’s emails.” Taylor Dotson has cleverly labeled this kind of politics—the brandishing of facts, fact-checks, and figures, of evidence, empiricism, and expertise, of “studies,” “research,” and so on to demonstrate that your position is clearly, obviously, self-evidently correct—“Fact-ism”:
Who hasn’t given in to the urge to reflexively drop a Snopes link, or to reference a scientific article whose abstract we only skimmed, in order to avoid thinking carefully about why a great-aunt or former college acquaintance doesn’t trust Anthony Fauci?
The basic logical problems with Factism are that it misconstrues the relationship between science and policy and the nature of science itself. Fauci’s knowledge about epidemiology is in a different galaxy than yours or mine. His knowledge about ethics is probably in the same ballpark, or even the same room. Science not only doesn’t give us certainty—especially probabilistic sciences like epidemiology and climatology—but even if it did, that wouldn’t tell us what we ought to do. Moreover, that “reflexively” reflects—you guessed it—passionate intensity.
But the knowledge of Real America is not what they think they know—the conspiracy stuff. It’s what they know we need: belonging. Belonging is what Real America thinks has been stolen from it, what the neoliberalism of Free America destroyed, what the meritocratic knowledge workers of Smart America don’t realize they need, and what Just America call “inclusion” and wants to engineer through social policy.
Dotson calls it connection:
If the underlying problem with scientism and conspiracism is the way each promises certainty, thereby fostering division, then we ought to look toward a politics that is preoccupied less with knowing and more with fostering connection.
Packer calls it patriotism:
“This feeling can’t be wished out of existence. And because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify—world citizenship being too abstract to be meaningful—patriotic feeling has to be tapped if you want to achieve anything big. If your goal is to slow climate change, or reverse inequality, or stop racism, or rebuild democracy, you will need the national solidarity that comes from patriotism.”
Belonging, patriotism, connection—call it what you want. It’s the unspoken category of Donald Rumsfeld’s epistemology: the “unknown known.” If people have it, they’ll “want” and “know” less; they’ll just go about their lives.
Whether you deploy a Scientific worldview or a Biblical worldview, you think you know more than you do. Information without knowledge is empty—meaningless—but knowledge without wisdom is blind—dangerous. Being informed matters, being knowledgeable matters more, but being wise matters most.
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”