Chapter 6: What Is Complete
“The valley spirit never dies.
Call it the mystery, the woman.
The mystery,
the Door of the Woman,
is the root of earth and heaven.
Forever this endures, forever.
And all its uses are easy.”
~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)
“The French novelist André Malreaux professed that the 21st century may or may not be religious. It will, however, be more feminine than the 20th century.” ~ Régis Debray
Western culture is oriented around Sky gods—Yahweh, Zeus, Marduk—and it is no accident that in our modern religion of technology and capitalism, what Neil Postman called “technopoly,” the pantheon of deities—Musk, Bezos, and Kurzweil—are Heaven-bent. Onward and upward to Space, Mars, the Cloud. Planet Starbucks awaits.
The transhumanist fantasies of Silicon Valley have a great deal to do with the denial of death and the typically masculine fear of it. The Great Men of the past were content to seek the immortality of their names in the historical record; those of the present are chasing the real deal.
The spirit of the Daodejing, however, offers up the matrix of a mythology for our time. If history has been dominated by the Escapism of the masculine ideal up through the 20th century, perhaps we are in the middle of a tectonic cultural shift; cultural moments like the #MeToo movement are the tip of an iceberg, a wisp of the emerging zeitgeist of Return. Fukuyama’s prophecy of the “end of history” was not so much wrong and incomplete. If History 1.0 is about differentiating humanity from the biosphere, History 2.0 is about integrating with it. History 1.0 was driven by a zero-sum logic of scarcity, conquest, and competition, of speeding and scaling, of transcending natural limits. History 2.0 will be driven by a logic of abundance, symbiosis, and cooperation, of slowing and rooting, of embracing natural limits. What we call “sustainability” is just a corporatized form of “forever.”
In the Ministry of the Future, novelist Kim Stanley Robinson envisions a new “structure of feeling,” a quasi-religion one character half-jokingly calls “Matriotism: “Gaia citizenship, or what have you. Earth citizen, commons member, world citizen. One Planet. Mother Earth. All these terms used by people who are coming to think of themselves as part of a planetary civilization. Main sense of patriotism now directed to the planet itself.”
This sounds naïve and silly until you realize that what we call “patriotism” is relatively new. The conservative instinct is to regard patriotism as “natural” and be skeptical of its meaningful extension beyond the bounds of the nation-state. The problem with this way of thinking is that the nation-state is a modern construct, not the state of nature. Patriotism is precisely the expansion of an individual’s horizon of care, loyalty, and belonging beyond their immediate kin and local territory to large groups of strangers and large amounts of land. If such an expansion was possible before, why not another? As more and more people are born into a worldwide web and a chaotic climate, it will become more and more natural for them to think in planetary terms.
Contrary to the dystopian bent of so much cli-fi, Robinson’s rollicking fable ends well. After all the geoengineering and carbon pricing and international coordination is done and the Keeling Curve is going down, the heroine, the Prime Ministress of the Future, does a flyover of the planet in an air ship, including a new port city built in the arctic to stabilize the polar ice cap. In a wickedly funny dig at the richest man in the world, Robinson names the city “Mackenzie Prime.”
New to the Dao Du Jour? Check out “Day 0.”
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