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Chapter 66

“All streams flow to the sea

because it is lower than they are.

Humility gives it its power.

If you want to govern the people,

you must place yourself below them.

If you want to lead the people,

you must learn how to follow them.”

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

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Geoengineering used to be one of the more fringy, sci-fi solutions to climate change, but it is gradually nudging its way into the Overton window and being looked at as a (potentially necessary) part of the solution. At one level, it presents as the endgame of human hubris, of the very way of thinking that got us into this mess in the first place: the modern project of controlling nature sanctioned by Francis Bacon, who deemed knowledge the power to bend nature to “relieve the human estate,” and Rene Descartes, who said we must become the “masters and conquerors of nature.” Taking the controls of “spaceship earth” seems like the logical extension of this ethos.

But at another level, geoengineering may be, bizarrely, congruent with the Dao. Counterculture icon Stewart Brand famously said, “We are as gods. We may as well get good at it.” His point, I think, is that we always have been. Nature issued beings able to consciously manipulate their environment; it is only in the modern age that the effects of that natural power have become planetary in scope and perilous in nature. To demonize human technology, as environmentalists often do, is to not only write off humanity and succumb to fatalism, but to reject the Dao. We, too, are a part of nature—including our ability to alter nature.

The problem is not engineering. People rarely make mention that the automobile, public emissions enemy #1, solved a serious public health problem in urban areas: horse manure. Every technology produces shit, just as every living organism does; and subsequent technologies clean it up and, in turn, produce a new kind of shit. Electric vehicles clean up the shit of carbon emissions. That is the dialectic of progress.

The problem is engineering that does not “place itself below” and “learn how to follow” people and planet. Engineering whose design is guided by the needs of the people who live there and the ecological contours of the place is the solution. Even Bacon recognized that to command nature, you must obey her.

And whether we want to call it geoengineering or not, intelligently and morally designed technology is our only hope. We must overhaul the parking lot we have paved over paradise so that it harmonizes with paradise. Through biomimetic technologies and design philosophies such as William McDonough’s “cradle to cradle” approach, in which “waste equals food” and human production processes are seamlessly integrated into natural systems, we can build sustainable infrastructure.

The first part of history was the Great Escape from nature. The second part of history will be the Great Return to nature. And in a way, coming to our sense, coming back down to earth—which will require great humility on our part, acknowledgement that we are, in the end, human, of the earth—is what we have been doing for the entire life of our species. We began in the trees, and only the discovery of fire allowed us to come down, sleep on the ground, build settlements, and dwell on the earth. Only the reinvention of fire, to use Amory Lovins’ term, will allow us to stay here. If we can get good enough at being gods, we have a chance at becoming fully human—and keeping the sea literally lower than we are.

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

Chapter 65

“The ancient masters didn’t try to educate people,

but kindly taught them to not-know.

When they think that they know the answers,

People are difficult to guide.

When they know that they don’t know,

People can find their own way.”

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

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One of the most common complaints from the Professional Managerial Class is that they are too busy. They are overscheduled, overcommitted, stretched too thin. They have difficulty saying no to things. That’s what they’ve been trained to do by our education system. They got the first half of Lao-Tzu’s adage—“to gain knowledge, add something everyday”—but not the second half—“to gain wisdom, subtract something everyday.” In the age of Twitter, even the Daodejing becomes TLDR.

The ideology of the meritocracy and the animating spirit of the knowledge economy is governed by the logic of addition: more data, more information, more connections, more growth, more degrees, more certifications—more more. To paraphrase E.F. Schumacher, perhaps a Daoist economics—a wisdom economy—would follow a logic of subtraction. It would be based on a basic faith in the innate wisdom of each person. The education in such a society would be wisdom-centric, not fact- or even skill-centric: toward helping young people cultivate the intellectual and moral virtues needed to know what they don’t know. To have an economy as if people mattered, we need an education system designed as if wisdom matters.

With that foundation, the acquisition of knowledge and the gathering of information would take care of themselves. The process would be focused, selective, and efficient. As it stands, our economic and educational systems generally hold an inverted view of the hierarchy of knowledge. The natural hierarchy is wisdom/knowledge/information. But in the information age, ruled by what Yuval Noah Harari calls the “religion of Dataism”, the Fact has been uprooted from its natural environment, decoupled from its original context, and served up to the gods of the algorithm for reassignment and the individual for consumption. Meaning is thus deregulated, and action in a meaningless world is hard. Without a coherent understanding of the world (knowledge) and the ability to act and live well (wisdom), information is pointless.

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

Chapter 64

“The journey of a thousand miles

starts from beneath your feet.

Rushing into action, you fail.

Trying to grasp things, you lose them.”

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

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This first line—one of the most quoted in the text—is often translated differently: not “from beneath your feet,” but “with a single step.” I cannot speak to which translation is more accurate, but I sense the way in which the latter gloss is appropriated, particularly in the start-up culture in which Lao-Tzu is, paradoxically, a patron saint, turns the meaning of the phrase on its head. It centers the goal, rather than the ground. It is too easily grafted onto “move fast and break things.”

While the courage to take the first step is crucial, what matters more is that it’s a step in the right direction. The second line supports this idea. The first step is folly if the final one is in the wrong place. The most important step is not the one you take with your feet, but with your mind. The most important step is not step one, but step zero.

Step zero is being rooted in the ground. Being rooted in the ground means knowing that it’s the precisely the same place you’ll be at the end of any journey, that the grass there is always going to be as green as the grass here. Only then can you walk freely and see your goal clearly, for what it is: a future ground. Only then can you see each place in double/exposure, as both ground and goal, to be able to make the gestalt shift between figure and ground with ease.

If you don’t take step zero, all your movement will be furious haste, and you will never really arrive at where you’re going.

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

Chapter 63

“Confront the difficult

while it is still easy;

accomplish the great task

by a series of small acts.

The Master never reaches for the great;

Thus she achieves greatness.

When she runs into difficulty,

She stops and gives herself to it.”

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

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One of our greatest evolutionary advantages is our ability to pretend. Our ability to tell stories helped us create religions and cultures that bound us together, helped us work well together, and not only ensured not just our survival, but enabled us to build complex civilizations.

But this unique cognitive tool is a double-edged sword. The stories a people tell themselves can delude them, or lead them to oppress the “bad guys” in their story. The stories a person tells himself can lead him to deny and repress ugly realities, to Disney-fi things—to pretend.

When we come upon an obstacle, we often deny it is there, distort its nature, or decide to just hit the gas and ram through it. We do not stop and acknowledge it, but keep moving. When we spot a plot hole in our working story, we try to quickly weave over it and restore the psychic fabric it threatens to undo.

But over time, the jagged obstacles over which our narrative is overlaid will begin to tug at and tear it, and we’ll have to go back to make repairs, which increases the complexity of the weave, which leads to tangles, which leads to knots. And our refusal to stop and deal with the obstacles on their own terms creates new obstacles.

The obstacles are not the exception, but the norm and, beyond that, the occasion for a good story. As Marcus Aurelius put it, “the obstacle is the way.”

Somewhere in the middle distance of your vision, there is an obstacle blistering the vista of your ideal future. It’s probably already inducing tension somewhere in your body, a little pinch on the periphery of your awareness.

Stop, drop your story, and roll toward it.

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

Chapter 62

“Why did the ancient Masters esteem the Tao?

Because, being one with the Tao,

when you seek, you find;

And when you make a mistake, you are forgiven.

That is why everybody loves it.”

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

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

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

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

Chapter 61

“When a country obtains great power,

it becomes like the sea:

all streams run downward into it.

….

A great nation is like a great man:

When he makes a mistake, he realizes it.

Having realized it, he admits it.

Having admitted it, he corrects it.

He considers those who point out his faults

as his most benevolent teachers.

He thinks of his enemy

As the shadow that he himself casts.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 60

“Give evil nothing to oppose

and it will disappear by itself.”

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

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

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

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

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

But one of you has to go first.

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

Chapter 59

“For governing a country well

there is nothing better than moderation.

The mark of a moderate man

Is freedom from his own ideas.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 58

“When the will to power is in charge,

the higher the ideals, the lower the results.

Try to make people happy,

and you lay the groundwork for misery.

Try to make people moral,

and you lay the groundwork for vice.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 57

“If you want to be a great leader,

you must learn to follow the Tao.

Stop trying to control.

Let go of fixed plans and concepts,

And the world will govern itself.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 56

“Those who know don’t talk.

Those who talk don’t know.

Close your mouth,

block off your senses,

blunt your sharpness,

untie your knots,

soften your glare,

settle your dust.

This is the primal identity.”

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 55

“He who is in harmony with the Tao

is like a newborn child.

Its bones are soft, its muscles are weak,

but its grip is powerful.

….

The Master’s power is like this.

He lets all things come and go

effortlessly, without desire.

He never expects results;

thus he is never disappointed.

He is never disappointed;

thus his spirit never grows old.”

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 54

“Let the Tao be present in your life

and you will become genuine.

Let it be present in your family

And your family will flourish.

Let it be present in your country

And your country will be an example

To all countries in the world.

Let it be present in the universe

And the universe will sing.

How do I know this is true?

By looking inside myself.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 53

“Stay centered in the Tao.

When rich speculators prosper

while farmers lose their land;

when government officials spend money

on weapons instead of cures;

when the upper class is extravagant and irresponsible

while the poor have nowhere to turn—

all this is robbery and chaos.

It is not in keeping with the Tao.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

Chapter 52

“In the beginning was the Tao.

All things issue from it;

All things return to it.

….

Seeing into darkness is clarity.

Knowing how to yield is strength.

Use your own light

And return to the source of light.

This is called practicing eternity.”

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

---

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

 

Chapter 51

The Tao gives birth to all beings,

nourishes them, maintains them,

cares for them, comforts them, protects them,

takes them back to itself,

creating without possessing,

acting without expecting,

guiding without interfering.

That is why love of the Tao

is in the very nature of things.”

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

---

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

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

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

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

---

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

Chapter 50

“The Master gives himself up

to whatever the moment brings.

He knows he is going to die,

And he has nothing left to hold on to:

No illusions in his mind,

No resistances in his body.”

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

Chapter 49

“The Master has no mind of her own.

She works with the mind of the people.

…

The Master’s mind is like space.

People don’t understand her.

They look to her and wait.

She treats them like her own children.”

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

---

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

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

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

---

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

Chapter 48

“In the pursuit of knowledge,

every day something is added.

In the practice of the Tao,

Every day something is dropped.”

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

---

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the ascetic ascends, the kenotic descends.

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

Where the ascetic is Apollonian, the kenotic is Dionysian.

Where the ascetic saves, the kenotic spends.

Where the ascetic clings, the kenotic lets go.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps a wisdom economy?

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

Chapter 47

“Without opening your door,

you can open your heart to the world.

Without looking out your window,

you can see the essence of the Tao.

The more you know,

the less you understand.”

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

---

The pandemic has made amateur monks of us all. We’ve had to close all sorts of doors—our social circles, our schools, our businesses. And in many cases, that’s felt like closing our hearts. Social distancing has made us feel socially distant. Our world have narrowed. And we have lots of time to just stare out the window.

But as with normal retreats, this long strange journey is also an opportunity to withdraw from the world to see it more clearly. In meditation, you do not look out your window, but at your window. We gain knowledge by looking out our window, and wisdom by looking at it. The more you look at your window, the more and better you will see when you look out of it.

---

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

Chapter 46

“When a country is in harmony with the Tao,

the factories make trucks and tractors.

When a country goes counter to the Tao,

warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

There is no greater illusion than fear,

no greater wrong than preparing to defend yourself,

no greater misfortune than having an enemy.

Whoever can see through all fear

will always be safe.”

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

---

This week I taught Machiavelli’s The Prince, which offers the opposite advice: the ruler should always keep his focus on war and readiness for war, and the key to keeping power is to be afraid of foreign invasions and domestic uprisings. To prevent both, you must make people fear you. Fear is not an illusion to “see through.” It is the truth that stands behind all illusions.

But your main enemy is not people, but Nature. Nature is not the Dao, but “Fortuna,” which Machiavelli casts in feminine terms as a force the ruler must try to master, to, if necessary, “beat and strike her.” Only the prince equipped with virtú—the root of which is Latin for “man”—has a chance of outfoxing and overpowering Fortuna to wrest power and glory from her clutches. But Fortuna is much more Kali or Tiamat than Providence or Gaia. Harmony with her is impossible; the best that can be hoped for is defensive rearguard actions that temporarily fend off her swallowing us whole. Or tearing us to pieces.

Machiavelli would have been fascinated by Trump—someone should write a Machiavellian assessment of his reign—but he arguably never could have predicted what Fortuna would throw at the United States: a cold civil war based on illusions that are both cause and effect of fear. The chief “enemy” is no longer foreign, but domestic. Machiavelli works well for the world of realpolitik, the geopolitics of the world of the 20^th century. But our situation is becoming increasingly characterized by what Ross Douthat calls “dreampolitik”: large segments of the population captured by alternative realities split off from the broader body politic, convinced their fellow citizens are their enemies.

In this world, FDR and the Dao are more useful than Machiavelli. The only thing we have to fear is fear itself—and the illusions it fosters and is fueled by. Just as we pulled ourselves out of the Great Depression through muscular government action and wartime mobilization—“the factories make trucks and tractors”—we must pull ourselves out of this perilous moment by making America make again, and leading the 30 year project to decarbonize the global economy and avert catastrophic climate change.

If we do that with speed, at scale, and with solidarity—and with a lot of Fortuna on our side—then we just may help humanity attain harmony with the Dao.

---

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

Chapter 45

“True perfection seems imperfect,

yet it is perfectly itself.

True fullness seems empty,

Yet it is fully present.”

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

---

For the Daoist, the proverbial glass is neither half-full nor half-empty. The conventional binary of “optimism” and “pessimism” is a product of an impoverished way of seeing. Optimism is too fixated on the future, pessimism too preoccupied with the past. Both are caught in what Tai Chi calls the “floating position.” Vaclav Havel agreed:

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

This reflects a deep trust—a kind of faith—not in a set of dogmas, but in the basic order of things. As Alan Watts put it, where belief clings, faith lets go.

For the Daoist, the glass is empty, however “full” it might appear. It may be relatively full or relatively empty, but ultimately it is fully empty. This seems contradictory to the logical mind—“true wisdom seems foolish,” we also read in this chapter—but as Pascal noted, “the heart has reasons that reason cannot fathom.” The heart-mind, according to Chinese philosophy, is that part of us that can intuit things felt but not seen…the hidden logos, the Force, the Dao.

In the modern age, we have lost the faith that, in the final analysis, things hang together, that we are part of a “cosmos”–literally, a well-ordered state of affairs. We don’t have to fall back on belief in the bearded man in the sky; that was never much faith to begin with. We have to fall forward into the world as it is, trusting that the emptiness of space is less an abyss and more an ocean that will buoy us up, the fount of all forms.

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

Chapter 44

“Success or failure: which is more destructive?”

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

---

It was not enough for us to enshrine “success” as the meaningless and therefore unattainable goal of the game of late capitalism. We also had to go ahead and fetishize “failure.” George Carlin quipped that in America, you never have to die; you get to just “pass away.” In the same vein, “failure” just brings you closer to “success,” so we—or rather, the Silicon Valley influencers who were the few lucky winners who despite their brilliance and heroic industry are either monstrously deluded due to their success or cynically gaslighting those less fortunate and whose products and platforms are causing the psychological and political equivalent of climate change—tell young people to fail early and often. Fail up! Fail forward! Marx had a powerful image for how ideology works: a “camera obscura,” in which the true world is turned upside down.

I don’t mean to knock the value of grit, hard work, and risk-taking. These are essential virtues, and we almost always need more of them. I don’t mean to knock capitalism. In its healthiest form, it is both the most moral and the most effective and efficient way to organize our economic lives.

But at some point, cultural scripts about success and failure start to mess with people’s minds. This semester I am teaching a seminar for seniors on work and leisure. They are about to start their adult lives with, theoretically, greater advantages than most people their age in history: coming out of an elite university in the richest country in the history of the world. And they’re terrified. Yes, there’s the pandemic, climate change, the fracturing and fragilizing of democracy, the vertiginous inequalities of late capitalism. But I suspect they’d be feeling this way regardless of these swirling storm systems.

Cleansed of ideological distortions, though, the gospel of failure carries a grain of truth. Perhaps the best advice I’ve ever heard about success was that true success would be to succeed yourself. If you are not dying and being reborn every five or ten years, you’re probably doing something wrong. This is a more psycho-spiritual view of success. Failure is “not an option,” it is a necessity. Not because complete success is possible, but because everything is built to fail. Rather than embrace this truth, the American mind chases a fantasy of perfect, permanent success, and when reality does not bend to its influential wishes and the soul or body breaks down, it calls that failure success in disguise. It tries to make the whole world yang, and when yin asserts itself, it says white is the new black.

Today’s chapter closes: “Be content with what you have; rejoice in the way things are. When you realize there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.” The serpent gets a bad rap in Genesis, but in the ancient near East, the serpent was a sacred animal and a symbol of eternity. The snake regularly sheds its skin. As Joseph Campbell puts it, the serpent represents the power of eternity in time, the force of life continually casting off dead weight, regenerating itself, being reborn. The snake’s skin fails, and it succeeds itself. The snake is not how it appears to others. The snake is not its skin. It is the sinuous line slithering across and around the yin/yang symbol.

Don’t follow the snakes advice and try to be like God. Try to be like the snake.

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

Chapter 43

“The gentlest thing in the world

overcomes the hardest thing in the world.

…

Teaching without words,

Performing without actions:

That is the Master’s way.”

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

---

What is the hardest thing in the world?

The images this passage summons are the gentle river patiently wearing down the hard mountain, or the martial artist deftly deflecting a rushing attacker. The hard is found in the heavy and the dense, the crude and the brutal. But these are not the hardest thing in the world.

The hardest thing in the world is a human mind that believes it knows the world. Words are futile volleys of arrows glancing off its proud façade. Actions aimed at prying it open only tighten its grip. How to teach without words and perform without actions? Look to the true Master.

The true Master is nature. “The gentlest thing in the world” is a mountain. Precisely by not moving—through its supreme silence and inimitable inaction—it forces the human mind and body to yield to it. In return, it reveals the view from above, helping us let go of the view from below. And as we descend, it makes us let go of that view too.

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

Chapter 42

“Ordinary men hate solitude.

But the master makes use of it,

embracing his aloneness, realizing

he is one with the whole universe.”

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

---

In 2014, a social psychologist conducted an experiment in which people had the choice of either doing nothing for a short period of around 15 minutes, or shocking themselves. The results were, well…you can fill in the blank. The experiment appeared to support Pascal’s famous aphorism, “All of mankind’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” More specifically, perhaps the problems stem from men’s inability to do so; more precisely, the masculine power’s revulsion at solitude sows chaos.

The lines above today’s selection read this way: “All things have their backs to the female and stand facing the male. When male and female combine, all things achieve harmony.”

If the male turns its back on the female, he will only see her shadow. He will, that is, only see Kali. And Kali makes you fight, flee, fawn, or freeze. Kali provokes furious action, frenetic motion, reactive energy, rash behavior—anything but sitting still.

But to turn toward Kali—to “embrace his aloneness”—the male has to fall backward into the black. The little shocks he distracts himself with to feel alive and accomplished are so much pornography filling in for the real thing; if he really wants to give birth to something, he has to turn toward Kali. He has to go, as Plotinus put it, from the alone to the Alone. He has to say yes to solitude.

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

Chapter 41

“The path into the light seems dark,

the path forward seems to go back,

the direct path seems long….”

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

---

Psychoanalysis, it has been said, is expensive, inconclusive, and interminable. In contrast to modern therapeutic approaches like Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy that tend to focus more on problem solving—on the future—psychoanalysis presents as a long, leisurely walkabout through the wilds of the psyche, a spelunking sojourn through the vast caverns of one’s past. Who has the time these days?

But however inefficient this continental method may sound to American ears, it had a practical purpose: what Freud called “regression in service of the ego.” The logic is that the unconscious is governed by its own peculiar logic; it “seems dark,” but its threshold is a “path into the light.” The gamble is that by treating with the monsters dwelling in the darkness of the psyche, we will unsnarl the knots in the net that binds us back up top; and that without this descent and return, all our efforts on the surface will only ensnare us more tightly in a matrix of our own making. In Song of Myself, Walt Whitman wrote, “out of the dimness, opposite equals advance.” Or as development psychologist Robert Kegan likes to put it, “Either we feast on our shadows, or starve on our egos.”

Sometimes, the only way forward is downward.

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

Chapter 40

“Return is the movement of the Tao.
Yielding is the way of the Tao.

All things are born of being.

Being is born of non-being.”

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

---

It follows from this that “being” is not a thing. What, then, is being?

Existentialism is one of the most perilous parts of our march up the mountain because it’s easy to get stuck there. Hamlet’s indecision is the classic example, the soul circling about on a rocky promontory, unable to see the point in either pressing on to the summit or coming back down the mountain.

Without yoga—some form of mental and physical practice to jolt the soul awake from its stupor of abstraction—the existential engine stalls. The word yoga is related to the word for “yoke,” and its goal is to align the movements of our being with the order of things.

If we are stuck to “being,” we will be cut off from things, because being is not an idea or a concept of a kind of super-being like God floating in some ether. If we yield to non-being, we will see being for what it is: nothing else than what Daoism calls “the 10,000 things.” The 10,000 things just are the play of being and non-being, form and emptiness, time and eternity.

In Biblical terms, creation is not an event in the distant past, but a process taking place right now. To paraphrase Hamlet, there is nothing past or future, but thinking makes it so.

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

Chapter 39

“When man interferes with the Tao,

the sky becomes filthy,

the earth becomes depleted,

the equilibrium crumbles,

creatures become extinct.”

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

---

When The Matrix came out in 1999, no one considered it to be an environmental allegory. Instead, we cast it as Frankenstein for the digital age: the hubris of humanity playing god, our creations turning on us and threatening the survival of our species. Climate change had not yet slid into the Overton window, but now that it has, watching The Matrix in light of it makes sense. What folks in the “existential risk” space refer to as the “control problem” of artificial intelligence is likely to become more and more entangled with the climate problem.

This week, one of the leading science journalists of our time, Elizabeth Kolbert—author of The Sixth Extinction—came out with a new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, reporting on the state of play around the climate problem. Among the many controversial cutting-edge technologies she profiles is geo-engineering, the main form of which involves injecting sulfate particles into the atmosphere to deflect solar radiation in order to cool the planet. As one of her sources bluntly remarks, we are at the point where we are seriously talking about “dimming the fucking sun.”

When Morpheus explains to Neo how the machines took over—“some time in the early 21^st century”—he says that as a last ditch effort to win the war, humanity darkened the sky in order to cut off the machine’s power source—the sun. Yet this turned out to seal humanity’s fate, since the machines realized they could use human bodies as batteries by growing them in fields, sucking their life force energy away as they sleepwalked through a virtual reality simulation. 

Few paid attention, however, to the deeper meaning of The Matrix sequels—partly because of wooden acting and stilted scripts, partly because they contained a spiritual teaching far too high for popular culture. In the second and third films, we learn that the simple morality play of the first film—“humanity good, machines bad”—is yet another illusion. The machines themselves turn out to be incarnations of spirit. In Hegelian terms, the machines are humanity’s alienated essence, and the war is the “cunning of reason” conspiring to reconcile them to each other. Neo is the Christ-like mediator between the two.

A form of this Manichean morality tale characterizes much of the environmental movement—“ humanity/technology/capitalism bad, nature good”—and colors Western appropriations of Daoism. The rhetoric of balance, harmony, and equilibrium conjures the idea that humanity is, as Agent Smith puts it, a “cancer on this planet.”

The problem with this line of thinking is that nature created a species that interferes with nature. To regard humanity as the problem is, paradoxically, to interfere with the Dao. As Stewart Brand famously put it, “We are as gods. We may as well get good at it.” Our destiny is not what we have tacitly been trying to do for millennia: leave this planet. It is to make it our home for the first time; to restore the balance we began to disrupt with the advent of agriculture; to run the industrial revolution in reverse; and, as energy scientist Amory Lovins puts it, to “reinvent fire,” switching from scarce “fuels from hell” to unlimited “fuels from heaven.” Like the machines, carbon dioxide is our alienated essence, the shadow of our civilization. We must confront it, take responsibility for it, bury it, and refrain from projecting it.

If we interfere with the Dao—if we not grow our consciousness to develop technologies to adapt to the world we have wrought—the sky will become filthy, the earth will be depleted, and creatures will go extinct. Few figures seem more at odds with both Daoism and environmentalism than Francis Bacon. Yet Bacon said that to be commanded, nature must be obeyed. It is earth (geothermal), fire (solar and nuclear), wind, and water power—and the fifth element, the spark of intelligence within us—that will lead us to energy heaven.

Only then will we have true “energy independence.” Only when our civilization is fueled by heaven will we give up trying to get there. Only then will we finally be earthlings.

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

Chapter 38

“When the Tao is lost, there is goodness.

When goodness is lost, there is morality.

When morality is lost, there is ritual.

Ritual is the husk of true faith,

The beginning of chaos.”

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

---

This chapter is a surgical strike against Confucius, for whom li, ritual propriety, was the key ingredient to a successful society. The Confucian saw the ideal society as a carefully choreographed play aimed at maximizing order. The Taoist saw this as a social straightjacket snuffing out spontaneity, sure to court the very thing it tried to control. Lao-tzu is the trickster in the garden Confucius cultivated, telling you to live a little, bite the apple, and see what happens. 

For the traditionalist, rituals are sacred and separate from the profane. 

For the modernist, rituals are silly because nothing is sacred and therefore nothing is profane. 

For the postmodernist, rituals are sacred but found in the profane–and the mundane. 

Growing up in a modern culture, it’s hard not to encounter a religious ritual like the Catholic mass as pointless, inefficient, hollow. There is no room for individual thought or action, since the participant is purely passive. Of course, in truth, the idea is for the soul to be active in prayer. But since modernity, afflicted by what Max Weber called the “disenchantment of the world,” doesn’t quite believe in souls, a mass seems like a big waste of time—and boring as all hell.

Yet after a while, everything on the modern plane seems like a big waste of time, because nothing really matters. Since nothing is sacred, time isn’t really worth saving, so it can’t really be wasted. The distractions designed to fend off the existential ennui evoked by an entropic universe start to lose their luster, and rituals once again become interesting.

For the postmodern “spiritual but not religious” set, there is no ritual more popular than the morning coffee. That caffeine has become the de facto sacrament of the information age, slavishly imbibed before we cross the threshold into the temple of productivity, speaks volumes about our culture’s priorities. Caffeine may be one of the “old gods,” but in the wasteland any god will do. But apart from that, the re-enchantment of the world has, for many of us, taken the form of simply being more present in the most mundane activities. These little sips of quiet we steal away before being sucked into the maelstrom of the marketplace—the coffee, the meditation, the yoga, the gratitude journals—certainly contain notes of Daoism. But this nibbling at the margins will not quite satisfy. It is as though we know we have to hold our breath all day, and inhale as many big gulps of air as we can before plunging into the fray.

Contra conventional wisdom, though, the traditional attitude has much to recommend it. The Sabbath is not the “end” of the week, a kind of bonus-round tacked on to the main event, a chance to get some R and R to be productive the week after; but it is the “end” of the week in the sense of the purpose of the week, the answer to the question of why the work, why the week—why time—matters at all. As Josh Cohen explains in his gem of a book Not Working, “The Sabbath, explicitly sanctifying non-work, encourages us to imitate this divine lassitude; its disappearance from contemporary life may have as much to do with the sacralization of work as it does with the secularization of society.” The truth is that modernity tells a noble lie about religion; as David Foster Wallace put it, there’s no such thing as atheism–everybody worships. And modernity worships the false idol of work.

The only way to recover the “true faith”–to ascend from chaos back to up to the Dao–is with what John Lewis called “good trouble.” A little chaos now is like a vaccine that inoculates us against a lot of chaos later. It’s true that we need order as an “antidote to chaos,” as Jordan Peterson puts it, but after a while order becomes boring and unbearable. The routines that streamline our lives, the habits that William James called the great flywheel of society, over time congeal into ruts that stifle the spirit. Chaos can be an antidote to order. Rituals are great, as long as we aren’t too religious about them. A little chaos in the morning, a little chaos at work, a little chaos on the Sabbath.

A little chaos, not too much.

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

Chapter 37

“If powerful men and women

could center themselves in [the Dao],

the whole world would be transformed by itself….

People would be content

with their simple, everyday lives,

in harmony, and free of desire.”

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

---

Few passages in the Daodejing sound more utopian than this. Yet few ages, arguably, are more cynical than ours. Sure, the elimination of desire and world peace are impossible and, in the case of the former, economically disastrous.

But if we adopt the hermeneutic of Trump apologists and take the passage “seriously, but not literally,” it has something important to tell us.

One of the many lessons of the Trump years was that who is in charge matters. For a long time, many Americans—call them casual centrists—didn’t think or worry much about politics, naively assuming that the system would take care of itself, or cynically believing that they’re all crooks anyway, so why bother?

The very idea that the character of the leader doesn’t matter was foreign to the ancients. For Plato, the ideal leader was the philosopher. The philosopher was not a professor of philosophy, but a person who had attained self-mastery, possessed the virtues, and was driven above all toward the truth and the common good.

The idea that character doesn’t matter in politics flows from the political atomism of our cultural DNA: classical liberalism. As Patrick Dineen has pointed out, the idea that we are first and foremost individuals, islands unto ourselves, isn’t just corrosive to the flourishing of human society; it’s false. You don’t even need to ask Aristotle; just consult your local evolutionary biologist.

People instinctively look to the leader—even if they’re disgusted, even if they can’t look away. And even if they are repulsed and don’t follow his example, it makes them just a little bit more cynical, a little bit more jaded. It’s precisely that fatalism that is fatal to a free society. Without leaders centered in—or at least orbiting—the Dao, it’s harder for people to be center themselves.

But what follows from this is that we are all powerful men and women, caught, as King put it, in a seamless garment of destiny. We are part of the same social fabric that produced Trump. We must then take responsibility for ten thousand tiny ways we “transform the world” every day. We must center ourselves precisely by remembering that we are not the center of things.

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

Chapter 35

“She who is centered in the Tao

can go where she wishes, without danger.

She perceives the universal harmony,

Even amid great pain,

Because she has found peace in her heart.”

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

---

There is little we would like more right now than to “go where we wish, without danger” and little more we desire than to feel centered. You can tell how long we’ve been in the underworld when memories from the before-times seem strange; I was recently recalling my first time meeting a colleague years ago, and it struck me as strange that we weren’t wearing masks. We can’t go anywhere without danger, and if anything, we feel too centered—because we’re always home. You can’t really go home if you’re always there.

What’s incongruous about this chapter is that it decouples danger and great pain. Modern Buddhists like to say that “pain is unavoidable, suffering is optional.” Physical, emotional, and mental pain is going to happen—hence the first Noble Truth, “Life is suffering”—but what we control is how we respond to it. Today’s suffering is tomorrow’s pain.

But pain conducted produces harmony. It reminds us that we are caught in a labyrinth, and gives us an Ariadne’s thread to fumble our way out so that we can see its brilliant design. The pandemic has been a tragedy, but the crisis, as the cliché goes, is also an opportunity to appreciate the reality and fragility of the world we have inherited and innovated: politically, culturally, economically, and ecologically entwined. Society is largely a conspiracy to protect its members from the truth, but the truth is just a broader, more concrete, and less nefarious conspiracy—that of life.

Life is the business of human beings and life forms breathing together in the same space, the background against which our religious and political stories appear childish things. The pandemic has laid bare the truth of our 21^st century civilization, which is really the truth of civilization itself: our destiny is not to leave this plane or planet for heaven or space, but to learn how to live on it, how to breathe together with all of its inhabitants.

The great danger is that we cocoon ourselves with comforts inside the cave of conventional wisdom, which largely consists of conspiracy theories, some more benign than others. The pandemic must be the “great pain” that breaks this spell, and helps enough of us perceive the “universal harmony” that we can begin to face the music: climate change. Like our democracy, our home is not a given, but a goal.

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

Chapter 36

“If you want to shrink something,

you must first allow it to expand.

If you want to get rid of something,

You must first allow it to flourish.”

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

---

In How to Change Your Mind, Michael Pollan relays one of the key “flight instructions” given by veteran “psychonauts” to people embarking on their first psychedelic trip: if you see a monster, go toward it.

As with all monsters, this requires defying our most powerful guardians—our desires and fears—as well as the conventional wisdom around monsters. At root, the word “monster” means a “showing.” He is always trying to show you something, even if he can’t articulate it—especially if he can’t articulate it. And he will not retreat from the stage until you get the message.

The monster’s medium—raging, roaring, rearing up—is his message. All he really craves is attention. It is hardly surprising that our contemporary culture is so monstrous: we live in an attention economy, where the latest form of manufactured scarcity is consciousness itself.

The art of monster-whispering requires not just courage and patience, but a heroic dose of imagination. Here, Lao-tzu calls it “the subtle perception of the way things are.” The way things are is not how they seem. The monster is not as he appears; or rather, he is precisely as he appears, if we look carefully enough: afraid.

So seen, he disappears.

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

Chapter 34

“Since [the great Tao] is merged with all things

and hidden in their hearts,

it can be called humble.

Since all things vanish into it

and it alone endures,

it can be called great.

It isn’t aware of its greatness;

Thus it is truly great.”

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

---

Mother Theresa (allegedly) said we cannot do great things, only small things with great love.

St. Valentine was not, in fact, the patron saint of lovers. He was a 3^rd century Christian cleric and martyr who ministered to persecuted Christians. The legend of St. Valentine was created in the 14^th century, and the industry of Valentine’s Day developed centuries after that. But both the legend and what little we know of the reality of the saint tell us a great deal about the hidden meaning of perhaps our most light-hearted holiday.

What yokes the life and legend of St. Valentine is devotion. Our modern conception of romantic love—that marriage should be based on personal passion rather than economic necessity and social status—derives in large part from the tradition of courtly love from the Middle Ages. But this idea was profoundly moral and religious: the knight errant does not simply devote himself to a noble lady because of her beauty and purity, but because she embodies qualities that reflect the divine. Put another way, he is not attracted to her, but through her, to something that transcends her. The danger of this, of course, is obsession: to idealize her and put her on a pedestal. That is the dark side of passion.

But the other side of passion is captured, to the best of our knowledge, by the real St. Valentine: selfless, sacrificial love. David Foster Wallace put it well:

“there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talk about much in the great outside world of wanting and achieving…. The really important kind of freedom involves attention and awareness and discipline, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them over and over in myriad petty, unsexy ways every day.”

To do small things with great love is precisely to do great things.

---

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

Day 33

“Knowing others is intelligence;

knowing yourself is true wisdom.

Mastering others is strength;

Mastering yourself is true power.”

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

---

One of the many fascinating findings in analyses of Trump supporters is that men who identify as “completely masculine” were more likely to vote for him and approve of his policies. Hardly a shocker.

But it gets at something elemental, something too easily dismissed as simple misogyny or, in cutting-edge cultural parlance, “toxic masculinity.” Like “racism,” “transphobia”, and “nativism,” misogyny is a term referring to a real thing whose power declines in proportion to how commonly it is deployed.

It’s true that Trump and Trumpism are suffused by a brutal and basic form of masculinity. It’s true that this lines up perfectly with findings from social psychology that conservatives are less tolerant of ambiguity and less open to experience than liberals, and hence drawn to black and white views of morality and gender identity; indeed, for conservatives generally, the very idea of a differentiation between sex and gender, between biological reality and social construction, seems confused and confusing.

But it’s also true that this is a deep stratum in our body-minds, a foundational piece of our evolutionary inheritance. We ignore it—or attempt to exorcise it—at our individual and collective peril. The Daodejing nudges us to “know the male, but keep to the female,” not to cling to the female and castrate—or cancel—the male.

One way to understand Trumpism is to see it as a symptom of a deeper cultural problem: a lack of respect for traditional masculinity, and the collapse of the socioeconomic stage that allows it to flourish. Put another way, if you do away with traditional masculinity, toxic masculinity will take its place; one of the blind spots of many progressives is that they cannot distinguish between the two, and hence dismiss both. And that, of course, is cause and effect of toxic femininity.

Beneath all of this is an elemental truth: the masculine and feminine powers are not merely social constructs. In fact, social constructs are not merely social constructs or, alternatively put, the idea of “social constructs” is a social construct; they are a part of an integral whole in the world that we separate in analysis in order to better understand the complexity of reality. For human beings, it is natural to construct social reality. The reason we have trouble seeing this is that we have inherited the idea that nature and nurture are separate—that our nature is merely our genetic priors. For Aristotle, however, our nature included “nature” and nurture because we are social, political, meaning-making animals; our nature is to create culture.

And when it comes to sexuality and gender, the culture we create is bounded by biological forces. The sexual forces of male and female are like relatively fixed biological anchors, and the psychological forces of masculine and feminine are like ships tied to them but relatively free to move depending on the currents of culture. Gender is distinct from, but cannot be completely detached from, sex. Otherwise, the entire idea of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine—that is, the very ideas of sex and gender—become meaningless.

The obvious form of “mastering others is strength” is the alpha male monster bullying people into submission. But the opposite form of this is the dark female power—Tiamat or Kali—that, unconscious of her own masculinity, captive to her shadow, tries to destroy the other, all in the name of respect for otherness.

“Mastering yourself” means, in part, recognizing and expressing the masculine and feminine within—and not necessarily in equal proportions. At its best, traditional masculinity is one of the most successful formulas for doing this. The code of chivalry, traditional virtues like humility and moderation, and the ideal of the “gentle-man” all sublimate the will to dominate to a higher purpose and connect with the “taming of testosterone” that, as Ken Wilber puts it, is one of the primary tasks and fruits of civilization. That formula may be incomplete, has certainly been applied incorrectly, and needs to be supplemented; but it is a mistake to abandon it as a mere cypher for misogyny, patriarchy, and/or white supremacy.

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

Chapter 32

The Tao can’t be perceived,

smaller than an electron,

it contains uncountable galaxies.

….

When you have name and forms,

know that they are provisional.

When you have institutions,

know where their functions should end.

Knowing when to stop,

you can avoid any danger.

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

---

The use of the modern word “electron” is obviously a liberty taken by the translator, but it also reflects one of the most influential modern appropriations of Daoism: the identification of quantum physics with Eastern mysticism more broadly. Popular New Age or New Age-adjacent books like the Tao of Physics and the The Dancing Wu Li Masters posited a parallel between the new physics and Eastern conceptions of impermanence and interdependence. Beyond this, they helped to spread the idea that science and spirituality are not incompatible, and that physics somehow “proves” the Tao.

In Quantum Questions, Ken Wilber convincingly argued that this line of thinking is misguided. But his intention was not to dismiss spirituality as “woo woo,” as the Defenders of Science commonly do. His approach was similar to evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould’s view of science and religion as “non-overlapping magisteria”—a clunky phrase for a simple idea: do not, so to speak, try to join what God has separated.

But a problem with the way this idea is spun is that science gets seen as “objective” and “rational” and “empirical,” while religion is “subjective” and “emotional” and based on “faith.” Science is the realm of the known and knowable, religion that of mystery.

Without for a minute dismissing the legitimacy and sophistication of contemporary physics, perusing the work of popular writers like Brian Greene or Neal DeGrasse Tyson, it’s hard to come away without thinking that the universe if fundamentally weird. It is as though physics and philosophy have switched places: the hard science is now in the business of positing abstract entities—superstrings and god particles and dark matter. Physics is the new metaphysics. At some point, you feel compelled to ask whether we are just bumping up against the limitations of our knowing.

And here, the medievals’ approach may be of use, without adopting their theology. Their idea was that faith and reason were not incompatible, but mutually entailing. We have to know the limits of our reason (“knowing when to stop”) in order to make room for what transcends it. What transcends it may be mysterious, but that is no excuse for pretending it doesn’t exist, or asserting that someday science will “explain it.” When science does that, it stops being science and turns into scientism.

Likewise, when religions claim to have the Total Explanation for Everything, they stop being religions and become cults.

Only be stopping can we start to see the mystery.

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

Chapter 31

“Weapons are the tools of violence;

all decent men detest them.

Weapons are the tools of fear;

a decent man will avoid them

except in the direct necessity

and, if compelled, will use them

Only with the utmost restraint.

….

His enemies are not demons,

But human beings like himself.”

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

---

One of my favorite book titles is Chris Hedges’ War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning. One of the reasons we moderns are meaning-poor, I suspect, is that we are insulated from war. War or the threat of war was a near constant for most of our species’ history, so much so that the ancients generally regarded it as natural and inescapable.

The basic idea of modernity is that we should stop fighting and start fucking—exchanging goods in the physiosphere (economics), bodies in the biosphere (immigration), and ideas in what Tielhard de Chardin called the “noosphere” (culture). The logic of the post-World War II “liberal international order” was based on the idea that economic interdependence would make the large-scale national conflicts intolerable and unlikely. The hope was that classical liberalism would act as a sort of booster rocket to help humanity achieve the escape velocity from Thucydides’ trap and attain Kant’s “perpetual peace.”

It’s true that this rocket ship was built on the backs of slaves, the exploitation of colonies, and the degradation of the environment. But it’s also true, as Steven Pinker demonstrates in The Better Angels of Our Nature, that despite the cataclysmic conflicts of the 20^th century, the modern world is far more peaceful than prior eras in history. Within the gates of civilization, at least, we live in a historically anomalous garden of peace and prosperity.

And it turns out that’s kind of boring.

At the end of the Cold War, Francis Fukuyama famously warned that the “end of history”—the victory of democratic capitalism in the multi-millennial contest of ideologies—was the beginning of a new threat: the “last man,” a phrase he took from Nietzsche. The last man is what C.S. Lewis called “men without chests” and T.S. Eliot termed “hollow men”—all reason and appetite, no heart. With a political system telling him to respect others’ rights, an economic system telling him to be a good producer and consumer, and a biology telling him that his only purpose is to survive and reproduce, the last man’s only goal is to…last. Tyler Durden distills the plight of the last man in Fight Club: “We’re the middle children of history, with no purpose or place. We have no great war, or great depression. The great war is a spiritual war. The great depression is our lives.”

True peace is not just the absence of war. Rather than exorcise the warrior energies that are part of our evolutionary inheritance, modernity denies their existence, and is confused when they erupt into the public square. It is hard to imagine a better example of this than the QAnon shaman howling in the heart of the Capitol.

Eliminate nature wars, and you’re going to get culture wars. The converse of Bismarck’s adage that “war is the continuation of politics by other means is also true.” For the vast majority of us in the so-called developed world, the weapons we wield are words. Most of us—particularly those in UMPMC (upper middle professional managerial class)—fancy ourselves decent, reasonable people free from ideology, far more civilized than the “great unwashed” idiocrats from the sticks attending Trump rallies, spellbound by the delusion that they are foot soldiers in some world-historical struggle re-enacting 1776. And of course it is horrible that, as Ross Douthat put it, the “dreampolitik” of today’s Republican party—the fake news, the conspiracy theories, the live-action role playing game ethos—tore the veil between the virtual and the real on January 6^th.

But this move is a mistake, and a subtle form of violence. We other the others because they other. We “them” them “theming” us. David Frum put it well in “Against Revenge,” the final chapter of his recent book on Trump:

“comparatively few of Trump’s voters were intentionally bad actors. Most of them were fallible human beings like everybody else. They were deceived by people they trusted. Fox News and Facebook penned them like farmed salmon inside a lagoon of ignorance. Irresponsible politicians them hauled them flopping into their nets. These Trump voters were not victims, exactly. They could have struggled to overcome their prejudices. They could have sought out better information. They could have made wiser choices. They did grave harm to American democracy. Yet if you are going to hold them accountable for their bad choices, you should also hold yourself accountable for the choices you will make after the political pendulum swings. These are your countrymen. They are not going anywhere.”

For if we recognize that we are caught in and, however minutely, contributing to a world-historical conflict—if we awaken from the dream that history has “ended,” and realize that the fate of democracy, capitalism, and the climate is bound up with the culture wars in the United States—we might come to see our struggle in quite different terms. As Nietzsche put, “in times of peace, the warlike man attacks himself.”

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

Chapter 30

“The Master does his job

and then stops.

He understand that the universe

is forever out of control,

and that trying to dominate events

goes against the current of the Tao.”

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

---

When it comes to Fortune, Machiavelli is the Western yin to Lao-tzu’s yang.

“I certainly believe this: that it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because Fortune is a woman, and if you want to keep her under it is necessary to beat her and force her down. It is clear that she more often allows herself to be won over by impetuous men than by those who proceed coldly.

“Fortune is a…raging river, which floods the plains, sweeping away trees and buildings, bearing away the soil; everyone flees before it; all yield to its violence, and no one can resist it…”

For Machiavelli, Fortune is tantamount to Tiamat.

What separates the two thinkers is the desire to dominate it. Machiavelli believed that the will to conquer the world is part of human nature; Lao-tzu believed that the ability to conquer desire is the key to harmony with nature.

The great leader aims not to be feared or loved, but to be ignored. There is a reason the Biden presidency has come as a relief to so many: boring is a blessing.

But it would be a mistake to cast Trump as a Machiavellian success story. His great masterstroke was to seize to perceive and mercilessly exploit the GOP’s hollowness, rural America’s anger, and Hillary Clinton’s unpopularity in 2016. His great mistake was that he tried to Tweet his way around Tiamat in 2020. Fortune, in the form of the pandemic, carried him out to sea.

If he had done his job and stopped Tweeting, he would be president. And we would not be bored.

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

Chapter 29

“Do you want to improve the world?

I don’t think it can be done.

The world is sacred.

It can’t be improved.

If you temper with it, you’ll ruin it.”

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

---

This is blasphemy to modern ears. The whole idea of modernity is progress, particularly material progress. As the old Dow slogan put it, “better living through chemistry.”

The Daodejing tends to mix with progressive spirituality in American culture, so it may be surprising to consider that here, it embraces two core conservative ideas: one, that the world cannot be fixed, and two, that the attempt to fix it often messes it up even more. As the British conservative political philosopher Michael Oakeshott put it, “Those who in Elysian fields would dwell, do but extend the bounds of hell.” Yang is not a problem to solved or managed.

At first glance, this appears to counsel pessimism; and indeed, it certainly recognizes the tragic side of life. But seen rightly, it spells relief. Thomas Merton understood this:

“There is a pervasive form of contemporary violence to which the idealist most easily succumbs: activism and overwork. The rush and pressure of modern life are a form, perhaps the most common form, of its innate violence. To allow oneself to be carried away by a multitude of conflicting concerns, to surrender to too many demands, to commit oneself to too many projects, to want to help everyone in everything, is to succumb to violence. The frenzy of our activism neutralizes our work for peace. It destroys our own inner capacity for peace. It destroys the fruitfulness of our own work, because it kills the root of inner wisdom which makes work fruitful.”

That doesn’t mean we should quit our moral striving and slouch into cynicism. As Pope John XXIII put it, “See everything, overlook a lot, correct a little.”

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

Chapter 28

The world is formed from the void,

Like utensils from a block of wood.

The Master knows the utensils,

yet keeps to the block:

Thus she can use all things.”

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

---

In the Babylonian creation myth Enuma Elish, the “villain” is the goddess Tiamat, a dragon-like monster of the deep who represents chaos, winter, death. In the story, essentially an agricultural allegory for the changing of the season, the “hero” Marduk slays Tiamat to thwart her destructive rampage and rebuilds the world with her body.

In Genesis, God calls forth the cosmos out of the watery chaos, or “the deep.” The Hebrew word used here is tehom, which is etymologically related to the name Tiamat; hence it is widely believed that the Biblical creation myth is an adaptation of an older story. But notice the differences: Chaos or nothingness doesn’t get a starring role, and there is no living female principle at the creation. In fact, in mythologies of the ancient Near East, the Bible is the odd ball in having no goddesses.

The vision of God drawing order out of the watery chaos later gets worked up into the theological idea of creation “ex nihilo,” out of nothing, but in the text, God does no such thing. The void is there first. The general effect of the Genesis narrative is to repress—to negate—the negative principle, and it haunts the Western tradition in various forms:  the problem of hell, the fear of death, punishment in hell and, of course, garbage.

When Jesus warns his followers about a place called “hell,” the word used is Gehenna. This was not an underground cavern filled with fire and fiends. It was a place in Jerusalem that was seen as cursed, formerly a site of child sacrifice, where the carcasses of animals sacrificed at the temple would be piled up and burned. Hell, in other words, was the town dump.

Architect Bill McDonough has a simple formula to explain his eco-friendly design philosophy: “waste equals food.” Just as the new world order is built out of Tiamat’s body, in the natural world there is no such thing as waste. Whether something is waste or food to you depends on your place in the food chain.

In this chapter, we find three couplets:  the male and the female, the white and the black, and the personal and the impersonal. In each, we are told to “know” the former, and “keep to” the latter.

Mind the gap.

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

Chapter 27

“A good traveler has no fixed plans,

and is not intent on arriving.”

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

---

Mike Tyson put the point more crudely: “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face.”

The text does not say to not make any plans—just to not hold onto them too tightly. Every moment, every situation, every day is the same: we come to it with a cluster of ideas, expectations, goals, plans, etc., but reality ultimately dictates the terms and tempo of battle. The art of entering the battle well is to strike just the right balance between narrowing our focus to master the moment and opening our awareness to welcome what it has to show us.

Our productivity-driven culture is great at goals—at doing the right things (effectiveness) and doing them the right way (efficiency)—and poor at dancing with things (efficacy).

If we don’t dance with things, we are doing to get punched in the face.

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

Chapter 26

“The heavy is the root of the light.

The unmoved is the source of all movement.”

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

---

When I was learning Tai Chi in graduate school many moons ago, this insight was made visceral.

I was paired up with a twitchy freshman to practice a simple drill: you take a straddle stance about three feet away from the other person, they kick straight at you, and you shift your weight to the side, dodge the kick, and clasp their foot.

Keep in mind that a) this is a practice drill, and b) Tai Chi is slow. Like, really slow. Slow like, yes, the way you see elderly Asian people practicing it in the park slow. Or at least, that’s how it’s supposed to be.

Once we had taken our positions, the instructor, Sifu, gave the go ahead, and my partner, impatient as a greyhound about to be loosed from the starting gate, proceeds to wind up and swing his leg toward my groin.

Luckily, we had just completed the warmup exercises. I mentioned slowness. The warmup has the effect not only of getting your body ready for a workout, but calming the mind and focusing the attention—Sifu likened it to be naturally stoned.

A long leg hurtling toward my groin, I pivoted instantly, effortlessly, like Neo dodging bullets, and seized his foot in one crisp, sure, snapping motion.

I turned my face to see Sifu next to me, a knowing grin resting on his face: “You see how quickly you can react when you’re relaxed?” The lesson didn’t just save me from a half hour or so of excruciating pain. It proved to be transferrable to pretty much everything.

The reason I was able to react so quickly, Sifu later explained, was that I was in the “grounded position.” The idea is Tai Chi is to draw power from your surroundings, particularly from the ground; gravity is not an obstacle to defy, but an energy source to harness. The more rooted we are, the more quickly and correctly we can respond to whatever comes our way.

The opposite—the posture we hold most of the time—is the “floating position.” We are easily knocked off balance or dragged away by distraction.

How often are you in the floating position?

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

Chapter 25

“There was something formless and perfect

before the universe was born.

It is serene. Empty.

Solitary. Unchanging.

Infinite. Eternally present.

It is the mother of the universe.

For lack of a better name,

I call it the Tao.”

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

---

In this chapter Lao-tzu comes the closest to violating the precept he lays down in chapter one: “the tao that can be told is not the eternal Tao.” It’s probably the most concerted attempt to describe the Dao in the entire text.

So stated, it sounds similar to the monotheistic idea of a God hanging out in the eternal void before creating the universe—except for two things: it is empty, and it is female.

Modern thinking is allergic to seeing the universe anthropomorphically. Postmodern thinking is allergic to seeing it patriarchally. It’s easy to see how ancient societies’ views of the cosmos were refracted through the structure of their societies, with a despotic God being depicted as king of the universe. It’s easy—and kind of fun—to debunk those mythic stories.

But Daoism offers a subtler way of thinking about the cosmos and our place in it. The masculine and the feminine are not simply features of human sexuality and gender identity, but basic principles of the cosmos. Put another way, the polarity between male and female in the human drama is just one iteration of the play of primal energies that suffuses the cosmos.

This is not the same as magical thinking and childish superstition, in which we project our wishes and imaginations onto the world. It’s the recognition that we should fully expect the basic elements of our being to reflect and cohere with the order of things that gave birth to us. The existentialist notion that we are “strangers in a strange world” is a strange doctrine, the sign of an age that has forgotten where it came from.

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

Chapter 24

“He who clings to his work

will create nothing that endures.”

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

---

Paradoxically, the worry, stress, and anxiety we experience around work is a function of not paying attention to our work.

When we “cling” to our work, we are fixated not on what we have to do, but our opinions and feelings about what we have to do—on our selves. Our attention is pulled out of the present—the task at hand—and inward toward concerns over the results and how they’ll be perceived by others.

But the clinging also takes our focus off of others as recipients and beneficiaries of the fruits or our labor. We dwell on how we will judged.

By taking work too seriously, we diminish its quality, and stymie the condition for its excellence: serious play.

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

Chapter 23

“Express yourself completely,

then keep quiet.”

---

A psychological formula I quite like goes something like this: “what you do not express you will repress, and what you repress will cause distress.” Not just in you, but in others—in small, subtle, osmotic ways.

If we do not express ourselves, we may keep quiet on the outside, but we will face the blowback of noise on the inside. A silenced signal breeds noise that gnaws on us until we explode. Better to express on our own terms, rather than the terms of our repressed feelings.

The chapter casts this in terms of trust and openness: “Open yourself to the Tao, then trust your natural responses; and everything will fall into place.” It means trusting—both that our thoughts and feelings are legitimate and deserve to be, and that however much we might fear letting them out into the world, they belong there.

An exchange between the dancers Agnes DeMille and Martha Graham illustrates this:

I confessed that I had a burning desire to be excellent, but no faith that I could be.

Martha said to me, very quietly: “There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. As for you, Agnes, you have so far used about one-third of your talent.”

“But,” I said, “when I see my work I take for granted what other people value in it. I see only its ineptitude, inorganic flaws, and crudities. I am not pleased or satisfied.”

“No artist is pleased.”

“But then there is no satisfaction?”

“No satisfaction whatever at any time,” she cried out passionately. “There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”

Express yourself completely, so that you may find quiet within.

---

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

Chapter 22

“When the ancient Masters said,

‘If you want to be given everything,

give everything up,’

they weren’t using empty phrases.

Only in being lived by the Tao

Can you be truly yourself.”

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

---

How much this last line sounds like St. Paul’s “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”! In chapter 19 of the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus is asked by a young rich man how to enter the kingdom of heaven. “Do you follow the commandments?” Jesus asks him. Check! But then Jesus makes a more exacting demand, asking the man to sell all of his possessions. Exit young rich man stage right.

This story—combined with the phrase that it will be harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than a camel passing through the eye of a needle—Is typically invoked to illustrate the idea that wealth if frowned upon in Christian teaching and, more generally, that it is incompatible with the moral and religious life. God or Mammon. But that is not the sense of the story.

Jesus is testing the young man to see how attached he is to his possessions. The story is not about the man’s net worth—it’s about the state of his soul. Put another way, the way to read the first beatitude—blessed are the poor in spirit—is that it calls for spiritual, not material, poverty: an empty, open, free soul unattached to power, property, profit, and prestige.

Jesus is calling the young man to “empty” himself, not to empty his coffers.

This is the same emptying to which the Daodejing is calling us. The demand sounds extreme only because, like the young man, we imagine it requires some dramatic change in our life circumstances. But what it mainly requires is a shift of perspective, to relate to our life circumstances in a different way. It’s a different kind of hard.

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

Chapter 21

“Before time and space were,

the Tao is.

It is beyond is and is-not.

How do I know this is true?

I look inside myself and see.”

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

---

A theme that runs through the Daodejing—and Zen Buddhism—is that the path to the knowledge of the self and the knowledge of reality is one and the same. But it is not confined to these traditions. Even St. Augustine’s formula can be cast as “going within takes me beyond,” or as one of his interpreters put it, to move “from the exterior to the interior, and from the interior to the superior.”

To our modern ears, this sounds odd. Why? Because we live in a secular age, which philosopher Charles Taylor suggests is bound by an “immanent frame.” The immanent frame is the idea that there is no transcendent spiritual reality, no unseen order, nothing really mysterious or spooky going on in the universe. The vision was perfectly encapsulated by Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of “scientific materialism”: “Nature is a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.”

In this frame, the self is what Taylor calls “the buffered self,” or what Alan Watts famously called a “skin-encapsulated ego.”

In this kind of a universe, if I withdraw into myself, I am eventually going to just hit a wall somewhere in the dark crannies of my unconscious or, worse, I’ll get lost and descend into madness. Also, I’m going to realize that wow, I’m really kind of crazy and weird. Maybe better to not make the trip?

In Taylor’s story, the “buffered self” came to replace the “porous self.” The porous self is that of the Biblical world, where God speaks to his people in dreams, of the Greek world, where gods and goddesses possess mortals, of the medieval world, where spirits and devils circle and penetrate the soul. Arguably, the internet has reactivated this “porous self,” but now our minds are vulnerable to hijack by spectral forces from the cloud—algorithms, influencers, bots, trolls, software engineers.

None of this is to say that that old enchanted world of magic and myth is true. But it does suggest that we ought to push the immanent frame and test the boundaries of the buffered self, not based on faith in some invisible order, but by being good skeptics in the original sense of the term:

To look for ourselves.

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

Chapter 20

“Stop thinking, and end your problems.

What difference between yes and no?

What difference between success and failure?”

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

---

One of the bestsellers of the aughts was The Purpose-Driven Life, by pastor Rick Warren. The term “purpose” functions in our cultural lexicon somewhat like the term “meaning”: a nebulous, semi-spiritual cypher that contains multitudes, that can be put to any purpose and carry any meaning. And the pursuit of purpose has much to recommend it.

But for Lao-tzu, purpose is a trap. Before she was secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice was a gifted pianist. Her teacher told her biographer that while Rice was technically proficient, she lacked the “disciplined abandon” needed to become a great concert pianist.

Where Confucianism pushes us to be disciplined, Daoism calls us to abandon. We need both.

The idea that what we decide (“yes or no”) and whether our efforts bear fruit (“success or failure”) doesn’t really matter sounds nihilistic. Nothing matters, so why bother?

But the Daoist receives this “nothing matters” as gospel. It is the good news that we are not on trial, that we are not being tested, and that the weight of the world is not on our shoulders. That means that we are free—to play, to create, to fail—to build sandcastles with the intensity and abandon of a child.

---

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

Chapter 19

“Throw away holiness and wisdom,

and people will be a hundred times happier.

Throw away morality and justice,

and people will do the right thing.

Throw away industry and profit,

and there won’t be any thieves.

If these three aren’t enough,

just stay at the center of the circle,

And let all things take their course.”

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

---

Here again we see conventionally valuable qualities cast as obstacles to human flourishing.

In one of his most potent and penetrating books, The Wisdom of Insecurity, Alan Watts claims that, paradoxically, we can only become secure by accepting that we will never be secure. Insecurity is not a problem to be solved, but a condition to be embraced. Put another way, we do not simply have problems, we are a problem to ourselves. The gnawing feeling of insecurity–that there are loose threads poking out the back of the carefully woven tapestry of our egos—is produced by denying and trying to cover up our natural insecurity.

It is only when we are “off center” that we feel the need to think and talk about what is good and true. Lao-tzu’s idea here is that often our attempts to restore balance often throw us even more off center. It is only when we stop struggling to “fix” ourselves, others, and the world—when we “let all things take their course”—and when we stop imagining that the center is somewhere else “out there”—that we can finally relax.

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

Chapter 18

“When the great Tao is forgotten,

goodness and piety appear.

When the body’s intelligence declines,

cleverness and knowledge step forth.

When there is no peace in the family,

filial piety begins.

When the country falls into chaos,

patriotism is born.”

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

---

This is the first chapter we encounter that is a direct attack against the rival tradition in Chinese culture at the time: Confucianism. We’ll come back to the quarrel between Lao-tzu and Confucius later.

But apart from that, what is confusing about the chapter is that it presents six good things—things we generally aspire to cultivate—as signs of regression.

Think of the self-styled “patriots” on the right storming the capitol, or Woke virtue-signaling on the left. When the country falls into chaos, what is good becomes contested, and people compete to be—and be seen as—better than others.

If we are truly living out and secure in our beliefs and values, we don’t feel the need to talk about them so much.

---

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

Chapter 17

“When the Master governs, the people

are hardly aware that he exists.

…

The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.

When his work is done,

The people say, ‘Amazing:

we did it, all by ourselves!”

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

---

I’ve been watching the press briefings this first week of the Biden administration, and ten or fifteen minutes into them, a feeling starts to settle in: boredom. Big glorious bureaucratic boredom. Who thought watching a White House press briefing could be as soothing as listening to that British guy in the Headspace app lulling you into samadhi? I usually continue watching, but I don’t have to, because every moment is not packaged to be damn good television.

Perhaps the defining feature of the Trump presidency, in terms of the experience of the average person, was his omnipresence. Like a supermassive black hole warping the galaxy surrounding it and sucking the light and life out of everything that approached it, Trump consumed our attention, relentlessly, from start to finish. Boring the last five years were not.

When the Master does not govern, the people forget they exist. They forget they exist as a people—bound together by a shared history, core values, and a common fate. They lose the willingness to trust each other. They lose their sense of agency. They lose the capacity to govern themselves.

The great irony of the end of the 40-year Reagan era—of which Trump is not the repudiation, but the last dying gasp—is that it has become clear that the real problem is the idea that government is the problem. The attempt to “deconstruct the administrative state” has made us realize how much we love bureaucracy—and the ability to turn off the television and get on with our lives.

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

Chapter 16

“Empty your mind of all thoughts.

Let your heart be at peace.

Watch the turmoil of beings,

but contemplate their return.

Each separate being in the universe

Returns to the common source.

Returning to the source is serenity.”

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

---

Every year I teach Genesis to college students. One thing that often puzzles them is the lists of names; why take a whole page to list all of Noah’s descendants?

I tell them a story about when I worked at the Grand Canyon for a summer when I was their age. During orientation, a park ranger was giving a talk about the Native American cultures indigenous to the region. He started by asking how many of us know who our grandparents were?

Everyone raised their hand.

Next, he asked how many of us know who their parents were?

Almost everyone raised their hand.

Finally, he asked how many of us know who their great grandparents’ great grandparents were? One man in the back—who revealed himself to be of Navajo descent—raised his hand. Imagine, Ranger Roger said, knowing your precise place in a family history reaching back hundreds or thousands of years. For the Jews, the Biblical narratives reminded them who they were and where they came from. What we moderns may deride as “ancestor worship” in primitive cultures serves a vital purpose.

The word “religion” is related, etymologically, to the word “ligament.” To remember where we came from is to literally re-member ourselves—to restore the connection that the emergence of self-consciousness severs. The term sin tends to be loaded with moral weight, as a personal failing for which we feel guilty, a red balance sheet we are forever trying to clear. But a better way to understand the term is “separation.” Religion, in this sense, means healing the rifts that rise up within our minds, between our minds and bodies, between each other, and with the world.

We are great at watching the turmoil of beings, but terrible at contemplating their return. “If you don’t realize the source, you stumble in confusion and sorrow.” Religion, at its best, reverses this existential entropy.

But what does it mean to be religious?

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

Chapter 15

“Do you have the patience to wait

till your mud settles and the water is clear?

Can you remain unmoving till the right action arises by itself?”

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

---

From the moment we wake up, the mud starts to seep in—meetings, appointments, deadlines, dogs to walk, groceries to buy, meals to cook, commutes to bear. The cocoon of the covers beckons.

But these things are not the true mud. The true mud is how our minds relate to them. As stoic philosopher Epictetus put it, “It is not things in themselves that trouble us, but our opinions of things.” If we don’t find a way to let our mud settle, we are going to try and offload it onto others throughout the day—consciously or unconsciously, crudely or subtly. If we don’t clean our minds up, they’re going to pollute, and that, in turn, will lead others to pollute. All told, we’ll just wake up tomorrow with more mud on our minds.

The call of the covers, of course, is a siren song. They lead us not to escape from the mud, but to wallow in it, precisely because the mud is not in the world outside of them, but in our own minds. Marcus Aurelius, another stoic thinker, had a considered view of the matter:

“At dawn, when you have trouble getting out of bed, tell yourself: “I have to go to work — as a human being. What do I have to complain of, if I’m going to do what I was born for — the things I was brought into the world to do? Or is this what I was created for? To huddle under the blankets and stay warm? So you were born to feel “nice”? Instead of doing things and experiencing them? Don’t you see the plants, the birds, the ants and spiders and bees going about their individual tasks, putting the world in order, as best they can? And you’re not willing to do your job as a human being? Why aren’t you running to do what your nature demands?”

The opposite mistake of wallowing in the mud is the wish to rid the world of it. As Buddhist monk Thich Naht Hanh likes to say, “No mud, no lotus.” Rather than pushing the mud away, we must allow it to settle, for it is ultimately the soil that nurtures and reveals the flowers we seek.

And once the mud has settled, we can finally play in it.

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

Chapter 14

“Look, and it can’t be seen.

Listen, and it can’t be heard.

Reach, and it can’t be grasped.”

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

---

As the saying goes, we do not see things as they are. We see things as we are.

Our seeing is always from an angle, refracted through our perspective. All seeing is seeing as. Our perspective binds us to reality, but also blinds us from it. That doesn’t mean our perspective should—or could!—be abandoned; as C.S. Lewis put it, “to see through everything is the same as not to see.” That way madness lies. What it means is that our perspective is not fixed, but fluid. And a facility to “take subject as object,” in the words of psychologist Robert Kegan, is the royal road to reality and the guarantor of growth.

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

Chapter 13

“Hope is as hollow as fear.

…

What does it mean that hope is as hollow as fear?

Hope and fear are both phantoms

That arise from thinking of the self.

…

See the world as your self.

Have faith in the way things are.

Love the world as your self;

Then you can care for all things.”

---

Two of the three theological virtues in the Christian tradition are invoked here by the translator—hope and faith—yet to convey an apparently un-Christian message. The notion that hope is a hindrance may strike Western ears the way the first noble truth of Buddhism—“life is suffering”—often does: as a world-weary pessimism. Yet it is hard to read the last lines of the chapter and not detect notes of Jesus’ “love your neighbor as yourself.”

All is not as it seems. The key to this passage is the connection between hope and fear. Both are understood here in terms of desire for a future outcome that is the flipside of a rejection of the way things are. Of course we “hope” and “desire” for some things to happen and others not to; the key is to see things going our way as “bonuses” on top of a fundamentally good deal. In Christian terms, this means seeing existence itself—all of it—as an unmerited grace. How often does Jesus encourage his followers to not worry, to not be afraid?

The recipe for overcoming fear is not to hope for a future, better life—here or the hereafter—but to turn completely toward the moment.

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

Chapter 12

“Colors blind the eye.

Sounds deafen the ear.

Flavors numb the taste.

Thoughts weaken the mind.

Desires wither the heart.”

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

---

All five of these statements seem not only false, but the opposite of the truth: thinking quickens the mind, desire inflames the heart, colors excite the eye, and so on. But this is so only if we take them at face value.

Many believe this chapter to be a set of rough meditation instructions aimed at thwarting the power of distractions to pull us out of the moment. The mind, the heart, and the senses are typically distracted and disintegrated in our daily lives. Instead, the text encourages us to “trust our inner vision.” But this doesn’t mean retreating to a mountaintop cave, closing our eyes, and plugging our ears. The Master “observes the world” and his “heart is open as the sky.”

When we focus on colors, sounds, flavors, thought, or desires, we fixate on a part of the whole, and unconsciously close ourselves off from the world.

To really see and hear and taste and know and feel, we have to let go of colors, sounds, flavors, thought, or desires.

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

Chapter 11

“We shape clay into a pot, but it is the emptiness inside that holds whatever we want.

…

We work with being, but non-being is what we use.”

One way to think of the Daodejing is a critique of our modern way of thinking about space. Our thinking about space is dominated by impoverished notions of utility, efficiency, productivity rooted in a mashup of perverted forms of Christianity and capitalism. Francis Bacon and John Locke construed the Biblical mandate for humanity to “have dominion over” and “subdue” the earth as a license to conquer nature through science and technology and maximize yield of the land. For Locke, the great sin was waste; one’s very right to property was premised on efficiently using the land. Extractive and consumer capitalism drives us not just to use, but to use up, scarce resources as quickly as possible in order to meet the multiplication of desires it produces.

But in the natural world, waste is food and trash is treasure. Daoism embraces a very different kind of efficiency—one that is basically conservative. For the Daoist, efficacy (de) is the supreme virtue. It is “making the most of your ingredients.” And the most important ingredients—the real “value-add”—is not our own manual or mental labor, or the materials from which we fashion our wares, but the empty space that allows the making to take place.

Take speech. All the words we perceive and receiver ride on complex currents of structured air projected through space. If we were more mindful of our breath—and the “conspiracy” (literally, “breathing together”) of life in which we are complicit—how much more often and easily would we speak true?

We shape sounds into words, but it is breath that holds whatever we think.

We work with speech, but breath is what we use.

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

Chapter 10

“Can you coax your mind from its wandering

and keep to the original oneness?

Can you let your body become

supple as a newborn child’s?”

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

Meditation and politics would seem to have nothing to do with each other. But as I noted a couple of days ago, the Daodejing is not just ancient self-help, and does not think we can seriously separate the personal from the political, character from the collective, de—a key term we will come back to—from the doing of the people’s business. If the last four years have taught us anything, it is how powerfully—how viscerally—the character of a leader and the climate of our politics can affect our consciousness—even our nervous systems.

In his inauguration speech yesterday, President Biden called us away from the toxic culture of negative partisanship that has consumed us these last four years. We have wandered so long and so far from the good, the true, and the beautiful—hell, even the decent and the factual—that many have begun to wonder whether our country is hopelessly lost, whether Biden’s call for unity is just an old man shouting into a hurricane.

For those wondering whether it is possible for us to “keep to the original oneness”—whether we can, in Franklin’s words, “keep” our Republic—the recitation of Amanda Gorman, poet laureate of the United States, was a definitive answer. Her movements were graceful as her words were wise, coaxing the attention of a nation toward the unity—the feeling of home, belonging, and “original oneness”—that even those who deny our new President’s legitimacy deep down so desperately desire. If our body politic can become just a little more supple—if each of us can find just a bit more space between stimulus and response—we can climb whatever hills we face. Without a little wuwei, there will be no exit from the vicious cycle of polarization.

What the Daodejing calls us to, above all, is trust: to trust in our own minds, in others, and in the nature of things. What do we do each day but try to form a more perfect union in our psyches, in our relationships, in our world?

Chapter 9

“Do your work, then step back.

The only path to serenity.”

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

One reason it is hard for us to “step back” these days is that we are always, at some level, plugged in. We carry in our pocket a portable Pandora’s box, perpetually propagating portents of end of the world, a taskmaster reminding us of all we have to do, and a tether keeping us “on call” to our employers.

Our attempts at achieving “work/life balance” are so many sad huts built on a beach in the face of an oncoming tsunami. The current of our culture of “total work” is a furious haste and busyness always sweeping us up and carrying us out of the moment.

The Daoist response is not, however, to fight the current, but to yield to it. In yielding to it, it slows; in rising to meet it, it becomes smaller; in working with it, it becomes more workable. Only in yielding to it can we be present to it, only in being present to it can we step back from it, and only in stepping back from it can we enter into it.

Only from a place of serenity can we truly do our work.

Chapter 8

“The supreme good is like water,

which nourishes all things without trying to.

It is content with the low places that people disdain.

Thus it Is like the Tao.”

Find the “low place” that you “disdain”—right now—and rest your mind and body there for a moment.

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

Chapter 7

“The Master stays behind;

that is why she is ahead.

She is detached from all things;

that is why she is one with them.

Because she has let go of herself,

she is perfectly fulfilled.”

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

The Daodejing is commonly cast as an ancient collection of cryptic fortune cookie sayings most relevant, if at all, for spiritual inspiration, the stuff of self-help. But it actually has a great deal to say about politics.

Consider the Dao of Obama.

The 44^th president was maligned for “leading from behind” (stays behind), being “aloof” and “professorial” (detached), “arrogant,” “smug” and “condescending” (full of himself).

These were all the judgments of lesser men with lesser minds.

Whenever someone is criticized from both sides of a polarity, pay attention. There’s typically a lot of ignorance, hypocrisy, and projection going on from those who, unlike the “Master,” “take sides.” Because they have taken sides, they can’t see the whole, and they actually don’t see the other side as a side; hence they harbor the delusion that it can be defeated. This is a branch confusing itself for the root.

The phrase leading from behind was popularized by Nelson Mandela:

It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership.

The allegedly aloof, professorial president followed a monkish regimen:

Almost every night that he is in the White House, Mr. Obama has dinner at 6:30 with his wife and daughters and then withdraws to the Treaty Room, his private office down the hall from his bedroom on the second floor of the White House residence.

There, his closest aides say, he spends four or five hours largely by himself.

…

“He is thoroughly predictable in having gone through every piece of paper that he gets,” said Tom Donilon, Mr. Obama’s national security adviser from 2010 to 2013. “You’ll come in in the morning, it will be there: questions, notes, decisions.”

…

To stay awake, the president does not turn to caffeine. He rarely drinks coffee or tea, and more often has a bottle of water next to him than a soda. His friends say his only snack at night is seven lightly salted almonds.

Finally, David Brooks made an insightful observation a month before Obama’s election in 2008:

We’ve been watching Barack Obama for two years now, and in all that time there hasn’t been a moment in which he has publicly lost his self-control. This has been a period of tumult, combat, exhaustion and crisis. And yet there hasn’t been a moment when he has displayed rage, resentment, fear, anxiety, bitterness, tears, ecstasy, self-pity or impulsiveness.

Some candidates are motivated by something they lack. For L.B.J., it was respect. For Bill Clinton, it was adoration. These politicians are motivated to fill that void. Their challenge once in office is self-regulation. How will they control the demons, insecurities and longings that fired their ambitions?

But other candidates are propelled by what some psychologists call self-efficacy, the placid assumption that they can handle whatever the future throws at them. Candidates in this mold, most heroically F.D.R. and Ronald Reagan, are driven upward by a desire to realize some capacity in their nature. They rise with an unshakable serenity that is inexplicable to their critics and infuriating to their foes.

Obama has the biography of the first group but the personality of the second. He grew up with an absent father and a peripatetic mother. “I learned long ago to distrust my childhood,” he wrote in “Dreams From My Father.” This is supposed to produce a politician with gaping personal needs and hidden wounds.

But over the past two years, Obama has never shown evidence of that. Instead, he has shown the same untroubled self-confidence day after day.

There has never been a moment when, at least in public, he seems gripped by inner turmoil. It’s not willpower or self-discipline he shows as much as an organized unconscious.

While statecraft and soulcraft are not the same thing, they overlap more than conventional wisdom suggests. If the last five years have taught us anything, it’s that character matters. Having an “organized unconscious” helps us see our own “dark side”—and thus able to see the light in those who oppose us.

What could be more practical in our polarized age?

Chapter 6

“The Tao is called the Great Mother:

empty yet inexhaustible,

it gives birth to infinite worlds.

It is always within you.

You can use it in any way you want.”

Kierkegaard called anxiety “the dizziness of freedom.” Sartre claimed that we are “condemned to be free.” This is blasphemy to American ears! Freedom is our transcendent value, and we shalt not take its name in vein.

It is easy to read the final line of the chapter as saying the Dao is like a genie who can grant all of your wishes. This reflects the bastardization of Eastern religions common in New Age thinking. The disturbingly but revealingly popular The Secret is the perfect example: if you just want it hard enough, the power of your intention will bend the cosmos, quantum foam and all, to align with your will!

But the message here is the opposite. The intent is not to help you get what you want, but to help you let go of what you want. True freedom is not the power to do or get what we want; it is realizing we already have everything we need. Put another way, once you realize that the pearl of great price is “always within you,” then you can play, free from the fear that you will lose it or the desire to gain it.

If we fail to make that distinction, the Great Mother transforms into Kali, the Hindu goddess of death. If life is a slow-moving conveyor belt, Kali is the black monster eyeing us the whole time, always hungry, ravenous, gobbling us each all as we plummet like lemmings to our demise. The Big Bloom becomes the Big Bang, an aimless, entropic universe whose direction and default is death. Our reactions to the face of freedom are familiar: fight, flight, fawn, freeze. Death provokes defiance, distraction, delusion, and depression.

But according to the Daodejing, the angst and ennui of the European existentialists—and the pep pathological positivity of the American New Agers—are misguided. If we do not rage against the dying of the light, but rest in the “darkness within darkness,” we will give birth to something new. If we embrace Kali, she will embrace us back. And then, we are free to play again. What Zen calls the “Great Death” and what the Christian mystic St. John of the Cross described as the “dark night of the soul” is the portal through which we must pass to enter what Jesus called “the kingdom of heaven”—and to do so, we must become “childlike.”

But the kingdom of heaven is not some place or plane beyond earth or after death. Jesus tells us that, like the Dao, it is “within you.” (Luke 17:21)

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

Chapter 5

“The Tao doesn’t take sides;

it gives birth to both good and evil.

The Master doesn’t take sides;

She welcomes both saints and sinner.”

Is Lao-tzu preaching moral relativism?

To paraphrase David Foster Wallace writing about atheism, in the day to day trenches of adult life, there’s no such thing as moral relativism. “Moral relativism” only exists as a theory that academic philosophers haggle about, and as a bogeyman in the imaginations of cultural conservatives. In real life, no one actually does—or could—live that way.

Just as Nietzsche’s call for us to go “beyond good and evil” was not sanctioning venery or violence, Lao-tzu is nudging us to consider that the moral categories we cut the world with are mere conventions—useful some of the time, dangerous when taken as absolute. We all cut the world with different dyads:  saints and sinners, winners and losers, oppressors and oppressed. But when we do this, we cut others and, unconsciously, ourselves, in two.

Indeed, the real “relativist” is the moral absolutist, the fundamentalist who is blind to how what he calls “good” generates—and is thus related to—what he calls evil. And the true absolutist, the “Master,” is the one who sees the folly of trying to be “right” and “winning” the game of morality, the one, as we saw in chapter 3, who “leads by emptying people’s minds.”

Such a message might seem opposed to Christianity, since God only creates good, not evil. But is Jesus not like “the Master,” always going toward the sinners? Like Lao-tzu, Jesus is hell bent (!) on scrambling people’s dualistic moral matrices in order to lead them toward unitive consciousness, so precisely captured in St. Paul’s “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”

Yet as Father Richard Rohr likes to point out, “Christ” is not Jesus’ last name. The “mystical body of Christ” is not Jesus’ resurrected body floating around in some parallel dimension, but what Daoism calls the “10,000 things,” a term of art for the cosmos. Or put another way, it is the person Jesus’ resurrected body—but that is the same body, of which we are all a part, that we call the universe. “Salvation” is not about believing in Jesus, but becoming like Jesus.

Not without reason does Jesus rebuke his disciples for misunderstanding him. Like a Zen master striking a stiff student, Jesus upbraids them for failing to grasp his parables and metaphors. Warning them to beware the “yeast of the Pharisees,” he asks with exasperation, “How could you fail to see that I was not speaking about bread?” (Matthew 16:11)

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

Chapter 4

“The Tao is like a well:

used but never used up.

It is like the eternal void:

Filled with infinite possibilities.

It is hidden but always present.

I don’t know who gave birth to it.

It is older than God.”

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

Alan Watts liked to tell the story of the astronaut who, upon returning to earth, was asked if he saw God in the heavens. He replied, “Yes. And she is black.”

One thing this chapter does is disabuse us of the idea that Dao is “God.” Many of the early translators imposed their own Western, Christian assumptions onto the text, supposing the Dao to be some transcendent super-being separate from nature, distorting a very different tradition with very different priors.

But not entirely different. While it would be wrong to regard the Dao as a cypher for a monotheistic God, it would be just as wrong to put it in the camp of atheism. One reason for this is that atheism is a Western phenomenon that emerged precisely as the rejection of a kind of God that Eastern cultures never embraced in the first place. It would be like addressing a man who never played baseball as a “non-baseball player,” only to receive the puzzled reply, “What is baseball?”

Nonetheless, as I’ll discuss later, the Daodejing—and Zen, the child it bore with Buddhism—is closer to Western spirituality than you might expect. My students are often surprised to learn that St. Thomas Aquinas, the Philosopher in Chief of the Catholic Church, wrote: “We cannot know what God is. We can only know what God is not.” Despite the magnificent cathedral of the mind he constructed—the Summa Theologica, a veritable Theory of Everything—here he gives voice to the mystics, what came to be called the tradition of “negative theology.” For the Hindus, this is the practice of neti, neti, “not this, not that.” We move closer to true reality not by addition, but by subtraction, eventually even letting go of the very idea of “true” reality. As legend has it, just before his death, Aquinas was reported to have uttered, “All I have written is so much straw.” Was this Aquinas’ realization, or perhaps confession, of the Zen formula that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form?”

Watts’ little parable, and this chapter, tell us three related things about the Daodejing.

First, while we Westerners tend to value the positive—I can think of no book title more representative of our “toxic positivity” than The Power of Positive Thinking, whose author’s church Donald Trump attended as a child—this tradition recognizes the power and potential of the negative. When Pascal, gazing up at the night sky, wrote “these eternal spaces fill me with dread,” he was voicing the idea that unfilled space is an abomination, neutral at best, negative at worst. The empty is the dead.

The alternative brings us to the second point: recognition and respect for the feminine principle. Arguably no major religion gives greater priority of place to the feminine principle than Daoism. Accordingly, the nothing is not a terrifying void which should lead us to “rage, rage against the dying of the light,” but a creative matrix pregnant with possibilities. Empty space is less a tomb, more a womb. As Martin Luther King wrote, “Only in the darkness can you see the stars.”

Lastly, we don’t just find empty space scary, but empty time. Pascal also wrote: “The problem with man is that he cannot sit quietly in a room.” If we are not doing something, we are “wasting” our time, not “making use” of it. Here, time is taken as a kind of raw material that has no value in itself. It only becomes valuable when we “mix our labor” with it. I take that phrase deliberately from John Locke, who laid the philosophical foundations for our understanding of private property and the “labor theory of value.” In this view, nature is not enough. For the Daoist, though, this attitude is premised on an un-useful understanding of what is truly useful.

Chapter 3

“The Master leads

by emptying people’s minds….

He helps people lose everything

they know, everything they desire,

and creates confusion

in those who think that they know.”

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

For the Daoist, a mind is not a terrible thing to waste, but a wonderful thing to lose.

Something can only be truly filled when it is fully emptied. How often can we say that our minds are empty? For most of us, each day is bookended by checking our phones, which deliver a steady stream of information—emails, texts, app notifications, social media posts, and calendar appointments—and in the time between we check compulsively, whether due to FOMO, work anxiety, or the craving for dopamine hits. We are rather like the “hungry ghosts” from Tibetan Buddhism, with tiny mouths and distended bellies, doomed to forever gobble without satisfaction. They don’t call it “doom-scrolling” for nothing.

We cannot be satisfied because we are never really hungry—never really empty. Just as we are surrounded by cheap, abundant calories, we are inundated with cheap, abundant information. And just as fasting can help us feel lighter and become leaner—and help us appreciate a good meal—digital detoxing can help clear our minds and ground us in our bodies.

T.S. Eliot asked—around a century ago!—that “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” By collapsing the three into “information,” and believing that the more information the better, we delude ourselves into thinking that we can move closer to certainty and further from confusion by amassing more information. But as we have learned, this often merely reinforces our imprisonment in echo chambers and filter bubbles, as our attention and greedy desire for “comfort news” is invisibly monetized while we click, tap, and scroll.

Reading this chapter, it is tempting to picture the “Master” as a guru, a sage, a monk, or even a great political leader. But the chapter also says “If you overesteem great men, people become powerless.” The Master is really your own inner sage—what Buddhists call not-knowing, that part of us that is always free, open, and empty, of which we are usually unconscious, and which our culture tends to regard as “useless.” Lead from there, the text suggests, and you will empty your mind.

And if you empty your mind, what would you let back in?

Chapter 2

“When people see some things as beautiful,

other things become ugly.

When people see some things as good,

other things become bad.”

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

Two thousand years after Lao-tzu, Hamlet would echo this idea: “There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”

Think about the last political conversation you had with someone you disagreed with. Did you make any progress? I suspect not. In our post-truth informational ecology, the conflict is not merely over what is good, but over what is true. There is nothing true or false, but Facebook makes it so.

A paradox arises: isn’t it then “good” to realize that all things are both good and bad, depending on your perspective? That strikes the mind as a contradiction only if we confuse thoughts with things. Daoism invites you to consider that contradiction, ambiguity, and paradox—put more positively, mystery—are not just bugs of bad thinking, but features of reality. And beyond this, the more we cling to one perspective, one half of a dichotomy, the more we strengthen its opposite.

Lao-tzu is not pushing nihilism and nudging us toward Hamlet’s existential despair. He is doing what Jesus does in the Gospel of Matthew when he says “You hypocrite! First remove the beam out of your own eye, and then you can see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” The word hypocrite is related to the word for “actor.” We are all hypocrites in a sense—actors in the play of society, characters with unique desires, preferences, and histories with our own ideas about what is beautiful, good, and true. Wisdom is realizing our hypocrisy, which is also to realize that we are more than that character—we are caught in the broader cosmic drama. As Wittgenstein put it, “to draw a line to thought is to think both sides.” Practical wisdom is skillfully holding those two perspectives together while acting in the world.

We can hold our masks lightly. We can, that is, play our roles with a view to the script as a whole–especially the part that is unwritten–rather than see ourselves as the center and the script as fixed. When we do so, we create space—for ourselves to realize what is “bad” in what we consider “good,” and for our fellow actors to see the same—and to breathe.

“The tao that can be told

is not the eternal Tao.”

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

This is the first line in the first chapter of the text. One implication you might draw is: read no further, you’re done! The end—in the sense of the goal, purpose, or “takeway”—is contained in the beginning. The text begins by telling us to let go of text itself—of words, ideas, concepts. As you’ll see throughout, the Daodejing is intent on disrupting our conventional view of the relationship between mind, word, and world. Our minds create and cling to our words, we come to confuse our words with the world, and this cuts our minds off from the world itself.

Lao-tzu would agree with Emerson: “Every word was once a poem.”

What words are you stuck to today?

Welcome to the launch of the Daodujour!

This project has been incubating for almost exactly one year. For one of my new year’s resolutions last year, I decided to start each day reading a chapter on the Daodejing. My reasons were both personal and professional: I was looking for a source of inspiration to start my mornings off, and I was scheduled to teach Daoism for the first time in the Fall for a course called “Philosophy as a Way of Life.” The text seemed like the perfect blend of poetry, spirituality, and philosophy to help me being the day with a clear, calm mind primed to create. And I figured it was a feasible goal, since the chapters are essentially poems, no longer than a page and often just a few lines. It ended up being one of the few resolutions I kept.

I was already familiar with Daoist philosophy, had practiced Tai Chi, a martial art it inspired, for an extended period of time, and felt confident I could do justice to it in the classroom. But I wanted more. As a saying from the Asaro tribe of Papua New Guinea puts it, “knowledge is only a rumor until it lives in the muscle.” In their commentary on the Daodejing, Roger Ames and David Hall put it more prosaically: “For it is affective feeling itself rather than simply cognitive ‘knowledge’ that is the site of knowing…. The Daodejing recommends cultivating those habits of awareness that allow us to appreciate the magic of the ordinary and everyday” (Daodejing: A Philosophical Translation (188). I wanted to soak up the elusive essence of the text, to steep in it—if I wanted to really learn how Daoism can infuse our so-called everyday lives, I reasoned, I need to make it a part of my life—every day.

The next question was what translation to use. The Daodejing is one of the most translated texts in world literature, and classical Chinese is notoriously difficult to translate. Beyond this, in Daoism, as you’ll see, obscurity is a feature, not a bug. At some level, the very idea of a “correct” translation is a misunderstanding of the tradition, a product of the very mindset from which it tries to release us. The Western mind, so preoccupied with clarity, precision, logical consistency, and analytical acumen, is at a disadvantage approaching the Daoist tradition, rather like a man trying to eat soup with a fork.  

The text has 81 chapters, which meant I could move through it in a little less than three months, which meant I could digest around four translations by the time I had to teach it. I dared not delude myself into thinking I would by then have anywhere near a comprehensive, or even well-rounded, understanding and appreciation for the variety of interpretations and nuances of meaning they draw out of the text. But I figured that if I looked at translations coming from discernibly different perspectives, I would be moving in the right direction—or at least a good one.

I decided to, as it were, triangulate between the philosophical, the Sinological (the study of ancient Chinese language, culture, and history), and the spiritual. One way of thinking about these three perspectives is, respectively, an emphasis on the true, the correct, and the useful. Another, overlapping schema is :

• moral (how does the text suggest we ought to behave?)
• metaphysical (what picture of the world does it paint?), and
• mystical (how does it aim to, in Aldous Huxley’s phrase, cleanse “the doors of perception,” and dilate our awareness to open to a deeper dimension of ourselves and the world?).

And, of course, there is the classical big three of the Beautiful, the Good, and the True from the Platonic tradition, or what Ken Wilber distills into Art, Morals, and Science. It is a mistake—especially with a text like the Daodejing—to cling too tightly to any scheme of categories, and better to approach it with what Zen calls “beginner’s mind.” But I figured cognitive flexibility and porousness of perspectives is the right way to circle around and sidle up to its inner sanctum. I wager that the reason certain texts stand the test of time is that they address all of these basic domains of our existence.

I decided to start where I was and with what I already had—a beat up old copy of the text I had gotten at a used bookstore in college—and got to work. Over time, as I entrained the habit and moved from one translation to the other, I found myself folding my reading into my morning walk and journaling routine, and the three actions began to constellate into one. I found the morning ritual grounding and therapeutic, and began to see just how practical and powerful such a gnomic little text could be. And being thus filled to the brim with daily doses of Daoist wisdom, I felt the urge to return the favor, and empty out the results of the reaction it catalyzed in me. I decided that my daily reading should be paired with daily writing.

For 2021, I would write about the Daodejing, share it with people, and see what happened.

The one thing most people know about Daoism is the yin-yang symbol. Indeed, it’s likely one of the things that draws people to Daoism in the first place. The symbol is directed at the subconscious—or, better, the superconscious (about which more later…). Like the Cross, or the Star of David, the symbol is arresting and archetypal, hinting at a simplicity beyond complexity. Like a Rorschach blot, it seductively lures you to pour and project, spill and splatter the contents of your psyche onto its façade.

The problem—as with all religious symbols—is that people often get stuck to the façade, turning an icon into an idol. Scholar Edward Slingerland explains:

“The yin-yang symbol is looked upon nowadays as a positive image of mystical wisdom, happily slapped on surfboards and tattooed on twenty-year-old butts. In fact, it actually symbolizes a dark and pessimistic vision, akin to the Buddhist teaching of dukkha or impermanence: all striving leads to disappointment in the end because there is no permanence in the world. The cycle of yin-yang is not to be celebrated but escaped.”

~ Trying Not to Try: Ancinent China, Modern Science, and the Power of Spontaneity (94)

How, then, do we escape? We’ll get to that.

I’ll be exploring the many meanings of yin and yang as we go, but I realized that it had a keen bearing on my little experiment. One of the most obvious features of the symbol is that dualities are interconnected and mutually interpenetrate each other; there is black in all white and white in all black. Reading is predominantly passive (yin-ish), writing mainly active (yang-ish). When you read, you’re reading something someone wrote, and when you write, you’re writing something someone else will (hopefully) read. Nevertheless, reading only works if the reader is bringing something to the table, and writing only sings if it’s open to the inspiration of the moment and mindful of the reader to whom it’s addressed. To read, you have to grapple with the writer, and to write, you have to listen, not just to the muse, but to the reader. You have to do something like dance.

How right and proper it seemed, given my subject, that my daily reading of the text be paired with daily writing. But I realized this was just a microcosm of a larger problem I had struggled with for years: creative constipation. I’ve identified as a writer ever since my ego congealed around 15, and while I’ve kept a serious journal since college and did lots of academic writing in and after graduate school to break into academia, over the last few years I kind of lost the habit. If a writer is a person who feels like a waste of planetary space on days when they don’t write, then by this point part of my psyche must resemble the garbage planet in Wall-E.

The flipside of this is that, as a reader, another part of my psyche resembles the rapacious consumer that produced all that garbage. Of course, I tell myself that it’s all “research,” fodder for future writing projects—books, blogposts, op-eds, long essays. As an Enneagram 5—the “observer”—I’m driven by the need to feel resourced. At best, this manifests as being well-informed about a topic; at worst, an obsessive-completism that snuffs out the creative spirit.

On top of this was another disordered desire: perfection. Despite knowing all too well, at an intellectual level, the paralyzing follies of perfectionism, I was nevertheless caught a state of perpetual conception, conjuring book outlines, chapter and essay titles, topics, but rarely converting any of it into finished products. I would return from a run burdened with insights and hastily record them in my journal before they stole away, the sweat smearing my chicken scrawl. And then the next day I would go on another run, and repeat the process. Over time, what felt like an albatross of debt—as though I owed the muse for her investment in me—began to accrue and, like a millennial cowed by an unscaleable mountain of student loans, I felt the urge to give up. The form this took was Netflix, video games and, of course, more reading. Reading, intended as either an end in itself (pleasure) or as a means to procure raw material for writing (research), tumbled into its opposite: drudgerous duty and procrastination from writing.

A marriage of obsessive-completism about reading and perfectionism about writing, needless to say, does not spirit children bear.

While I am unusually bookish, in some ways it’s a modern pathology: the desire—if not the perceived duty—to be well-informed about the world and in the know and have opinions about everything, cultivated by a 24-hour news cycle, a historically unprecedented abundance of information, and ready access to all of it in the palm of our hand almost every moment of every day.

Already in the 19^th century, Nietzsche warned that modern man had begun to be weighed down by “knowledge stones” that blocked access to our creative, meaning-making power, that trap us in the cave of the present and suffocate the will to the future. Emerson, writing across an ocean at around the same time, began his great essay, “Nature,” with a similar thought: “Our age is retrospective.” Today, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat has diagnosed ours as a decadent age—exhausted, complacent, fat, full, feeding on the cultural products of generations past.

All of which is to say: I have long found it instructive to consider the ways in which my own karmic knots are caught in and caused by a wider web of social pathologies. As Nietzsche also said, “Madness is something rare in individuals—but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” To find your bearings in the labyrinth of your own psyche, you need to discover the ways in which your culture is mad. To find your Ariadne’s thread, you need a lifeline from a culture not your own. And after spending a good year with the Daodejing, I’m convinced that the Dao is strong, needed medicine for our culture—precisely because we lack one—and our souls—precisely because we doubt they exist. It’s not the answer—as with the meaning of life, there’s no such thing, and to think so is folly—but it’s a damn good one.

So each day, I’ll select a quote from a chapter of the text, and offer you a short response to it. It may be only a sentence or a question; it may be a personal reflection along the lines of a journal entry; it may take the form of metaphysical musing, or maybe even mild moralizing; it may come off as clichéd, banal self-help or cultural appropriation; it may be social or political commentary; it may even, heaven forfend, get a little “woo-woo.” My hope is that it will give you a tiny dose of Dao to start your day off right—or at least better than it would be doom-scrolling Twitter.

If I ask myself about what I make of Daoism, or whether I “believe” in it, after my extended experiment, I smile and recall what one of my Zen teachers, Robert Kennedy (no, not that one), said upon first meeting the man who would become his Zen master. I paraphrase from memory: “I had no idea what Zen stuff was, but I knew right away…whatever it is, this is it!”

My latest essay on Medium that touches on John Lewis, Obama, Biden, Trump…and Hamilton, Batman, the Bible, and the Lord of the Rings!

https://medium.com/@storeyd_57906/the-bridge-barack-obama-joe-biden-and-the-battle-for-everything-e55ac7795937?sk=0ff29b96d2c034b5a67173a21193e38d

My latest essay on Medium.

Over at onlinecolleges.net, a sort of fun interactive infographic with a “Choose Your Own Adventure” decision tree to help you decide whether or not you should go to graduate school:

The question of graduate school isn’t really one question, since grad school is said in many ways:  there are worlds of difference between grad school in the humanities, in law, and in business, for instance.  In contrast to the infographic, I am going to talk here exclusively about grad school in the humanities.

Continue reading “The Great Grad School Debate”

[Reposted from the following discussion thread]

Thinking about this and reading your posts, I am reminded of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, which is emerging as sort of the Big Novel of our era. The story takes place in the not too distant future, and the title refers to a film that is so addictive that it kills the people who watch it; and the film, unsurprisingly, is wildly popular.

Wallace was concerned that, in the words of sociologist Neil Postman, we are “amusing ourselves to death”–not literally, of course, but psychologically or spiritually. I find this narrative seductive, but I resist it for that very reason. Part of the problem, I think, is that people just have different dispositions. Humanist folks tend to have a European part of their soul, a melancholic affect, a deep suspicion of the popular, the common, the fashionable, the masses, a reverence for some distant past, a disdain for the practical. But a lot of Americans don’t share this affect or this outlook: they just want to do their work, make their money, and have some fun, however the culture is currently defining and delivering it–”what’s the harm in that? Lighten up?” The Euro-humanist, of course, looks at these people and just cries “false consciousness”–they either don’t know, or won’t admit, their true condition. The Euro-humanist sees most people as trapped in and bespelled by some kind of Cave, and tends to see The Next Big Thing (MOOCs, gamification, Facebook, etc.) as just more distraction, illusion, ideology, etc.  As the inimitable Roger Sterling puts it:

So what I think we’re dealing with here, at some level, is just different sensibilities: the can-do, practical, pragmatic, American happiness pursuer just NEVER WILL see the world quite like the intellectual, Europeanish, theory-minded soul will; for that reason, the gamified world is a blast (“awesome!”). This person does not have a problem with just doing their work, whatever it is, and going home and living their life. They don’t see, and they don’t care, that the compulsion to be entertained does any kind of damage to the soul, or makes us less of a human being. Maybe some people can just handle entertainment in a more moderate way. Wallace himself, for instance, had a highly addictive personality, and couldn’t handle fun things because he just found them to be, well, too much fun.

I have grown suspicious over the years of what I’ll call the Office Space Ideology that lots of intellectuals and humanists and liberals adopt: that corporations are evil, that office workers are drones, that it all really is as stupid and wretched and soul-rending as films like Office Space portray it to be. Why? Because most of those people have probably never worked in an office! And yes, they probably would find it to be drudgery. But maybe for people of a different sensibility, that’s not what it is. Maybe they are just better at accepting things for what they are–that, as Matthew Crawford puts it in his thoughtful and important meditation on the value of work, work is necessarily toil and serves someone else’s interests.  And so rather than futilely try to fuse work and play, erect a separation of powers:  work is the realm of necessity, play is the realm of freedom.  And that reminds me of something Wallace said in a different context, when he was interviewing a pro tennis player: “I am almost in awe of his ability to shut down neural pathways that are not to his advantage.”  People who are well adjusted are better at adapting to the reality of American life, which in some important ways overlaps with reality itself.

And let’s face it, the American Pragmatist is sometimes spot on about the EuroHumanist’s posturing, pedantry, and pretentiousness:

Maybe one reason that Euro-humanists disdain things like gamification is that their attachments to an idyllic past and an ideal future create such a sense of loss, longing, disappointment, and frustration that the escape and pleasure provided by games et al. is an irresistible narcotic. The crucial question is, whose sense of reality is more warped?

Paige Harris has an informative piece over at Online PhD Programs on some best practices for landing an academic job.  Despite one factual error–Paige claims that academia has long been “unscathed” by the vicissitudes of the economy, when in fact the job market, at least in the humanities, has been abysmal since the 1980s–I think it is all sensible advice, though I would say that the understated tone of the piece may be misleading to those in or aspiring to graduate school.

Paige writes:  “There’s no doubt that building a career in academia is a challenge these days, but it can be done.”  There are challenges, and then there are challenges.  Running a 6-minute mile is a challenge for many, but pretty much anyone can do it if they discipline themselves.  Running a 4-minute mile is nearly impossible; it depends not just on an unusual degree of hard work and determination, but on winning a genetic lottery.  As someone who has just hazarded the punishing fire of the academic job market and lived to tell the tale, while I would not equate landing a tenure-track or secure position in academia with running a 4-minute mile, it’s not far off.  I will recount my harrowing tale–which, I can assure you, has a most happy ending–in a future post, “There and Back Again.”

A couple of things that Paige does not mention (and, to be fair, need not mention, as her subject is simply HOW to get a job) are how “success” is measured in academia, and whether “success” is really as desirable as wide-eyed graduate students tend to believe.  First, reading her post, you might be wondering how, with all of the energy that goes into “packaging” yourself, you ever find time to focus on the ACTUAL job:  teaching, thinking, reading, and writing.  As I recently told a group of young graduate students, the first rule of the job market is also the first point in Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life:  “it’s not about you.”  It’s about a persona that you will create that will, hopefully, be selected in the lottery that we call the academic job market.  This is essential not just for marketing purposes, but for maintaining mental health.

But this marketing does not end once you get a job.  As you will see–through attending conferences and publishing papers and getting your nose dirty in department politics–academia is a game–everything is not as it seems.  This is partly why Frank Donoghue claims, in his book The Last Professors, that today’s academic is less an intellectual than a kind of salesman.  I will be blogging on Frank’s book–and, hopefully, interviewing him via podcast–in the coming months.

Second, as Paige rightly emphasizes, people need to think very, very carefully about whether they really want it–and what they’re really signing on for, financially, geographically, socially, and professionally.  To paraphrase Ian Malcolm, the eccentric mathematician from Jurassic Park:  “Academics are so focused on whether or not they can get a job, they never stop to think if they should.”

I will be posting about these and related issues in the coming weeks.

 

A giant ball of oil.

(Chart by James Lawrence Powell)

Check out my interview with Daniel Mullin, editor of the Unemployed Philosophers Blog.  We discuss nonacademic careers, application of philosophy beyond the academy, and philosophical counseling, among other issues.  Dan’s got some great content on his blog that is definitely worth checking out.