Month: January 2022

Chapter 51: Back to the Beginning

“Close the openings,

shut the doors,

and to the end of life 

nothing will trouble you.

Open the openings,

be busy with business,

and to the end of life nothing can help you.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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How many browser tabs do you have open right now? I wager 5-7–on this window. One of these is likely your work email. Another is maybe your personal email. Through both of these openings, anyone in the world can at any given time make a free withdrawal on your stock of attention. 

I am guessing you probably have another window with 7-10 tabs. Half of these are TLDR articles about e.g., the geopolitics of natural gas in Ukraine, the chances of democratic subversion in the U.S in the next few years, the latest climate-related weather disasters, whether we are in a crypto-bubble, and what, exactly, an NFT is. The other half are intriguing YouTube videos. All of these you’re planning to read and watch “sometime later this week.” They’ve been open for over a month.

If you’re reading this on your phone, I won’t even bother getting started.

The whole point of a matrix is that when you’re plugged into it, you don’t see it. But that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily a prison.

In the Matrix films, the computer simulation in which humanity is trapped is initially presented as a prison for the mind. As the films progress, however, it is clear that there is more than meets the mind. After Neo escapes the Matrix created by the machines and wakes up in the “real world”—closing the openings and shutting the doors—we discover, at the end of the second film, that there is a “second” Matrix: the “real world” of the body and the senses is part of something deeper. Neo experiences a subtle, energetic connection with the machines, which culminates in a powerful gnosis experience in the third film: the machines and the humans are one, made of the same star stuff. Only from a superficial, dualistic perspective were humanity and the machines at odds, the true world opposed to the apparent world, the mind and body split.

The Matrix, in the fullness of time, is revealed to be not a prison, but a pregnancy.

Don’t be so quick to write off information technology as condemning us to a post-truth world destined to leach our humanity by capturing our attention. We must always remember that we are in early days—even when the hour grows late.

Here’s a thought experiment: rather than a culture of TLDR, we try “TSDR”: Too Short Don’t Read. Rather than taking sips from what technology critic Nicholas Carr calls ”the shallows,” we adopt the default of preferring the long and in-depth perspectives. By closing the many tiny windows, we open to the few bigger ones. We factor in the cost of these draws on our scarce attention the same way we need to factor the cost of carbon’s draws on the scarce resource of atmosphere.

Software engineering that solves for that—that would overhaul the attention economy of Web 2.0–would be a killer app indeed.

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

Chapter 51: Nature, Nurture

“To have without possessing,

do without claiming,

lead without controlling:

This is mysterious power.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Obama said many things that were grossly misinterpreted: “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” “You didn’t build that,” and, of course, “Leading from behind.”

Except he didn’t say that last one. But you probably thought the did. These two facts are instructive. 

If there is one thing presidents of elite universities will tell you they are trying to instill in their students, it is something called “leadership.” Contrary to the traditional ethos according to which young people should first listen and learn, defer to experts and elders, receive guidance from the discipline and wisdom of teachers, bosses, or mentors, submit to a craft, a subject, an established body of knowledge—they should lead. Prior to the full development of their neocortex, they should lead. Before they are old enough to legally drink alcohol, they should lead. All of them.

What this really means is that they should conform to the values, norms, and mores of the Professional Managerial Class in order to join, or rather remain in, what Matthew Stewart calls the “9.9%.” Crush it. Kill it. Grind. “Lunch,” as Gordon Gecko memorably put it, “is for wimps.”

To lead means to win, to dominate, to reap the rewards of a zero-sum game. Rarely is it stated that there will be many losers. Through a strange ideological alchemy, the winners-take-all mindset of neoliberalism capitalism has been fused with the “everyone gets a trophy” mindset of progressive egalitarianism; this creates the illusion that everyone can be a leader.

Ignoring for the nonce that this is a terrible way to build a healthy society and thriving economy, it’s a misguided way of understanding leadership. Obama didn’t use the phrase “leading from behind” to describe his approach to foreign policy, but it does capture the spirit of his approach. During his campaign for president in 2008, he famously said that he was not opposed to war; he was opposed to “dumb” wars. The Iraq war was dumb in that it was launched from a dumb mindset—the heady intoxication of the “unipolar moment” after the end of the Cold War and the neoconservatives’ eagerness to promote democracy abroad—and in a dumb way—lacking legitimacy in the eyes of the international community. While Obama and the foreign policy establishment over-learned the pitiless lessons of Iraq—especially when it came to Syria and Russia—the instinct was sound.

Leading from behind means sounding out your allies, partners, and stakeholders—especially those who are “less powerful” than you. It means thinking and feeling into the perspectives of your friends and enemies. It means realizing that you’re not in control. It doesn’t mean not using overwhelming force; just that you should only do so when the winds and the waves are behind you. Otherwise, you are just puffing and bluffing. Putin is leading, but not from behind.

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

Chapter 50: Love of Life

“To look for life 

is to find death.

The thirteen organs of our living

are the thirteen organs of our dying.

Why are the organs of our life 

where death enters us?

Because we hold too hard on to living.”

So I’ve heard 

if you live in the right way 

when you cross country 

you needn’t fear a mad bull or a tiger….

Why? Because there’s nowhere in you for death to enter.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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There are three attitudes to take toward one’s qi: squander it, husband it, or augment it. Only the latter two concern us. A common mistake is to suppose that Daoism is offering a path to immortality by building up one’s qi to become as powerful as possible, invulnerable against the mad bull and the tiger. Today, this ancient impulse hails under the banner of “Transhumanism.” In relation to Daoism, this is a kind of Gnostic heresy.

The preferred path is preservation, to practice a kind of negative efficiency: not to be as “productive” as possible—to be “killing it,” a common phrase nowadays whose significance warrants serious consideration—but to be as effective as possible by leveraging your power in the right places. This is done by recognizing that your power is not, strictly speaking, “yours”—it is a tiny trickle in the endless ocean of the world. To hold too hard on to living is Hamlet’s mistake: “take up arms” against this sea, and see it as a “sea of troubles.” To “live in the right way” is to move from the standpoint of the ocean, not that of the drop.

When you “cross country”—when you move through the world—you needn’t worry about mad bulls and tigers because you will not bother them. They will not feel threatened by you because you will not see them as threats. There’s nowhere in you for death to enter because you have already let it in.

Yorick the fool is the perfect foil for Hamlet the heavy. The fool is an expert at husbanding qi because he sees the inverted world—or rather, he sees the myriad ways the world is absurd, contradictory, puffed up, pretentious, empty, and false—and points it out. He pulls the rug out from under those building Babel, trying to win a finite game, straining their organs to escape the round. Like an acupuncturist, he locates the pressures points in the social body and releases squandered energy.

Yorick doesn’t dwell on such questions of life and death and immortality. By poking holes of fun in the argument for augmentation, he shows that there is plenty of qi to go around.

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

Chapter 49: Trust and Power

“The wise have no mind of their own,

finding it in the minds

of ordinary people.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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“In my walks,” Emerson wrote, “every man I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from him.”

Several years ago, I was invited to a wedding in Woodstock, NY. To get there, I had to carpool with some of the bride’s friends. We met up that morning in the East Village. I arrived at the car rental place and spotted the woman I assumed I was looking for, as she was the only woman there. She smiled, shook my hand, and introduced me to an elderly man next to her—her “boyfriend”—named Philip. The age difference—which was quite possibly pushing half a century—was noteworthy but, I figured, it’s New York, and they were, like most of the crowd attending the wedding, artsy types.

I took the wheel, and we began our escape from Manhattan. Philip sat shotgun, his partner in the back. She was in the theater world. I asked Philip what he did. He was vague and evasive, saying he worked in an adjacent area, the arts, etc. We drove on. I finished my second cup of coffee. My mind began turning things over.

My body knew before my conscious mind that I was sitting across from Philip Glass.

I was only passingly familiar with his music—an old roommate used to play it in the background while he worked, and I remember loving his score from the film The Hours—but I had the sense that he was kind of a big deal. I resisted googling his name to get image confirmation lest I loose control of the car and kill the famous composer. But at our first rest stop and could safely use my phone, I came to learn not only that it was, in fact, him, but that according to Wikipedia, Philip Glass is generally considered one of the most influential composers of the late 20^th century.

During our drive up to Woodstock, he peppered me with questions about my work in philosophy. I was at a crucial point in my career, having leveraged my twenties running down the dream of being a professor, beginning to conjure a plan B, wondering if Marge Simpson was right: that, as she tells Lisa, “grad students aren’t bad people, honey, they’ve just made a terrible life choice.” Philip was interested, enchanted, encouraging. When we arrived and parted ways prior to the wedding ceremony, he stopped me and gave a kind of “go forth young man you will do well” benediction.

When I saw him at the reception hours later, as the evening eased toward bacchanal, I asked him “Why didn’t you tell me you were Philip Glass?” He laughed and said, “Because then I wouldn’t have gotten to know you and learn from you. You would have treated me differently.”

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

Chapter 48: Unlearning

“To run things,

don’t fuss with them.

Nobody who fusses 

is fit to run things.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Who most fusses? Babies.

LeGuin points out that the word she glosses as “fuss” has been translated as “diplomacy,” “meddling,” “interference.” In this context, the counsel of the text is to be undiplomatic.

As Russia and the West stand on the brink of something like war over Ukrainian sovereignty, they are of course tied up in something called diplomacy. The text suggests that diplomacy involves some kind of dissembling; indeed, part of the word’s root means to “double” or “fold over,” as official communiques from leaders would have been in the early years of modern statecraft. 

I take the text to be saying not that diplomacy is bad, but that sometimes it means an attempt to deny reality—to defy the gravity of history, to smooth over the rough edges of nature, to pretend that all conflicts can be peacefully resolved. 

Dictators who meddle and interfere and act to gain are the fussiest of all. They do not trust things—and people—to run themselves. They make a fuss and force us to fuss over them. At its worst, diplomacy coddles them and encourages them to persist in their folly. The dictator is playing a different game than the diplomat. The diplomat pretends that we live in a world of grownups. The dictator understands that we never grow completely beyond middle school politics, and exploits that fact in his subjects and enemies. The democrat has to dance in the middle, knowing when to hold them and when to fold them.

The conflict of the day is not about Ukrainian sovereignty. It is about the capacity of the West to defend liberal democracy and democratic capitalism, and hold the line against the rising tide of autocracy. It is about the ability of petrostates to weaponize fossil fuel reserves in an age of climate change. It is about remembering the point of the post World-War II international order, and refusing to let the passage of time dull our collective wits and lull us into complacency.

As on the school yard, there is only one way to stop a bully, and diplomacy is not it.

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

Chapter 47: Looking Far

“You don’t have to go out the door

to know what goes on in the world.

You don’t have to look out the window

to see the way of heaven.

The farther you go,

the less you know.

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Why do we read the news?

“To see in front of one’s nose,” George Orwell wrote, “is a constant struggle.” These days, the struggle is, as we like to say, real.

The first thing to consider is that, in a deep historical lens, “the news” is a relatively recent development. It could only emerge on the back of a nexus of technologies capable of storing and shuttling information widely across space and quickly in time—the printing press and the telegraph, initially, then radio, television, computers, and the internet. 

From another perspective, though, “the news”—and the desire to know it—is ancient. Before civilization—that is, before technologies that could store “bits” in “its”—what we call the news was produced and consumed by a small number of people over a tiny territory. And for everyone except from the very, very earliest humans, the storehouse of past knowledge—disciplined by the iterative process of learning through feedback from the local environment, preserved and passed on orally by the elders from generation to generation—was much more complex and valuable compared to the details of the day. On average, basic life conditions wouldn’t change all that much from one day, week, month, or even generation to the next. Hence a psychological and cultural orientation toward the past: the time of the ancestors, who gradually pass from history into legend and myth. You had to hunt, yes, but you “did not have to go out the door” or “look out the window” to know what is what, in the most vital sense of the phrase.

Consider that this is the information ecology in which we evolved.

The second thing to consider is whether a kind of cognitive optimum, a balance between signal and noise, is necessary for a minimal level of sanity. Every organism has to “make sense” of its social and natural environment, to pay attention to certain things and ignore others in order to survive. Every organism, in other words, has a tacit ontology and axiology, what its nervous system identifies as real and valuable. We are no different; or rather, the way in which we are different makes making sense harder for us. 

If so, it follows that the default settings for that optimum developed prior to civilization. From there, it would follow that civilization is driving us slightly mad, and at an exponential rate.

This would explain a lot of things.

But it would be too hasty and easy a conclusion to draw. Evolution produced us: creatures that are capable of understanding (at least partially) the conditions of their creation, and of creating culture—symbolic forms of thought and communication that shape and are shaped by their environment. Calling us an “evolutionary mistake” is incoherent if you believe that evolution is nothing but “mistakes,” random mutations of genes and natural selection of environments; in fact, the very idea of mistakes makes no sense if evolution is not in some sense a sense-making process. If you buy Neodarwinism, you are not entitled to any value-judgments, because you are committed to value being a purely human construct. You are not entitled to claim that hunter-gatherer societies  were/are better than agricultural, industrial, and informational societies—only different. You are not entitled to claim, for instance, that secular humanism is preferable to religious dogmatism.

The third thing to consider is that we have gotten really good at acquiring information about “the earth” outside of our door and out our window. So good, in fact, that we have begun to entertain fantasies about leaving it. We have become really bad at acquiring wisdom about the way of heaven. “The news” has become a deluge, constantly flooding our homes and pouring through our ears and eyes; we live in the informational equivalent of water world. In that kind of information ecology, it is hard to think, hard to be still, hard to make sense—sense can only be made if there is leisure: free space and time set apart from the business of the world.

I speculate that the roots of organized religion—ritualized, collective worship in the broadest possible sense of the term directed toward the heavens in the broadest possible sense of the term—can be traced to this basic existential situation. Periodic retreat from the present—the news of the day, the business of the world, and so on—resets the mind, reconnects it to heaven, reminds it of the great inheritance on which it rests. Something like a sabbath, in other words, was a cultural invention in order to cope with a more complex information environment. Leisure, in Joseph Pieper’s words, is the basis of culture.

If true, it would follow that the erosion of sabbaths would re-introduce the problem. We would have to turn elsewhere.

This would also explain a lot. Conspiracy theories. Rapture ideologies. Cancel culture. Identity politics. Meditation apps. It would explain, in Philip Rieff’s phrase, modernity produces a kind of “anti-culture.”

Knowing heaven while neglecting earth is just as ignorant as knowing earth and forgetting about heaven. Wisdom is a divine thing, information a human thing. Knowledge, perhaps, is a bridge between the two. We must not retreat into heaven, or get lost in the world. We must find the middle way.

But the middle way always depends on the context. And these days, we should probably err on the side of heaven. The Trump era (which spans before and after his presidency) is if nothing else the near total victory of “the news” in the war for our attention. The production of “fake news” is the sign of the cancerous hypertrophy of information production; since there is too much information to make sense of, the signal/noise ratio in the culture is thrown out of balance, and people begin producing a simulation of the news in order to try and restore it.

Being informed is only desirable to the extent that we can fit the information we acquire into scaffolds of meaning, and climb those scaffolds to help us see new information that can help us build better scaffolds. The most important kind of information we are receiving now is not external, but internal—what our bodies, our hearts, and our minds are telling us about the information ecology we have built. More, at long last, is no longer automatically better. Paradoxically, a kind of intentional ignorance has to be coded into the choice architecture of our built environments in order to build a sustainable civilization. And sustainability needs to be understood not merely or even mainly in ecological and economic terms, but in psychological and cultural terms.

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

Chapter 46: Wanting Less

“The greatest evil: wanting more

The worst luck: discontent.

Greed’s the curse of life.

To know enough’s enough

is enough to know.

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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In Wall Street 2, investment banker #1 (Shia Lebouf) asks investment banker #2 (Josh Brolin), “What’s your number?” How much money, in other words, would it take for you to walk away from the game of high finance dollar bill fuckery.

One word issues from Brolin’s granite rictus: “More.”

The investment banker is the stock image our minds summon when we hear the word “greed.” This makes it easy to assure ourselves that we ourselves are not greedy.

Buddhism warns us of the three root poisons: greed, hatred, and ignorance. Why these three? Because they correspond to our three centers—head, heart, and hara (the gut)—and how they get mixed up. Suffering is produced when one center thinks it’s running the whole show, and fails to recognize the intelligence in each. 

We can become greedy, not just for food, but for recognition and knowledge. 

We can come to hate not just other people, but our own bodies and the truth.

We can be ignorant not just of the way things are, but of our own feelings and bodily needs.

The Tibetan tradition offers a powerful image of greed: the “hungry ghosts” that occupy the lowest level of existence, cursed with tiny mouths and distended bellies, floating about forever empty. We all have a little hungry ghost—and a little investment banker—within. The question is not whether we are greedy, but into which form of greed we most tend to fall. That is the place to begin.

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

Chapter 45: Real Power

“True straightness looks crooked.

Great skill looks clumsy.

Real eloquence seems to stammer.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Several years back I attended a weekend Zen retreat. I arrived on the late side, and the only open cushion was on the left end of the outer horseshoe. I had been on retreats with this teacher before, and had the utmost respect and admiration for him. He was a natural, a “Buddha to the fingertips,” as they say: someone who in their movements, gestures, and voice radiates grace, self-possession, equanimity, lightness, and both humor and intensity all at once. After making a few introductory remarks, the roshi took his seat, which happened to be directly in front of me.

In zazen, you sit with your eyes open in soft focus gazing down a few feet in front of you, and given how still the room is, you notice the slightest motion in your field of vision. Halfway through our first twenty minute session, I noticed the roshi listing forward, then jerking back to an upright position…and a few moments later, doing it again, and a few moments after that, doing it again. The monitor—a senior student who keeps the time and rings the bell at the start and end of the session—was sitting across the horseshoe from him. I saw her see him and smile.

The Zen master was falling asleep.

Projection is an essential element of any kind of pedagogical dynamic. The student projects magical powers onto the teacher. His perception is a mixture of these projections, which are illusions, and correct apprehensions of superior skills, knowledge and qualities acquired after years of practice. The learning process involves the student mastering both his projections and acquiring those skills himself. A gifted teacher will not only model the technical competence to pass on the skills, but will use what in Buddhism is called upaya, “skillful means”: creative ways of imparting things that cannot be written down in a rule book or distilled into a neat verbal formula. Upaya are meant to disrupt the linear, logical mind, to disappoint expectations. The most powerful projection in Zen, and the hardest one to disable, is the student’s belief that the teacher possesses some kind of secret, special knowledge that he lacks.

Roshi Kennedy nodding off in the middle of zazen, I later realized, was an unconscious upaya: even Zen masters get tired.

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

Chapter 44: Fame and Fortune

“Which is nearer,

Name or self?

Which is dearer,

Self or wealth?

All you grasp will be thrown away.

All you hoard will be utterly lost.

Contentment keeps disgrace away.

Restraint keeps you out of danger

So you can go on for a long, long time.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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“I wish everyone could get rich and famous and everything they ever dreamed of so they can see that it’s not the answer.” ~ Jim Carrey

One of the many odd affordances of our new information ecology is that it presents everyone with the plausible chance of becoming micro-famous. Social media is, of course, diabolical in its ability to tap into the most ancient and powerful drives in the psyche, and with fame it is no different. The desire for fame is the sick form of the natural desire for belonging; in Darwinian terms, the desire and the ability to “fit in” was arguably the most important form of “adaptive fit” in our species’ early history. Not just the natural selection of the environment, but the cultural selection of the tribe, was essential for survival.

As with calories, we evolved in conditions of relative scarcity when it comes to recognition. There were only so many people you had to appeal to, gain respect from, and burnish your reputation before; doing so was a requirement for attaining a sense of coherence, feeling yourself integrated with the social and natural world. But now, just as our propensity to feast on sweet and fatty foods is a liability, our propensity to get people to like us—normal, natural, and necessary for both survival and sanity—gets us into trouble. The evolutionary imperative—“more is better”—began smart but has become dumb. Eating, like making a name for oneself, is a means, not an end in itself.

We know this, of course. So why do we fall for the lure?

Cardinal John Henry Newman offers us an incisive distinction for cutting through this conundrum: “real assent” vs. “notional assent.” The difference can be seen by an example Michael Pollan gives in his book on psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind. Smoking addicts who successfully quit after taking a clinically administered dose of psylocibin were asked, months after the treatment, why they didn’t smoke anymore. Their answers were were complicated. Why would I do that to my body? Smoking kills you. And so on. In other words, they didn’t go through any kind of intellectual conversion or gain new insight; every smoker knows full well smoking is bad for you. What had changed was their relationship to their beliefs; they had moved from notional assent—an abstract understanding—to real assent—embodied, lived understanding. It’s a fantastic explanation for, e.g., why you find yourself complaining about social media one minute while doom scrolling the next.

The problem with wisdom is not that we lack knowledge, but that we forget it. The most important kind is the category Donald Rumsfeld left out: “unknown knowns.”

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

Chapter 43: Water and Stone

“What’s softest in the world rushes and runs

over what’s hardest in the world.

The immaterial

enters

the impenetrable.

So I know the good in not doing.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Carl Jung—the Swiss psychoanalyst and disciple of Freud whose ideas are enjoying a resurgence of late—inspired a novel form of therapy: “sand play.” Jung speculated that playing in the sand freed up repressed emotions and fostered a kind of circulation between the different and often dissociated parts of the psyche.

This raised a question: what is so attractive about playing in the sand and, in particular, building sand castles? Answer: sandcastles reflect the incarnation, in Christian categories, and the polarity of yin and yang, in Daoist terms. They are the diamond hard distillation of what draws us to the beach.

Sand stands in the bardo between water and stone. Sand is like water shot with a tranquilizer. Slow, dumb, and dead, it moves and flows, but unmusically. Wet, though, sand gives water shape, and plays at being stone. Like the rock of a cliff face, a sandcastle can resist water, but only for a time.

Water stands in for life and spirit, stone for death and matter. Inland, in the adult world, we forget that all castles are made of sand. However impenetrable we try to make our fortresses—our houses, our bank accounts, our psyches, our stories, our ideologies, our religions, our polities—the immaterial always finds the hidden entrance. We forget, in other words, that all castles are made, that time is a circle, that the tides—or the storm—will come.

This is a powerful spiritual teaching. The sandcastle is a sutra. The term, which is attached to Buddhist scriptures—the heart sutra, the lotus sutra, and so on—is related to our terms “thread,” or “string,” and “suture.” No doubt this has to do with the physical binding of the texts. But it also connotes the message of healing, weaving, and mending the texts aim to foster. “Not doing” is building in a spirit of serious play.

The Kingdom of Heaven, as Jesus says, is “at hand,” and it is built of sandcastles.

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

Chapter 42: Children of the Way

“The ten thousand things

carry the yin on their shoulders

and hold in their arms the yang,

whose interplay of energy

makes harmony.

People despise

Orphans, widows, outcasts.

Yet that’s what kings and rulers call themselves.

Whatever you lose, youv’e won.

Whatever you win, you’ve lost.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Why is astrology so popular?

It is too easy to dismiss it as magical thinking, a constellation to hang onto in the face of cold black space. If you wade through the woo, you’ll find a there there. The word “horoscope” derives from Greek terms for “time” and “observation.” Think of it as a cosmic positioning system.

In his seminal work, Philosophy as a Way of Life, Pierre Hadot identifies three marks of wisdom in ancient Greek thought: peace of mind (ataraxia), inner freedom (autarkia), and cosmic consciousness. The latter, he writes, is “the consciousness that we are part of the cosmos, and the consequent dilation of our self through the infinity of nature.” In this sense, the existential thrust of astrology is not that everything happens for a reason, as though our fate were fixed by the stars, but that we are, as Carl Sagan put it, “made of star stuff,” and the meaning we make of the world must take the world as its guide.

Modernity is marked off from this cosmocentric mentality by what Bruno Latour calls the “partitioning” of culture and nature; we separate the two and attempt to purify the former from the mess of the latter. Similarly, Charles Taylor explain how the ancient and medieval blueprint—the individual is ordered by society and society is ordered by the cosmos—came to be abandoned: the “Great Disembedding” of the modern project turns us from “porous” selves–in touch with and attuned to the cosmic energies suffusing and surrounding us–into “buffered” selves standing apart from nature and manipulating it at will. Modernity, in short, yangs.

Today’s chapter is not merely offering us a version of Biblical moralism—to care for the marginalized—but a metaphysics, and not an academic metaphysics, but a practical one. Our natural tendency to partition and purify—the sacred and the profane, the noble and the base, the clean and the dirty—is at odds with the Way. Rather than “carry the yin on our shoulders”—embracing weakness, darkness, and loss—we resist the current of the cosmos.

What we really turn our back on, however, is the orphaned and outcast parts of ourselves. To be a king or queen—to attain “inner freedom” and self-rule—is precisely to carry your yin. For Carl Jung, this meant embracing the “shadow” self, the disowned and unconscious parts of the psyche. Guided by the alchemical adage—“In filth it will be found”—we must tarry with the negative, and in doing so come to realize that the “interplay of energies” working itself out in us is the same drama playing out in the ten thousand things.

The only way to the Way is through the woo.

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

Chapter 41: On and Off

“Thoughtful people hear about the Way

and try hard to follow it.

Ordinary people hear about the Way

and wander onto it and off it.

Thoughtless people hear about the Way

and make jokes about it.

It wouldn’t be the Way

if there weren’t jokes about it.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

---

The reader is tempted here to pick the “correct” method of approach—to be thoughtful, ordinary, or thoughtless—as though the text were testing her. But what unites all three is that they only “hear about the Way.” They are all false paths to the Way, because all paths to the Way are false; they assume the Way is something out there, over there, to be found. But to paraphrase Ken Wilber, the Way is not hard to find, but impossible to avoid.

By offering three paths, the chapter disrupts our binary mode of thinking. Thoughtful and thoughtless are mutually exclusive opposites that would seem to exclude a third option. But ordinarily, we are always a little thoughtful and a little thoughtless, sometimes more, sometimes less. It’s a spectrum across which we are constantly wandering.

Perhaps then the chapter is itself a joke about the Way. Spirituality is much too serious a business, and the more it becomes like a business, the more serious it gets. If, as Anne Lamotte likes to say, “laughter is carbonated holiness,” that would make the standup comedian a kind of high priest.  

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

Chapter 40: By No Means

“Return is how the Way moves.

Weakness is how the Way works.

Heaven and Earth and the ten thousand things

are born of being.

Being is born of nothing.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

---

The question, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” is often taken as the most fundamental. It has the whiff of the beginning of many an undergraduate philosophy paper: “Down through the ages, the greatest philosophical minds have asked….” Raised by F.W.J. Schelling in the early 19^th century, resuscitated to wonder-killingly loquacious lengths by Martin Heidegger in the early 20^th, and re-engaged by physicists in the early 21^st, the question is pesky. Despite Stephen Hawking’s protestations, reports of the demise of philosophy are greatly exaggerated. Try as they might, Richards Dawkins, Hawking, and the smug set of scientistic thinkers have not advanced the conversation one step beyond Aquinas’ reply to the objection that the world can explain itself when he considers the question of whether God exists in the Summa Theologica. But that is a topic for another day.

But the scientists afflicted with philosophy-envy have a point. Nietzsche smelled something fishy in Western philosophy. “Being,” he remarked, “is a vapor and a fallacy.” Being, in other words, is a meaningless word.

Buddhism and Daoism have a direct and disarming answer to the question in question:

“There isn’t.”

In Western metaphysics (in general), being is taken for granted: the world is made of substances. In Eastern metaphysics (in general), nothing is taken for granted: the world is made of processes. In Buddhism in particular, our language and concepts that divide the world up—being and nothing, self and other, etc.—are regarded as conventions. Wisdom is seeing beyond these conventions, and realizing that the mind’s incessant demand that reality submit to rational justification is the fundamental fallacy. Acknowledging the weakness of the logos allows the Way to work.

Nietzsche thought that it is only as “an aesthetic phenomenon” that the world can be justified, which is to say that it cannot be justified. Christian mystic Meister Eckhart wrote of the “rose that blooms without why.” The Way ways without why, and letting it take you will take away your existential questions. If you surf it, you will look back to shore and laugh at your former self, realizing that asking why there is something rather than nothing is like standing on the beach and asking why people surf.

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

Chapter 39: Integrity

“The root of the noble is in the common,

the high stands on what’s below.

Princes and kings call themselves

‘orphans, widowers, beggars,’

to get themselves rooted in the dirt.

A multiplicity of riches

Is poverty.

Jade is praised as precious,

But its strength is being stone.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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When you hear the word “hierarchy,” what arises?

The first thing to notice is that something is arising. That is to say that beneath or behind or within your conscious mind, there is a storehouse of memories, beliefs, associations that can be summoned to the surface and sorted through by something else. There are, in other words, levels, parts, structures that constitute what you call your mind. In pondering the word “hierarchy,” a hierarchy is doing the pondering.

Among the chattering classes on the left, hierarchy has been a dirty word for decades, but over the last few years, it has attained the lowest status possible; it is to discourse as sulphurous coal is to energy. You will have noticed, again, that the very act of assigning a value to the concept depends on the concept.

The word literally means “sacred order.” Hence the stakes: if you’re trying to overthrow a hierarchy, you’re either defying God’s will by tearing it down, or doing God’s work by replacing it with a truly sacred order. Hence the meaning assigned to the tearing down of Confederate monuments and the attack on the U.S. Capitol, or to the BLM protests and the associated riots, looting, and vandalism.

Our cultural confusion over hierarchy is a kind of decoder ring for understanding the culture wars. Hierarchies are not simply good or bad; their value is context dependent. The contexts that matter are the form they take and the content they contain.

The content has to do with ideology, which tells us that it means to be “noble and base,” higher and lower, on the top and on the bottom. In our culture, there are four ideologies.

The first is that of the Warrior, which cuts the world into predators and prey. This is the alt-right.

The second is that of the Traditionalist, which divides the world into saints and sinners. This is the social conservative right, which George Packer calls “Real America.”

The third is that of the Modernist, which sorts the world into winners and losers. This is the center-right and the center-left, which Packer dubs “Free America” and “Smart America.”

The fourth is that of the Postmodernist, which sorts the world into oppressors and oppressed. This the progressive left, which Packers calls “Just America.”

The form has to do with how each dyad is related. Ken Wilber draws a useful distinction between “growth hierarchies” and “dominator hierarchies.”

In the former, the higher enfolds the lower, includes it in a broader embrace, opens up new possibilities for it, nurtures it; the lower, in turn, supports and suffuses the higher. The higher is open to an even higher higher, and the lower is allowed the freedom to be a higher for an even lower lower. Its logic is nonzero sum and its lines of force are both top down and bottom up. It communicates with itself and what’s outside of it, constantly adjusting, correcting, adapting. A growth hierarchy, in other words, is alive, and life just is a growing hierarchy.

In a dominator hierarchy, the higher controls and represses the lower, sees it as a resource to be exploited and used up. It’s logic is zero sum and its line of force is one directional: top down. Its communication lines are down, and it doesn’t adapt to change, it just runs the same program ad infinitum. A dominator hierarchy, in other words, is either dying or dead.

The amount of resources—the “multiplicity or riches”—matters less than how those resources are deployed—whether the system has integrity. The system could be a polity, and economy, a company, a family, a psyche, or a cell.

Integrity is more than just a character trait. It is an organizing principle of the universe. This is the sense of the Stoic injunction to live in conformity with nature, and the Daoist idea of embodying the Way.

When you hear the word “hierarchy,” stop, notice what comes up, filter your intuitions through that 8-fold framework, and then respond accordingly.

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

Chapter 38 (II)

“So: when we lose the Way we find power;

losing power we find goodness;

losing goodness we find righteousness;

losing righteousness we’re left with obedience.

Obedience to law is the dry husk

of loyalty and good faith.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

---

If you’re like me, the first thing you think of reading this selection is Yoda: “Fear is the path to the dark side; fear leads to anger; anger leads to hate; hate…leads to suffering.”

You wouldn’t be wrong.

One of the few things the most recent Star Wars trilogy got right was the metaphysics and morality of the Force. In the second film, The Last Jedi, while Luke is training Rey on the remote island of Ach-To, there is an unmistakable giant yin/yang symbol on the floor of the hall in which they are speaking. He eventually confesses a secret to Rey, the truth about why he repaired to the equivalent of a Jedi monastery years ago. Sensing Ben Solo’s prodigious strength in the Force will lure him to the dark side, one night Luke had a Gethsemane moment, and found himself on the cusp of slaying the young adept. As with Oedipus, his attempt to outrun the prophetic vision fulfills it. Ben Solo becomes Kylo Ren, following the path of his grandfather Darth Vader.

Luke’s great realization—the reason he withdrew from the world, the reason he cut himself off from the Force—is that just as he created Kylo Ren, his former apprentice and nephew and the chief villain in the trilogy, the Jedi created Darth Vader.

The desire for complete control—for safety, security, order, and peace—conjures its opposite. In the Star Wars saga, the Jedi’s attempts to bring order to the galaxy, to expunge the dark side of the Force from the cosmos, are futile and counterproductive. They do not see their own shadow: the fear that drives them to cling to order is the small black dot in their proud white yang. It is the spec in their eyes they can’t see as they wrestle to remove the planks in their neighbors.

Nihilism, Nietzsche said, is the “will to the end.” The end of what? The cosmic play of light and dark, good and evil, form and emptiness.

The rift grows out of a basic distrust in the nature of things. Life is loss, loss, loss. This is not the final word, but the first. Today’s selection ends with the word “faith.” When this word used in the Bible, it typically means trust. When Jesus heals people, he repeatedly says “Your faith has healed you.” Jesus is not a magician zapping people’s leprosy away. He is awakening and restoring their original relationship to existence. The true power does not traffic in domination, the stuff of law and order and obedience and brute force, the domain of Leviathan; it is submission to the full Force, light and dark. We are, in Rene Girard’s words, “to double business bound.” True power is laying down on the floor of Hell—which, in Dante’s Divine Comedy, is wintry ice, not fire and brimstone—making snow angels, looking down, and realizing it’s Heaven.

As Joseph Campbell says, “If you’re falling, dive.” You’re going to fall, so you may as well fall upward.

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

Chapter 38: Talking About Power

“The good the truly good do,

has no end in view.

The right the very righteous do,

has an end in view.

And those who act in true obedience to law

roll up their sleeves

And make the disobedient obey.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

---

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

~ W. B. Yeats

A central premise of classical liberalism is that when it comes to politics, we should be neutral about the Good. You are free to define and pursue the good as you see fit in your personal life. This is one reason the word “virtue” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. The omission was deliberate. Where virtue was central to the politics of the ancients—the purpose of law, Aristotle intoned, was to make men good—the Founders, chastened by centuries of Wars of Religion—or, more precisely, wars stemming from the conflation of politics and religion—hypothesized that the Good and the Right must be separated. The purpose of the state must be to protect the rights of individuals, not prescribe how they ought to live: what kind of people they ought to be, what goods they ought to pursue, what gods they ought to worship. The state should protect people, not promote virtue. Another way of putting this is that the modern liberal state “has no end in view.”

But today, we see the modern liberal order under siege. The movement is disparate but not diffuse. It goes by many names—Trumpism, the alt-right, Christian nationalism, national conservatism, post-liberalism and, for all intents and purposes, the Republican Party—but it is united by a conviction held with passionate intensity: classical liberalism, the political philosophy undergirding the Enlightenment and the modern state, is a failed experiment, and it must be replaced by a philosophy and practice of governance that embraces a “substantive” conception of the good. The state, in other words, should “have an end in view.”

Like all movements, this one has an intellectual wing—the think tanks like American Compass, the scholars like Notre Dame’s Patrick Dineen, the public intellectuals like Rod Dreher, the budding celebrity-cum-pols like J.D. Vance. They tack left on economics and right on culture. The foot soldiers of the movement need no introduction. They are the stuff of Trump rallies, anti-vax campaigns, and Capitol riots, the real Americans defending law and order, willing to “roll up their sleeves” and “make the disobedient obey.”

Shortly after Trump’s election, one of Mitt Romney’s policy wonks, conservative pundit Avik Roy, had a revelation: that the conservative intellectual elites had deluded themselves, inflating their own importance and misunderstanding their voters. Republican voters, he realized, never really cared about principles like limited government, states’ rights, and low taxes. All of that, he now understood, was a smokescreen, an ideology stretching a bland, unthreatening mask over the true soul and power of the GOP: what Hamilton called the “great unwashed,” the incoherent blend of white identity politics and Christian nationalism that wants power, and specifically the power to punish and purge Them. Beginning with Goldwater and Buckley, modern conservatism was a tiny group of point-headed elites believing they were standing athwart history, when in reality they were riding shotgun in a monster truck.

And they are poised to make the same mistake again. They will think they can ride the tiger of Trumpism to bring about a conservative policy revolution, patiently and prudently poking and stoking the culture war as needed. Today’s chapter also reads: “Lesser power, clinging to power, lacks true power.” To ride a tiger, you have to cling, and if you have to cling, you are not riding; you are holding on for dear life. If you fall off, the tiger will eat you. Many will try to mount the tiger of Trumpism in the troubles to come. All will be thrown off and fail. “There is only one lord of the ring. Only one. And he does not share power.” The power of the ring is the reflex to cling.

There is, however, a piece of the truth that this disturbance in the force of conservatism grasps. Classical liberalism has not so much failed as it has been revealed to be constitutionally incapable of supporting a just and sustainable society. Climate change, COVID-19, and the carnage that globalization has wrought on the American heartland have made plain that the political atomism of liberalism, which reached its apex in the last 40 years under the Reagan-Thatcher consensus and the economic mythology of Milton Friedman and Alan Greenspan, is metaphysically false. It is not so much liberalism that has failed, but its late stage mutation, neoliberalism. Another way of putting this is that Aristotle was right: we are social animals by nature, and we only flourish in communities ordered around a shared conception of the good. By denying this, liberalism attempts to plug round pegs in a square holes. It pretends not to “have an end in view,” but it turns out that this pretense to neutrality is just that: a story, a myth, a noble lie crafted in order to preserve law and order. While it may be a better story than what came before, it has reached the end of its life cycle as an adequate form of governance. This is why it is losing its legitimacy. It must be transcended and included by something new. The NatCons are right to want to transcend it, but wrong in wanting to replace it tout court.

The good news is that, unbeknownst to the post-liberals on the Right, that something is ready and waiting to be woven into a new story. Call it progressive liberalism, social democracy, post-progressivism. The post-libs are throwing out the baby of liberalism out with the bathwater of classical liberalism. They fail to see that progressive liberalism was precisely a response to the deficiencies of classical liberalism: whether it is the concern for historically marginalized groups, the dangers of economic inequality, or environmental degradation, at it best, progressive liberalism embraced a substantive conception of the good intended to redress the excesses of hyper-individualism; but one that, unlike conservatism, is world-centric rather than ethno-centric. This is why Joe Biden rightly cast the 2020 election as a “battle over the soul of America.” With the notion of a neutral public space unmasked as a story we told ourselves over and over and over again until we forgot that it was a lie, what ensues is a contest between two rival conceptions of the good.

The great task, however—the great power that is needed—is to weave the three stories into one. To paraphrase Plato, until our leaders become conservative liberal socialists, or conservative liberal socialists become our leaders, there will be no end to troubles for American society. Just as he who does not want to rule is the one who should rule, only he who acts with all ends in view can truly do good.

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

Chapter 37: Over All

“In the unnamed, in the unshapen,

is not wanting.

In not wanting is stillness.

In stillness all under heaven rests.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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These verses recall the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths:

1. Life is suffering.
2. Suffering is caused by desire.
3. There is an end to suffering
4. The end to suffering is the Eightfold Path.

And key steps in the Eightfold Path—Right Mindfulness and Right Concentration—involve contemplative practices aimed at cultivating the cessation of desire, at sowing the seeds of stillness.

Many people chafe at what they perceive to be a pessimism pervading the Buddhist prescription. To snuff out desire would be to get rid of what makes life worth living in the first place: action in pursuit of what we want. Beyond this, it sounds like trying to fight gravity, to resist millions of years of evolutionary inertia. Finally, many of the things we desire are things we think are good to be, things that ought to be done, things that are needed for society to function. In short, the Buddhist path sounds neither desirable, possible, nor moral.

The paradox is that once we perceive that wanting is the problem, we want to stop wanting. That is where the real struggle begins.

The struggle is not really to eliminate desire, but to excavate the psyche, explore its root system, and begin to understand your “understory.” There are desires, and then there are desires. Some are like weeds: they multiply mindlessly, bear no fruit, are parasitic, have shallow roots, are easily pulled, and a waste of time.

Weeds represent a psychic economy of scarcity: I am incomplete and empty, and I need something else to fill me up. This is the first phase of Maslowe’s hierarchy: survival, safety, belonging, self-esteem. These are marked by what he called “deficiency needs.”

But some desires are like big old trees. They do not seize us with intensity in the moment. They tug on us with lunar gravity, gently, persistently. Their roots reach deep beneath the surface. They grow slowly. They reach high. They send forth an architecture that turns an empty space into a living place. Their roots plug into an underground network. Not to mention they sequester carbon, preserve soils, and provide habitats for living things.

Trees represent an economy of abundance: I am already full, and I need to empty myself to share my bounty. This is the second phrase of Maslowe’s hierarchy: self-actualization and, what is less widely appreciated, self-transcendence. They are marked by what he called “being needs.”

There is a reason the Buddha found his enlightenment seated at the foot of a tree. The Buddhist goal of eliminating desires is really about identifying and pulling out the weeds in order that we can find our true roots. The stillness we find there is not a withdrawal from life or an end to desire. It is the space that gives us the clarity to see which desires matter most.

And tells us where we need to weed.

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

Chapter 36: The Small Dark Light

“What seeks to shrink

must first have grown;

what seeks weakness

surely was strong.

What seeks ruin

must first have risen;

What seeks to take

has surely given.

This is called the small dark light:

The soft, the weak prevail

over the hard, the strong.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

---

Sometimes it is better to sit with a chapter of the Daodejing as though it were a Zen koan: a paradox designed to disrupt the rational mind. More learned scholars may have already explored or established this connection but, given that Zen is almost certainly Buddhism filtered through Chinese Daoism, I wonder whether the method of the koan was inspired by the gnomic verses of Lao Tzu.

LeGuin offers us a lifeline in her commentary: “small dark light” is her gloss on wei ming, which other translators have variously rendered “subtle light” (Henricks), “wonderfully minute and obscure, yet brilliant” (Gibbs-Cheng), “dimming one’s light” (Waley). The latter, she notes, “explains that wei means obscure because very small, and also obscure because dark.”

Ah! Of course! Diogenes.

Diogenes the Cynic was sort of Socrates without the social graces; Plato allegedly described him as “Socrates gone mad.” Like Socrates, he challenged his fellow citizens to scrutinize the way they lived their lives; unlike Socrates, he was neither subtle nor solicitous. Where Socrates used a scalpel, Diogenes used a hatchet. Socrates made arguments in public; Diogenes took shits.

When venturing out from the rain barrel that was his dwelling, he would carry a lantern around the agora in the daytime, claiming that he was looking, in vain, for an honest man; intending, likely, to suggest to his compatriots that they were lost in bright darkness. When Alexander the Great came to visit Athens and requested to see Diogenes, he came upon the man sunning himself. Diogenes, squinting up at the most powerful man in the world, regarded by some as a living god and a latter day Achilles, kindly asked him to move to the side and stop blocking the sunlight. Every star, no matter how bright, is wrapped in darkness. A lantern and the sun shed the same stuff. An Alexander and a Diogenes both shit.

In his Confessions, Augustine tells a story about when he was a social climber in Milan. On account of his social connections and gifted tongue, he had been given the honor of delivering a panegyric, a public speech heaping false praise on the Emperor. Think speakers at the GOP’s National Convention—or just 99% of the public excretions of the mouths of Republican pols—minus the eloquence. But on the morning of the speech, on his way there, he noticed a beggar by the side of the road. Drunk, laughing, singing, and panhandling, the beggar seemed joyful. Augustine was pulled up short.

About to reap the rewards of his disciplined social climbing, he was a hot mess inside. Wracked by anxiety and insecurity over his public performance, the beggar thrust Diogenes’ lantern in his face, stopped him in his tracks, made it impossible for him to push down the pangs of conscience. Though the beggar enjoyed only a temporary, worldly happiness, he was more content than Augustine. The beggar, the kind of man Augustine looked down upon, may not have been living in the truth, but at least he wasn’t peddling lies. Suspended between the apex and the asshole of society, Augustine, in Nietzsche’s phrase, “began to go under.” He had seen the small dark light, and unsee it he could not.

It is always there. “Out of the dimness,” Whitman wrote, “opposite equals advance.”

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

Chapter 35: Humane Power

“Hold fast to the great thought

and all the world will come to you,

harmless, peaceable, serene.

Walking around, we stop

For music, for food.

But if you taste the Way

It’s flat, insipid.

It looks like nothing much,

It sounds like nothing much.

And yet you can’t get enough of it.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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The first line in today’s chapter sounds suspiciously like the formula of The Secret, perhaps the saddest brand of snake oil: “the law of attraction,” according to which your thoughts can change the world. “Setting intentions,” “manifesting,” “energy”—that sort of thing. Published in 2006 by Rhonda Byrne and translated into 50 languages, the book has sold 30 million copies and was made into a film in 2020 (the occurrence of which definitively disproves its hypothesis).

The Secret was a New Age retread of the “power of positive thinking” of Norman Vincent Peale, whose church, incidentally, Donald Trump attended with his family as a child. Childish is precisely what such thinking is: magical thinking is the infantile belief that you can think things into being, a cognitive vestigial organ we inherit on account of our cries as a baby swiftly summoning mother’s milk. Because our inner child is alive and well, we are forever vulnerable to its charms.

Reaganomics is a similar, secular form of the creed: if you’re poor, it’s your fault because you’re not working hard enough. The Secret is more insidious: if you don’t have what you want, you’re just not wanting it hard enough. It is easy to run an ideology critique: that The Secret is a clever adaptation of late capitalism, assuring the overworked and underpaid that the problem is not economic but psychological or spiritual, that it tries to cover up the true secrets hidden in plain sight: that the rent is too damn high, that child care, health insurance, and college are too expensive, that corporations are undertaxed and have too much power; that tech companies have adapted the psychology of the gambling industry to deploy algorithms that hijack our limbic system to sell ads to get us to buy stuff that won’t make up happy; and so on. The “music” and “food” we walk around trying to fill our ears and mouths with leaves us wanting. The “law of attraction” is a tool for distraction.

There is some truth to that story, and you can tell it all you want, but it is not a “great thought”: it will only bring you burnout, outrage, and despair. And the only defense you’ll have left is irony, a kind of self-righteous knowingness, the consolation that you can see the code of the Matrix. But you will have succumbed to the evil twin of the power of positive thinking: the dark secret of nihilism.

The Secret would not be so popular if it didn’t contain a piece of the truth. “To ‘see through’ all things,” C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man, “is the same as not to see.” In that text, Lewis uses the word “the Dao” as a catchall for the Logos, Natural Law, the Principles of Practical Reason, the Hindu notion of Rta: “that great ritual or pattern of nature and supernature which is revealed alike in the cosmic order, the moral virtues, and the ceremonial of the temple.” Because, as Rumi writes, “what you seek is seeking you,” it is easy to lose sight of the whale we are sitting on as we fish for minnows.

When we stop “walking around” and just sit, it is as though the lights have gone out. The way before is dark, “looks like nothing much,” “sounds like nothing much,” “tastes insipid.” But if we are patient, the darkness will begin to secrete shapes. Our eyes will adjust. We will see things anew. The “great thought” is to stop thinking entirely.

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

Chapter 34: Perfect Trust

“Doing its work,

it goes unnamed.

Clothing and feeding

The ten thousand things,

it lays no claim on them

and asks nothing of them.

Call it a small matter.

The ten thousand things

return to it,

though it lays no claim on them.

Call it great.

So the wise soul

without great doings

achieves greatness.

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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As we approach the one year anniversary of the attack on the U.S. Capitol on January 6^th, we can expect much reflection about what it meant, why it happened, and what it forbodes for our democracy. Let me hazard an answer about the why: Babel.

Upon first reading the story of the Tower of Babel in Genesis 11, the first question many students have is, basically, “Wtf?” These people are building a great city, erecting a tower reaching up to the heavens; why confuse their speech, scatter them, and metaphorically knock the tower down like a cruel older brother smashing his little sibling’s lego set?

The obvious answer is that, like Adam and Eve, the people were trying to play God: reaching for the heavens and resisting God’s imperative to spread across the earth.

That is true enough, but incomplete. The real meaning of the tower of Babel is what stands next to it in the text. In Genesis 12, Abram is called by God to leave the country of his birth and go forth into the unknown, and promised that God will make of him a “great nation.” God even gives him a new name: “Abraham.” The contrast with Babel is clear: in that story, the motivation for building the tower is for the people to “make a name for themselves.” The Babel-onians aim to be a big deal, to be self-made men; the Hebrews are a small matter, destined to be made great by God. In Biblical terms, a “self-made man” is an oxymoron.

When the Metaverse began to emerge into our collective consciousness, I decided to go back and read the novel in which the term was coined, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992). As many have pointed out, Zuckerberg’s, ahem, renaming of Facebook as Meta, as well as his creepy video touting the Metaverse as the future of the internet, are ironic given that the novel is a dystopia. The plot of the novel is that the eponymous drug makes people lose their minds when they are exposed to it digitally while plugged into the Metaverse, and join cults and begin speaking in tongues when they take it in what techies call “meatspace.” What results is Babel and “Infocalypse.”

Which brings us back to January 6^th. The Metaverse is the tower Zuckerberg wants to build to reach the heavens. He is of course shamelessly, transparently attempting to rebrand his company in the wake of the revelations of whistleblower Frances Haugen. But Haugen was merely the straw that broke the camel’s back, a bookend to the Cambridge Analytica scandal; in between the two, 2016 and 2021, is the gradual degradation of our information ecology that eventuated in the storming of the U.S. Capitol. While Trump was the drug, Facebook and social media more broadly were the pipeline. They have thoroughly confused our speech and scattered us—into tribes, filter bubbles, echo chambers, pushed us toward conspiracy theories, chained us in Plato’s cave, plugged us into the Matrix.

But beneath it all is a two-pronged crisis: in trust and belonging. Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has identified both; the first in his campaign, the second in his recent book, Trust. As traditional forms of belonging have eroded due to globalization, people have replaced them with artificial substitutes through social media and other drugs. This has led to the mainstreaming of a mentality that formerly flourished only on the fringes of American politics but had been fermenting for decades on the Right: the distrust of what Rush Limbaugh called the “Four Corners of Deceit”: media, academia, government, and science. Social media provided the informational ecology a demagogue like Trump could leverage to push this distrust to the hilt: a breakdown of trust not just in in democratic institutions, but in reality itself, a kind of low-level mass psychosis. Make America Great Again is a fundamentally Babel-onian creed. (It should not surprise that, according to his mother, when Trump was a child he would glue together the building blocks of his little brother. I leave you to ferret out the Biblical significance.)

In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argued that civilization was a fragile, thin veneer keeping at bay a state of nature in which life is “short, nasty, brutish, poor, and solitary.” It is worth considering the last in the context of social media, the pandemic, and Trumpism. As Hannah Arendt pointed out in The Origins of Totalitarianism, the latter takes root in societies plagued by a high degree of loneliness. People glom on to faux forms of belonging, like shipwrecked sailors clinging to driftwood to just stay afloat. Today, our flotsam is served up by algorithms as we drift through an ocean of noise. We do not even need to swim to the Sirens; they come to us.

But what the Biblical story of Babel—and this chapter of the Daodejing—suggest is that prior to trust in government, or the media, or science, prior to even the trust in your neighbor, is the fundamental trust in reality. When the term “faith” is used in the Bible, it usually doesn’t mean belief in a creed. It means trust. Basic trust in the nature of things is the foundation of trust in ourselves, in our neighbor, in our community, in our country, in humanity.

In this respect, Buttigieg figures as the anti-Zuckerberg. While the latter aims to build vertically, creating a new virtual infrastructure destined to alienate us even further, the former has been charged with building horizontally, creating a new physical infrastructure to reweave the social fabric.

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

Chapter 33: Kinds of Power

“Knowing other people is intelligence,

knowing yourself is wisdom.

Overcoming others takes strength,

Overcoming yourself takes greatness.

Contentment is wealth.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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Power is commonly understood as a base end viciously pursued in a zero-sum game. No philosopher is more associated with it than Friedrich Nietzsche, so much so that his phrase “the will to power” has become part of our vernacular. Nothing could seem more at odd with the Daoist emphasis on “going with the flow” than the desire to fight the river, as Achilles does in the Iliad. But the conventional understanding of Nietzsche’s idea, and of power itself, is misguided. As Aristotle said of being, power is said in many ways.

“In times of peace, the warlike man sets upon himself,” Nietzsche writes in Beyond Good and Evil. The first layer of meaning here is the literal: the warrior of the body trains in peace time in order to be more effective when battle calls, in order to dominate the enemy. The second layer of meaning is the ethical: the warrior of the heart improves his character through habituation of good deeds. The third layer of meaning is spiritual: the warrior of the spirit overcomes his ego and aligns himself with the cosmos through contemplative practice.

The paradox of Nietzsche’s notion of “self-overcoming” is the same as in the Daoist notion of wuwei: Trying not to try. Trying too hard is what Nietzsche called the “ascetic ideal.” It stems from discontent with and a refusal to accept the way things are—including ourselves—and involves the futile attempt to change, deny, or escape from them. The opposite pole we might call the “aesthetic ideal,” though this is somewhat of an oxymoron. It is the figure of the “last man” Nietzsche lambasted, the consumer, the person who is given over to hedonism and strives for nothing greater than themselves, what C.S. Lewis called “men without chests.” The middle way is not to flee the world or get lost in it, but to joyfully participate in the dance of the 10,000 things.

The chief obstacle to doing so for Nietzsche—and for the Daoist—is the self. Self-overcoming entails not some heroic act of the will, but the realization and acceptance that there is no self. Having let go of the desires for pleasure, profit, power and permanence, one becomes a receptacle and conduit for a higher power. LeGuin translates the Daodejing “A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way.”

Contentment doesn’t mean complacency. It means saying yes to life within and without, rather than cutting existence in half—good vs. evil, self vs. others, heaven vs. hell, and so on. And that radical acceptance of what is allows the knots of suffering to relax, to give, to be unraveled by the patient power of the Dao. Contentment is reveling in the revelation of that unraveling.

You already have all you need. The need is to give yourself away.

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

Chapter 32: Sacred Power

“To order, to govern,

is to begin naming;

when names proliferate

it’s time to stop.

If you know when to stop

You’re in no danger.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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We used to “analyze” things. Now we “deconstruct” them. The roots of this shift in our vernacular are worth pondering. They have much to do with the so-called “meaning crisis.”

The term deconstruction entered academia through the philosopher Jacques Derrida around the 1980s, and in the halls of the ivory tower it remained for a generation or so. Derrida’s basic idea was that meaning happens through differentiation—the meaning of “this” consists in how it differs from “that,” and so the meaning of “this” is deferred from the act of saying or writing it.  Put another way, “this” does not have a clear, fixed, self-contained meaning; its meaning depends on the context. This may sound rather obvious, but the important part is that there is no end to the process: we expect this at the beginning and middle of a story, but not at the end. As one of Derrida’s interpreters, Jonathan Culler, put it, the two tenets of Derrida’s neologism differánce are that “meaning is context bound” and “contexts are boundless.” Ambiguity is an original sin stamped on the DNA of language. Though commonly understood as a form of textual interpretation, analysis, and critique—a philosophy of language and semantics—it was much more.

Since nothing really ends, deconstruction spells the end of stories. Derrida came to be associated with the movement of postmodernism. In The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard identified one of the pillars of the movement as a rejection of “master narratives.” The postmodern project was to deconstruct, debunk, and decolonize texts and traditions, to dismantle systems, to subvert hierarchies. This project has much to recommend it, but it didn’t know “when to stop.” And so began a proliferation of names: master narratives were just myths motored by things like “phallo-phono-logo-Euro-centrism” and the “white-cis-hetero-patriarchy.” The Great Awokening has been nothing is not a “proliferation of names.” Deconstruction contradicts an essential part of our humanity: we are storytelling animals. In this respect, it was just a more French, more pretentious, more pedantic form of Nietzsche’s proclamation that “God is dead.” The basic bind is that we need myths, but we can no longer believe in myths.

And then something strange happened: these ideas started to seep into and structure mainstream culture; more precisely, they began to fuel what Philip Rieff called “anti-culture.” Bill Clinton’s “It depends upon what the meaning of ‘is’ is” may well mark the start of what we now call “post-truth” culture. From Richard Linklater’s Reality Bytes to David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest to Morpheus welcoming us to the “desert of the real” in the Matrix, the structure of feeling of the 1990s was fundamentally ironic. As Ken Wilber explains in Trump in a Post-Truth World, the postmodern condition is one of “aperspectival madness.” The design of our digital infrastructure incarnates and disseminates this idea, strip-mining meaning through the mashup, the personalized feed, the filter bubble, the echo chamber, the splicing and dicing and cutting and pasting of text. We are condemned, not to meaning, but to meme-ing. A thread runs from Clinton’s sophistry to Trump’s demagoguery. Little wonder that a mad world would find itself ruled by a mad king. As David Frum put it in reference to immigration, if liberals do not police their borders, fascists will do it for them. In this context, postmodernists love nothing more than “transgressing borders.”

The problem with differánce is not the first claim—that meaning is context bound—but the second—that contexts are boundless. When we say something is meaningful, we generally mean something like this: it is 1) internally coherent and 2) corresponds to reality. By robbing language and thought of this power, deconstruction consigns us to nihilism. Nihilism means many different things to many different people—indeed, to be logically consistent, we would have to say that it can mean anything to anyone, since the concept itself is, like all concepts, inherently meaningless—but Stanley Rosen’s formulation will serve: nihilism is the position that there is no meaningful difference between silence and speech. And people will choose empty speech over silence any day. When the social cost of false speech is low, and when confusion about what is true abounds, you will get a proliferation of false speech; more precisely, you will get lots of speech that is not so much false, but that isn’t speech in the proper sense of the term. In this kind of information ecology, language takes on a different function. It is not aimed at expressing what is true about reality, but is used to distort reality in order to augment the speaker’s real or perceived power, signal his tribal allegiance, and attack or confuse his enemies.

But this is not the way. As Jordan Peterson puts it, while there are a potentially infinite number of interpretations of the situation—and Web 2.0 creates an information ecology and permission structure that entertains all of them—there is a finite, bounded set of viable interpretations. What constrains meaning, beyond the stubbornness of facts, is the logic of meaning-making itself: how human consciousness and culture develop. And that development happens through a dialectic of transcendence and inclusion, differentiation and integration, yang and yin. These form an indestructible polarity. We are not storytelling animals through some freak accident of evolution. We tell stories because the cosmos itself is a “neverending story,” what Charles S. Peirce called an “infinite semiosis,” what Thomas Berry termed the “universe story.” While none of our narratives can master the universe, some are more true, more good, and more beautiful than others.

If names are not bound by a narrative, they spill over and pool into an ocean of noise. The sacred power of language is lost, and speech becomes cheap. A chief reason our country has become ungovernable and our democracy is in danger, why we have lost the plot, why we are polarized, is that we do not know “when to stop.” When to stop and what?

Listen.

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

Chapter 31: Against War

“Even the best weapon

is an unhappy tool,

hateful to living things.

So the follower of the Way

Stays away from it.

Weapons are unhappy tools,

Not chosen by thoughtful people,

To be used only when there is no choice,

And with a calm, still mind,

Without enjoyment.”

~ Tao Te Ching: A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way, trans. Ursula K. Leguin (Shambhala, Boulder: 2019)

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“Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.”

The refrain is part of the catechism of childhood and, like most such things, it blends truth and falsehood. As we get older, we learn that not only do words hurt, but that they are the chief weapons in the main arena of conflict in day to day life: our relationships not with our enemies but our intimates: family, friends, colleagues.

Just as Daoism might seem to preach pacifism in the theater of war, it can appear to counsel quietism in the theater of words. But this is not so. As the excerpt reads, weapons should be used only when there is no choice. So with words.

Language is the double-edged sword we are born to wield. It cuts—it separates this from that, separating what God has joined—but it also points—it illuminates this from the background of that. To use words in a “thoughtful” way, with a “calm, still mind,” is to remember what words are—that, as Emerson put it, “Every word was once a poem.”

The Word, then, is not really a word. It refers to the creative fount from which all words and things arise. When we read in John’s Gospel that “In the beginning was the Word,” we could translate that as Logos, as Dao, as Buddhanature. These are all super-cyphers to remind us that all words are poems, a kind of Rosetta Stone to help us decode the matrix of the mundane.

When God creates in Genesis, he does so in two ways that are really one: speaking and separating. Conventional Christian theology separates the Creator and the Creation, the Dao and the 10,000 things. But wisdom is crazy, not conventional: the nondual spirit of the Asian traditions can help Christianity see what it is truly saying: that, as Alan Watts put it, “matter is spirit named.” The message of the incarnation is not so much that spirit became matter or God became human or the Word became flesh at some point in time, as though it were just hanging out in some eternal ether with nothing to do. What we call creation is still happening. The Big Bang is still banging. The Dao is still Daoing.

When God said that each and every thing he created was “good,” he could say that because he created with a calm, still mind. He spoke and separated only with a view to love—and for the fun of it. That is why the Hindus regard the universe as lila, God’s play. In the Bhagavad Gita, it is only when Arjuna has realized this that he can take up his sword, do his duty, and join in the fray.

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