Politics: the "Land of Dust"

Canada recently had an election and as someone who has devoted enormous amounts of my precious time to politics, the experience brought me mixed emotions. I was angry, because I think that politics is ultimately a game that exposes much that is wrong about people. I was also very attracted to it, though, because I tend to believe that the democratic ideal is something very noble and valuable. I have no truck or sympathy with cynics who refuse to engage in the process of choosing our government, even though I am fully aware of how far the practice diverges from the ideal.

I've learned a lot of things from my involvement in politics, and increasingly I've wondered how I could pass on this information to others. I'm pretty sure that I would have benefited greatly if someone had tried to explain a few of these things to me early on. Indeed, I was desperate for some information when I started out, yet I never really did meet anyone who understood and could articulate some key points that I only learned from long, hard experience. Think of what follows as my first attempt at a "Politics 101".

Politics is Personal

I was always amazed at how petty most people can be. That is, it is a very rare person indeed who can differentiate between their personal feeling about a person and the program that they are supporting. I found in politics that a person can be totally in favour of a specific project, it can even be useful for their future career, but if they dislike the person who is promoting it, they will usually move Heaven and Earth to sabotage it. This always flabbergasted me, as I am so committed to saving the planet that I don't usually care who I'm working with as long as they are helping me work towards the same goal. Most people aren't like that, though. If you piss them off about something, they will usually hold onto that slight like a dog with a bone and if it is necessary in order to punish you, will destroy the organization they support and all the ideals that they hold dear to do so.

As a result, when you get involved in politics always consider the person you are dealing with. If you possibly can, try to be their friend. If they are a total dick (and don't kid yourself, many people are), then ask yourself very seriously "how much damage can this person cause me years later if I cross him and he ends up hating me for all of eternity?" If he can cause you problems (and almost everyone can), then try to figure out some way of hopefully avoiding him, or at worst neutralizing him in a way that he never thinks to blame you.

People Will Play Dirty Tricks

I was often surprised at how incredibly underhanded a lot of people who mouth the most beautiful sounding ideals can be. I've always believed that being "forthright" was a virtue, so I tend to tell people to their face what I think about them instead of trying to manipulate them from behind. The way I believe democracy should operate is that people should articulate different points of view in a very honest, open manner and allow the membership to decide which course to follow through a free vote. What I found instead was that many people in the party would use process rules in order to drastically limit the ability of the membership to make decisions.

Often this involved keeping the membership from being able to vote on the issue at hand. One classic method was to set up the agenda at meetings so the item that the organizing committee didn't want to see passed was put at the absolute end of the agenda. That way people opposed to it could waste time through various methods in order to "wait the clock out" with the result that it never got discussed. Since meetings where these sorts of agendas only occur once a year, this usually meant that no matter how popular a resolution might be, it could be postponed almost forever.

In general elections there are any number of dirty tricks that can be used to massage a vote. In the last Canadian federal election, for example, fake "robo calls" (originating in the USA where they could hide from prosecution) informing voters that the place where they vote had been changed. These targeted polls that traditionally voted one particular way.

Politics Is a Team Sport

Because people managing the organization of any sort of political institution will take advantage of their authority to manipulate the process---no matter what the constitution may say---it is imperative to avoid trying to play the role of "lone wolf". Playing by the rules is no guarantee whatsoever that you will be given a fair say if the referees are all members of the other team. Instead, you have to be willing to form a team of your own and make sure that you get control of some of the referees yourself. If you don't do this, no matter how popular you may be with voters you will always lose due to the other side cheating.

"Nice" People Aren't Fair People

It's important to remember that most people are more concerned about people being "polite" than they are about people being "fair" or "honest". What this boils down to in politics is that no one gains any support from the populace for pointing out when the other side is cheating. The reason for this is that they do not have the interest to try and figure out the truth of what you are saying. Instead, what they hear is someone "squabbling about politics", which at best will turn them off the entire process or at worst decide to not support you because you are "paranoid" or a "whiner". This allows the people who control the referees pretty much a free reign when it comes to manipulating or even totally ignoring the process set out in the constitutional structure. Ultimately, voters are like parents who's response to complaints by children that one of them is cheating is to throw over the board----which always gives cheaters at worst a draw.

(This rule was shown in the last Canadian election where the Liberals tried to show how badly the Conservatives had subverted our Parliamentary rules---they were destroyed as a party. It also may be why John Kerry in the USA never really tried to fight against the voter fraud that appears to have given George Bush his second term of office.)

People Want to be Lied To

Very few people have the inclination to "stretch their minds" or challenge their basic assumptions about how the world operates. What this means is that any politician who can spin his message around what passes for "conventional wisdom" has a tremendous advantage over anyone who is trying to express something that is either unpleasant to consider or hard to understand. This isn't hard to understand. If a person is confronted by two equally plausible options, they will tend to be attracted to the one that doesn't require him to make any uncomfortable changes in life or to work very hard to understand.

The problem is, however, that whenever a society genuinely does face a significant problem, the political system will usually refuse to deal with it until some sort of catastrophe makes it impossible to avoid admitting that there is a real problem. America was isolationist in spirit until the surprise attack on Pearl Harbour. And even though Jimmy Carter could easily see "the handwriting on the wall" with regard to dependence on foreign oil, Ronald Regan was able to cast him as a "gloomy Jimmy" who didn't understand that America could still do anything it wanted without regard for the future. This basic tendency probably means that our political culture will not do anything significant about climate change until some catastrophe (perhaps dramatic increase in sea levels) makes both the fact of change and the scope of the problems it will create impossible to ignore. (Hopefully geo-engineering will allow us to retreat from this situation.)

Politics is Universal, But Democracy is Best

People often think of politics as being something peculiar to democratic states. This is a profound misunderstanding of how societies operate. A dictatorship or absolute monarchy may not have regular elections or formal political parties, but it does have constituencies that need to be supported. Even the most ruthless dictator has to have the support of his praetorian guard or else they will kill and replace him with someone who is more able or willing to serve their interests. In authoritarian or totalitarian states, politics always comes down to the creation of cabals who then maneuver to be able to seize control of the government through assassination, coup d'etat or other violent means.

Democracy has two great advantages over other forms of government.

First, it allows for a non-violent method of changing the regime. Votes can be rigged and manipulated, the system of organizing representation can (and usually are) grotesquely unfair, and voters can be systematically misled and confused by propaganda campaigns----but no one ends up with their head on a stick at the end of the process. In and of itself, this is a big improvement on just about every other system humanity has created.

Secondly, democracies are organized around formalized institutions: Parliament, Congress, political parties, Riding Associations, etc. In contrast, non-democracies are built around "big men" that everyone looks to for leadership. This makes non-democracies very vulnerable violent turnovers in times of crisis. All that the rebels really need to do in Libya, for example, is knock out Gaddafi and the country is theirs because the government he has built around him will collapse immediately. In contrast, were someone to assassinate the Canadian Prime Minister the deputy leader would immediately take control, and were he assassinated too, the house leader would replace him, even if there was a mass slaughter of the cabinet, MPs would quickly hold a snap vote and appoint someone else. Similarly in all democracies there is a clearly defined chain of command, all of which members have significant legitimacy within their own right.

Machiavelli believed that it was very dangerous for princes to declare war on democracies (both forms of government existed amongst the Italian states of his time), as the former would almost inevitably collapse on the death or significant failure of the ruler whereas the latter could survive tremendous setbacks by bringing forth new leaders in times of crisis.

Why it is called "The Land of Dust"

It is easy to see why a Daoist would be repelled by the chicanery endemic in any form of politics. It is impossible to manifest Ziran when you find yourself having to avoid saying or doing anything that will put you at a disadvantage vis-a-vis someone else who is ruthlessly trying to push you out of the way. Indeed, the system has worn me down to the point where I've pretty much given up on politics. But as the saying goes, even if you give up on politics, it will not give up on you. In other words, just because you chose not to participate don't expect the decisions made by the process to not affect you in your daily life. As a result, I still try to follow politics, I vote and even donate money to parties when I can afford it.

But I have realized that politics is invariably for mainstream people, and I am a totally marginal person. I believe that I am right a great deal of the time, but my viewpoint makes me about as alien to the average voter as if I was from the planet Mars. Sometimes people ask me why I call myself a "hermit" even though I live in the city. It is this sense of alienation from "normal" society that gives me this label. So, like many Daoists before me, I have removed myself from the Land of Dust.

"The Tragedy of the Commons"

I work for a university, which is a large charitable corporation that does a lot of work for the government as well as private industry. I mention its structure because a lot of people think that it is a government institution, which will bear on their emotional response towards what follows. I mention this before the following meditation because I want the reader to be prepared to park their ideological assumptions at the door and read what I write instead of following the narrative that many folks follow when they think about government.

One of the things that an academic institution has to do is purge books that no one wants to read. If they didn't do that, they would have to constantly expand the size of the building to find room for the new books that it is constantly buying. This causes problems for the institution because many people have a huge emotional investment in the idea that books should never be discarded. That is to say, the library has to hide the fact that we are throwing out books because if we don't some folks---often elderly people who are potentially large donors to the institution---will complain bitterly.

In the past this need to hide has caused big hassles for the institution. Many years ago, for example, the university had to build a complex, covered slide to hide books that were being discarded from an older building because people had complained about seeing books being thrown out a window into a dumpster. The books were still being thrown out, but now they were hidden from sight by a plywood chute. Another time someone complained about seeing books marked with the library stamp in a landfill. As a result, we started boxing surplus books, packing them on skids and shipped them to the National Book repository hundreds of miles away---where they were landfilled. This went on for years and cost the institution a lot of money, even though the collections budget had been cut repeatedly to save money.

We no longer ship books to the Repository because they can be "recycled". But we recently had a new purge and I noticed that once again the books are being packaged in boxes, placed on skids and shipped out of the building----even thought we have a dedicated recycling bin right in receiving. Why not just dump them there as they come down?

It turns out that the municipal recycling system will not accept books unless they have their covers torn off. (This is probably because the covers cause problems for the machinery in one part of the recycling process or another.) This would be a huge task for the institution as they are purging thousands of books right now. We do have a company that is willing to accept the books as is, but if it placed a dumpster on campus they are concerned that the books would be contaminated with other garbage. This is a reasonable fear, as people routinely come onto campus with loads of garbage and throw trash into the dumpsters without any regard to whether or not they are putting their refuse in the right one.

As a result, in order to "do the right thing", the university has to use a lot of corrugated cardboard boxes (many of which are reused, but a lot have been purchased new specifically to box these books meant for "recycling".) They are being loaded onto trucks and shipped across town to go into a dumpster that is safely away from the members of the public who would contaminate it.

At this point I hope anyone with any sense has realized that all the extra handling, the diesel fuel used in transit plus the cardboard boxes probably mean that any value that the environment might have seen from reusing the paper pulp is more than wiped out. Please note, as well, that I have been putting the word "recycle" in "scare quotes" for a reason. The company that is receiving the books is not pulping the books to make paper, it is instead shredding them for animal bedding. I hope that after its use it gets composted and spread on fields, but for all I know it gets incinerated or landfilled.

I mention this one example of what really happens when we try to recycle in order to show just how illogical our society has become.

I mention all of this primarily to draw people's attention to the way people's assumptions swirl around them and drive institutional behaviour. For example, I had to start this little anecdote by warning people that I do not work for the government. I did this because my experience has been that once some people assume that the government is involved, they just "write it off" as being inherently inefficient. Well, no, I don't work for the government. Moreover, I have worked for very large private sector corporations and it has been my personal experience that large corporations are just as inefficient as the public sector. Inefficiency, as near as I can tell, is a result of an institution being huge and hierarchical, not whether it is owned by taxpayers or shareholders.

Once this caveat is out of the way, I will draw reader's attention to the strong emotions that are drawn out about books. People do not like to throw them out. This causes no end of problems for people in charities who end up with enormous piles of unsalable books being delivered at their doorstep. And, as I pointed out, it causes significant problems with academic libraries that have to routinely purge books that have absolutely zero value for the public. After all, outside of a very small academic readership, who wants back issues of "The Journal of Bloody Diarrhea"?

I would ask readers to parse down the emotions that are at play and think about their commitment to recycling. How much of an improvement is it to "recycle" the paper in the books when the process of doing so involves the purchase of new books and driving the books to an isolated dumpster where they won't be contaminated---so they can be shredded and used as bedding material instead of being made into new books? Could it be argued that the emotional commitment that people have towards recycling is often about as illogical as the emotional commitment that many people have towards the preservation of books?

I got started meditating on the way our cherished assumptions and emotional feelings influence our behaviour---both individual and collective---by thinking about a seminal essay titled "The Tragedy of the Commons", by Garrett Hardin. I have seen this essay referred to by right wingers who say that it argues that all natural resources should be privatized in order to prevent their over-utilization and destruction. In actual fact, however, it argues that the tragedy isn't one of public ownership, but rather that of under-regulation.

A "tragedy", as classically understood, was not just a bad thing that happens to someone, but rather a very bad thing that comes about because of the inherent nature (or, in Daoist terms "Ziran") of a person sows the seeds of their destruction. In Shakespeare, for example, the tragedy of Hamlet is his vacillating character which means that he ends up destroying both himself and the royal court instead of simply revenging his father's assassination.

The specific "tragedy of the commons" refers to the way that collective ownership can lead to the destruction of a natural resource. The example used in the essay is that of a medieval pasture where peasants were allowed to graze their cattle. The idea is that because everyone owns the pasture, but only the peasant owns an individual cow, the cost to the individual due to overgrazing is greatly diluted whereas the utility of having another cow is significant. That is the cost of over grazing is "X" divided by the number of peasants in the entire community, whereas the profit of owning another cow, "Y" belongs only to one person. (In economics, this is known as "externalizing your costs".) This means that there is a strong self-interest for peasants to have as many cows as they can and over-graze and destroy the pasture in a way that they never would if they also owned the pasture individually.

Hardin used this example to argue that the environment is a "commons" that is held by all individuals and is being progressively "over-grazed" and destroyed. Because no one owns the oceans, they are being over-fished, the air is being polluted, etc. His answer, however, is not to privatize the entire environment, but rather to develop a strict regulatory regime that protects these "commons" from being damaged.

This is an intermediary stage in his argument, however, as his ultimate concern is population. Once we see the oceans, etc, as a "commons" that needs to be protected the next logical step is to see the entire earth and its future as a commons. And the greatest threat to that is arguably over population, if only because all insults to the earth caused by humanity are multiplied by the number of people who are insulting it. That is, if five people pollute a river they can get away with a great deal individually without causing severe damage. But five million have to all be extremely scrupulous in order to protect the stream.

If we accept that population increase has a tremendous impact on the "commons", and we believe that the only real way to protect it is through regulation, then it follows that we need to have some pretty significant regulation over the ability of human being to reproduce.

On the face of it, this should be pretty obvious to all and sundry. But the fact of the matter is that it is a conclusion that is very controversial. Not because the logic or evidence is faulty, but rather because people have such a strong emotional commitment to the idea that there is something good about large families that they are blinded to obvious fact that the earth is grotesquely over-populated.

If you listen to old women you will often notice the extreme pride they take in the size of their families. For example, I recently heard two women in a restaurant bragging about how many children and grand-children they each had. One had ten and the other had fourteen. On the occasion of my grandmother's death I remember the enormous satisfaction my mother had----she had five children herself and she had four surviving brothers and sisters herself, most of whom had had at least two children too. This emotional commitment to "family" is the sort of thing that is driving our population explosion.

I've been trying to point out that key behaviours of both individuals and institutions are being driven by emotions because I want to point out a significant debate that took place in ancient China and which I think should also be taking place right now. Amongst the other schools, there was one known as the "school of Fa " or "legalism" which battled with Confucianism. (For some reason, which is debated, Daoism was embraced and not persecuted by the Fa when they tried to erase all the other schools.)

For the purposes of this blog post, I would argue that legalism is the dominant philosophy of our society in that the initial response to any and all problems seems to be to pass a law about it. Confucianism (or, the school of "Ru"), in contrast, argues that this is wrong-headed because it ignores human nature and the fact that the world is too complex to be able to craft laws that can deal effectively with all possible situations. Confucianism believes that the way to govern society is to find and train good people and then give them the authority to "do the right thing".

As a matter of historical fact, the Fa school was successful in building up one of the warring states, Qin, into a military powerhouse that was able to conquer all the other states. As such, it set the direction of Chinese society for thousands of years to come. At the same time, the Confucians were also proven correct in that the totalitarian Fa state fell apart into rebellion and confusion because the leaders of the state had no moral glue holding them together after the death of the First Emperor and because the citizenry were so oppressed that they had no reason to support the state. As a result, Confucianism has survived as a seminal influence on Chinese political theory up until the present Communist state and perhaps past, as it now even seems to be being resuscitated as part of modern nationalist identity.

I introduced the distinction between Fa and Ru because these issues still dog us today. No matter what laws govern the institution of the University where I work, the administration still has to consider the emotions and concerns of the people it has to deal with. This leads to the absurdities of having to ship books long distances instead of just tossing them into a bin off the loading dock. Similarly, as someone who has spent far too many years in politics, I can assure you that people's emotions have huge bearing on the laws that get passed. (Even the legalists of the Qin dynasty realized that they have to think about this when they eventually went too far and ended up with peasant revolts on their hands.)

How this bears on the commons has a huge impact on Hardin's thesis. The medieval commons survived for over a thousand years because it was regulated by a combination of rule by the local lord and by the customs that held peasant society together. This blew apart when society changed and the old verities of society no longer held sway. It is easy for him to suggest that governments should regulate population, but I know from practical experience in politics that there is no swifter way to destroy a career than to simply point out that we are over-populated, let alone try to craft regulations to deal with it. A totalitarian state like Maoist China may be able to cut its population through its "one child law", but that sort of thing is simply beyond the authority of just about any other type of government.

I don't know what response I bring from thinking about these issues. For a long time I believed that it might be possible to actually change society by creating new mythologies or even a new religion that would be able to change the emotional framework of people, which could then create room for new laws and regulations governing things like population growth. I'm less sanguine about this sort of thing nowadays. Instead, I tend towards a more pessimistic opinion that people have very little control over the Dao and instead it simply follows its own path. Perhaps this is wisdom dawning, perhaps it is just exhaustion and old age.

One of the paradoxes of life is that we begin to see the complexity of things just at the point where we lose the energy necessary to try to be an active agent in the world.

What is Enlightenment?

I've been thinking a lot about enlightenment lately. Primarily, I've found that I've been spending more and more of my time living in the moment instead of fretting about the future or the past. This isn't to say that I don't spend time doing both, but just that I've found that a useful antidote to both is to focus on the "here and now".

The result has been a significant improvement in the quality of my life. While time seems to go by faster and faster, paradoxically, the individual moment I inhabit seems to have expanded dramatically. People often remark on how time seemed to go on forever when they were young, but now it seems to go by more and more quickly. I always ascribed this fact to the idea that an hour of a young child's life is a greater fraction of their lived experience than that of an old person. But now I think a large part of that experience might be the fact that children are forced by their circumstances to be little more than potentiality----they always have to wait until some adult deems it is the "right time" for whatever they want to do.

In this clip we see that Homer is actively engaged in all the different aspects of getting to the amusement park, whereas the children are merely passive passengers who can do nothing more than wait. I think that this has a lot to do with the experience of time. If you are a passive person without any engagement in your life, time expands whereas if you are actively engaged, it shrinks.

This is an insight that has really made a big change in my life. When I remember it, it allows me to avoid the ennui and dread that use to fill many hours of my previous life. Ennui, like Bart and Lisa, who were forced to passively sit in the back seat and wait for life to arrive. And dread, like during my episodes of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder when I was consumed with terror over what might happen and guilt over what already has. By focusing on the individual moment in time that I am inhabiting now, I am able to avoid both aspects of Hell.

What this experience has got me thinking about recently is what "enlightenment" could be. All religions seem to have some sort of mental state that at least some of their followers are seeking. Buddhism is probably most famous for its pursuit of Nirvana. Daoism has its equivalent in Ziran. I belive that Sufism has the concept of "An" (although I cannot find a supporting link.) And Christianity and Judaism has Shalom.

Please note, that I am not suggesting that all of these experiences are exactly the same. It might be that they are, but in any event, the cultures that they arise from are different enough that even if they are all the same, the languages used to express them are sufficiently different that they each will have different nuances. Moreover, it might be that the experiences themselves are culturally mediated in such away that there are differences between them. The key point to understand is that Buddhists who are enlightened, Daoists who do manifest Ziran, Sufis who experience An and Christians and Jews who do live in Shalom would all get along with each other far better than with their co-religionists who do not understand or emphasize these concepts in their particular faith tradition. For example, a Sufi who manifests An will get along better with a Jew who lives in Shalom than with a member of the Taliban or al-Qaida. (Which is probably why the Taliban recently attacked a Sufi shrine with a bomb, killing many worshipers.)

The experience that I have been having lately is nothing earth-shattering. It is really very mundane, actually. But it is something that I treasure and it does make life a lot easier. It is also somewhat hard to explain. People go through life on the assumption that all words and experiences can be explained. This is an important and useful assumption. Most of the time things can be explained. And most of the time when someone cannot explain something and expects us to accept it "on faith", it is usually because they believe something that is unjustifiable. As my Daoist teacher once said, "if you can't explain yourself, you usually don't know what you are talking about".

But sometimes people cannot understand something simply because they haven't had the experience. Someone who has been blind from birth simply cannot know what colour is all about. In the same way, I don't think that enlightenment or Ziran or Shalom can be understood by anyone who hasn't really tried to live their life in a certain way. Please note, that the difference in being able to understand the experience of enlightenment or Ziran doesn't come from some sort of wild, extra-ordinary experience, but rather from a lot of time spent thinking about what it means to be alive. It's more like moving ten tons of gravel, one shovel at a time than about shoving your fingers into a light socket and getting an instantaneous jolt. (This isn't to say that there aren't life changing moments, but my experience is that they are very rare and usually come about because of previous mundane effort.)

I don't think that enlightenment or Ziran or Shalom is anything all that special or weird, but it does make it an "undiscovered continent" to people who haven't really tried to understand their life. And in the presence of a vacuum, people start to insert all sorts of speculation about what they could be like. And because fame and power are not things that come from manifesting enlightenment or Ziran, the guys who know the least often end up teaching the courses and writing the text books. And if you can't understand exactly what someone is talking about until you do the exercise yourself, you are going to be at a real disadvantage when it comes to shopping around for a "do it yourself" manual. And when you do make some headway, you may find yourself smacking yourself on the head and thinking "That's what its all about? Wow, if I'd known then what I know now, I wouldn't have wasted so much time chasing blind allies."

Think of this post as a suggestion of a road map. I might be fooling myself, but I don't think I am. It's up to you to figure out if I can be trusted or not, though. Obviously very few people do, which is why I don't have hundreds or thousands of subscribers. And therein lies the rub. To read the map of where you want to go, you pretty much almost have to be there already.

One last thing. I came across this Youtube for a "Daoist Rap" and I simply couldn't let it pass without sharing----.

What is Morality?

I read an article by Michael Valpy in today's "Globe and Mail" that got me thinking about what people mean when they say the word "morality". Specifically, the article makes the assertion that "conservatives are more likely to embrace a world view that seeks certainty and abhors ambiguity, and hold the belief that morality is more important than knowledge". This statement really grabbed me by the lapels and shook me up. Why is there a contradiction between "morality" and "ambiguity"? Even more to the point, why is there a contradiction between "morality" and "knowledge"?

When I think about "morality", it seems to me that there are several underlying issues that are intrinsically involved in being a moral person. One of which is being "truthful". And by this, I don't mean in the sense of being honour-bound to never tell a lie---such as in the old, moronic "situational ethic" argument about whether it would be right to lie to the Gestapo about whether or not you know where the Jewish family is hidden. What I mean instead, is that a "moral" person should be willing to follow the "truth" where it leads---no matter how much difficulty that might cause the individual in question.

An example in point comes from a documentary movie I once saw about the abolition of slavery. Early on in that struggle a person brought a suit to an English court about whether or not it was legal to have slaves in England. (A fellow from the colonies had brought along a personal slave servant, and he decided to "jump ship" in England.) I recall the judge made reference to a legal maxim of "Fiat justitia ruat caelum" ("Let justice be done though the heaven's fall".) The idea was that even though there would be a great deal of anger from slave owners about their loss of "property", the law said that there should be no slavery in England. (As I recall, the reasoning was based on a medieval case against slavery where the judge had written that "the air England is too sweet to allow a slave to breath it".)

How would it have been "moral" for the judge to not follow the case law and agree that the person arguing against slavery was right? It would have been a lot easier to simply agree with the other side and not alienate the wealthy and powerful. But would it have been moral?

If we agree that intellectual honesty is part of the foundation underpinning morality, then surely "knowledge" is not only not existing in opposition to morality, it would seem to be an essential element of its composition. Moreover, if knowledge is important, then it seems that ambiguity should also be an intrinsic element of morality. It is a truism that "the more we know, the less we think we know". But if this is the case, then surely ambiguity follows on the tail of knowledge. And if morality consists of following the truth wherever it leads us, then the moral path must also lead us into the valley of ambiguity more than once in a while.

This is a very practical issue because it strikes me that the conservative people I meet are people who are anything but moral in their behaviour and outlook. Indeed, I would argue that they are often the most immoral people I have ever met. I say that because they seem to almost invariably refuse to believe that "truth" has any sort of intrinsic merit. Instead, their morality is based on submission to some sort of authority----governmental, scriptural, ecclesiastic, etc. The "Bible tells me so", "my country right or wrong", etc is good enough for them. Lay out a reasoned argument that shows that they shouldn't be following their particular chosen authority, and they invariably derail the discussion in one way or another.

I had an experience of this a few years back when I was involved in an email discussion with a Jesuit priest. He said he honestly couldn't understand why people would be opposed to children being given a Catholic education. I wrote back that with all due respect the image that many people have of the Catholic church is pedophilia, homophobia, misogyny and intellectual dishonesty. For these people, giving children a Catholic education is a form of child abuse. The priest didn't respond, he simply cut off the conversation. We have met since then, but he never, ever makes any reference to the conversation---it's as if it never took place.

I would suggest that this is not only a cowardly thing to do, it is also profoundly immoral.

Another incident teased out a further complexity for me.

Years ago the mayor of my city got caught cold copying a large amounts of an official speech. Lots of my friends were very angry about this, but her supporters seemed to honestly not understand what all the fuss was about. It strikes me that the reason why people with a university education made such a fuss was because it is probably the absolute worse crime (short of fudging research) which an educated person can commit. Lots of students fool around sexually, take drugs, etc, but what will get you booted from school no ifs or buts, is plagiarism. I can remember in grad school that the professors were absolutely ruthless about this and would expel undergrads without any mercy for copying. And, if you think about it, this makes sense. All scholarship is based on a degree of trust. No authority could possibly fact check every single piece of research that gets done. Universities simply have to be able to trust their scholars and scientists.

This raises one last point. Is morality authoritative or consensual?

Conservatives would argue that all morality comes from some sort of authority: the Bible, the constitution, the Pope, etc. But scientific truth seems to be based on the development of a consensus. A person puts forward a theory and performs an experiment, then writes it up in a paper. The paper then goes in front of a jury of experts in the field who decide whether or not it is worth publishing. Then it gets published and enters the discussion that constantly goes on between members of the field. People try to recreate the experiment, design others to disprove it. Eventually, a majority of people in the field decide to either discard it as a failed model, or accept it and then try to build further on it.

In retrospect this different attitude explains the way my friend the Jesuit responded to my honest attempt to engage him about the public view of Catholic education. I tried to engage him in the consensus-building dialectic of intellectual discussion. Instead, all he saw was an attack on the authority that he had built his life around.

I've had friends say that this is the problem with religion, that it is authority based instead of being experientially or consensus-based. I agree, it seems to me right now that this is the key problem with regard to existing dominant religions. But I don't think that they need to be. I recall reading somewhere that the Buddha said that the religion he was founding was bound to die out and be replaced as it got old, became corrupted and ceased to serve society. I also have read a quote that said that he felt no one should follow his teachings on authority---instead, he counselled people to be a "lamp onto themselves". I like to think that Daoism is similarly based on personal experience and consensus between free individuals instead of slavishly following some authoritative text or teacher. (I know that Buddhism and other non-authoritarian religions often fall far short of this idea and that there are non-authoritarian streams in Western spirituality, but I am only making generalizations to illustrate different tendencies.)

Excuses and Apologies

I haven't been making many posts lately. Primarily, this is for two reasons.

About a year ago, one of you readers reached out and contacted me. A fellow Daoist, she started reading my blog and found a kindred spirit that she never knew existed. We struck up a conversation, which led to a visit, which led to a proposal. Now we are engaged----even though we live in different countries. As you might imagine, this relationship eats up a little of my time.

Secondly, I've hired a company to gut and rebuild the kitchen of my home. This too is taking up a lot of my time. It has also made writing a very difficult activity, as I usually write on my kitchen table. Also, it is very hard to write when a group of strange men are making loud noises and creating clouds of dust all around you.

Hopefully I will be able to get back into my "groove" soon. Writing is a spiritual practice for me and I deeply feel its loss.

Life and Death, Autonomy and the Dao

I recently went to hear a lecture by Gwynne Dyer about climate change. Basically, his message came down to the idea that it is technically and economically feasible for the human race to take the measures necessary to prevent runaway global warming, but it is beyond our political institutions. As a result, we will not be able to prevent CO2 levels from reaching the point where we start getting feedback effects that will result in more warming, which will trigger more feedback effects, which will trigger more warming, and so on.

The end point as Dyer sees it, would be a total human population in the millions clustered around the Arctic Ocean. Everyone else will be dead either by famine or war or disease within one or two hundred years.

Dyer doesn't think that this is inevitable, however, because he thinks that there are "on the shelf" geo-engineering solutions that will allow the human race the "breathing room" necessary to develop solutions to the greenhouse problem. These include things like spraying the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide, creating fleets of wind-powered robot ships that spray water into the air, building giant space mirrors to shade earth, etc. The idea is that these techno-fixes would reflect enough sunlight that they would keep the planet from heating up to a dangerous level.

What I'm interested about with regard to all of this is my personal reaction to Gwynne's dire predictions. I have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy in the battle to prevent global climate change. Primarily, this was based on a real terror of what could happen. As it happens around me, I've had to think deeply about the nature of that fear.

Oddly enough, I've come to the conclusion that it is fundamentally misplaced.

It seems horrible to consider the vast majority of the human race dying off in some sort of environmental cataclysm. But the fact of the matter is that every single person who has been born has died in one way or another. And most of the ways that people do die are pretty bad. Ultimately, what real difference is there between starving to death in just another run-of-the-mill famine or the "mother of all famines" caused by climate change? Or dying in an ordinary war caused by sheer stupidity instead of one caused by societies that are on the verge of collapse due to environmental catastrophe? Again, what is the difference between dying of cholera because your society hasn't really figured out how to give working people clean water versus getting something bad because your society has collapsed? Either way, in all of these cases, you end up dead. And I suspect that if you look at mortuary statistics the overwhelming majority of people in any age have died due to hunger, violence or disease.

So what would be all that new in Dyer's scenario?

Not much, really. There is the death of nature, but I don't think that I'd be being really honest if I said that that was the source of my extreme emotions. Instead, I think that a larger fraction of my concern is my own fear of personal extinction. Indeed, in a real sense the entire world "ends" when every one of expires---at least for the individual in question. Perhaps contemplating the death of nature (or, to me more precise, its radical change) forces me to direct my gaze in ways that I prefer not.

Another element of this issue came home to me today when I was at church. My local Unitarian congregation has an energetic group of members who have talked the church into installing solar voltaic energy panels on the roof. One member's also hot to create a more ecologically-focused congregation. I sat in on a question-and-answer session after the service to hear what people had in mind. I was appalled because it was the same old middle-class feeble attempt to deal with an absolutely existential problem with tiny "baby-step" solutions. I didn't hear any evidence that these people had even begun to wrap their heads around either the severity of the problem or the type of substantive change that would be necessary to prevent catastrophe. (I suspect that Dyer would say that this is what underlies the inability of our political system to actually come to terms with climate change.)

This highlights another key element underlying my frantic emotions about climate change.

I've always had some sort of faith in the human race. That is, I'd always felt that people's basic sense of "fair play" and "common sense" could be counted on in the long run. I suppose the best way to sum this up is to quote Abraham Lincoln "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time." But looking around the room I came to the conclusion that while Lincoln might have been right within a very limited set of social circumstances, but with regard to existential issues, the overwhelming majority of people live their entire lives swimming in a sea of delusion.

One particular delusion that I have laboured under has been the idea that individual human beings can have much impact on the direction of human history. Dyer mentioned this fact at the end of his talk, when he said that it only makes sense that if an intelligent species of animal creates a technological society it is inevitably going to have to come to terms with the limits that its environment imposes on it. That is the situation that the human race faces. Our economy and society moves forward through the operation of impersonal cultural laws. And it will either be able to develop new ways of preserving the environment through these individual, inhuman laws or it will not. The efforts of all the environmentalists are only, at best, one tiny part of the way those laws operate.

In effect, I have to not only accept the fact that I---and all I hold dear to me---is mortal and doomed to die; but also that for that brief life I live, I am not much more than a chip of wood floating on the ocean current that is the Dao. The chip has no responsibility about where it goes, all it can do is just float. In the same way, individual human beings---even educated Daoists like me---have zero influence over whether we are going to suffer runaway climate change or no. This is a very hard lesson to learn intellectually.

I wonder if I will ever be able to know this truth in my bones?

Realization---Moment by Moment

I've been reading a lot lately about "crazy wisdom" teachers. Primarily, I read The Buddha from Brooklyn by Martha Sherrill, Holy Madness by Georg Feuerstein and Stripping the Gurus by Geoffrey D. Falk. I'm interested in this subject, at least in part, because I've often wondered if the fellow who introduced me to Daoism, Moy Lin Shin, was some sort of "crazy wise" teacher. If he was, perhaps his behaviour wasn't simply weird and dysfunctional, but instead a tremendous opportunity to learn that I passed up when I left his organization.

For those readers who haven't heard of "crazy wisdom" before, the idea is that some religious teachers choose to teach their students by stressing them to the breaking point in the hope that this will force them reassess their basic assumptions about what it is to be a human being. The stress can take many forms, but primarily, it consists of expecting far, far too much from the student, either in the form of simple effort or in the form of breaking very important social taboos. Religious literature abounds with this sort of thing---Zen masters who beat their students, Lamas that force students to do heroic tasks of labour, Taiji Chuan masters who work their students so hard that they attempt suicide, and so on. In a more modern context, it involves gurus deliberately ignoring the boundaries that usually exist between a religious teacher and a student---such as forcing them to engage in abusive or embarrassing sex acts.

How could this possibly be justified?

The best illustration that I've ever seen comes from the delightfully complex movie "I Heart Huckabees". (If you have or haven't seen the movie, I'd recommend this essay on it.) The scene involves two men sitting at a picnic table bouncing a beach ball off each other's face. The idea is that the minor pain that results distracts them away from whatever thoughts are filling their minds and gives them a chance to experience "pure consciousness". (I suspect that this experience might have at one time been behind the Zen "keisaku" stick.) The two men are so enamored with the experience that they ignore their teacher's warning that this taste of empty consciousness can only be nothing more than just a fleeting event that invariably becomes overwhelmed by the complexities of life.

In order to force them to listen to her, she illustrates her point by caressing the crotch of one of the men with her foot, which immediately focuses his mind on her. As they walk off into the bushes to have wild, crazy sex, the other man is overwhelmed with jealousy. This, of course, completely makes the teacher's point that no matter how hard people try to take refuge in the "suchness" of life, they will invariably become distracted by the world around them. As such, their teacher is breaking social convention in order to teach them an important truth---i.e. in a "crazy-wise" way.

The problem with this style of teaching, unfortunately, is that the knife cuts both ways. Just as the two guys in the movie were quickly distracted from their beach-ball illumination, so can even the most enlightened master who gains a similar awareness from years of meditation. It isn't just the student who gets distracted when he gets "boinked" by the teacher, but the teacher too! The sad truth is that people with some significant insight can find their store of wisdom exhausted by the grind of attempting to help other people. I happen to believe that this is the reason why people who appear to have genuine insight at one point in their life can end up becoming abusive tyrants later on. Moreover, I think that this problem can become magnified within organizations as people who once had genuine insight but then lose it go on to make decisions about the abilities of other people, who then get promoted to positions of authority that they may either never have been capable of filling adequately, or, once did but since lost their ability to do so.

Underlying this issue is the fallacious assumption that "enlightenment" is an "all or nothing" or "once you've got it, it can't be taken away" sort of thing. If you believe that this is the case, then once someone "gets it", then they can never ever be wrong again---"backsliding" is simply impossible.

Well, IMHO, things just aren't that simple. In fact, I think that every moment of everyone's life we are in the same situation that confronted Neo when he first met Morpheus in "The Matrix". That is, we have a significant test of our courage and integrity. Do we take the "blue pill" and wake up safe and secure in the bed of comfortable illusions that sustain us in our present existence? Or do we take the "red pill" that may expose us to an uncomfortable truth that may shatter those illusions even though it might give us significant new insight? Those pills aren't just offered as a test for introduction to the spiritual life---they come along all the time. The failures we find in spiritual authority figures come up to their having decided to choose the blue pill.

So what does this mean for the serious student of the Dao (or Christ within, Buddha mind, etc)? Well, I'm not about to give up on the entire enterprise of spiritual practice. I think that there still is value. (I hope that by making this decision, I'm not just grabbing at a blue pill myself.) But it does get me thinking about a couple practical issues. First of all, I think that people should change the emphasis on enlightenment, realization, etc, away from the individual to the experience. Men (and women) cannot become "enlightened" or "realized". Instead, they can experience moments of realization. Obviously, some more than others. But the emphasis in teaching needs to be the contents of the vessel, not the vessel itself.

Secondly, I think that we should accept that if no one is "enlightened", then no one, ultimately can take on the mantle of "Mastery". This means that people have to accept that while there are people out there with insights who can offer us suggestions in our search for wisdom, we are always going to end up sitting in that chair having to decide on the red or blue pills all by ourselves. And if we decide to live in institutions, we are going to have to give up on any illusion about there being someone to tell us what to do. Instead, we are going to have to accept that any sort of authentic collective religious life is ultimately going to have to involve the "give and take" of people trying to figure out the right thing to do through the messy activity of consensus building and democracy.

Some people might complain that I've robbed the spiritual path of any goal. What is the point of it if no one ever becomes enlightened? Agreed, this is a big change. Without the ideal of the enlightened Master, the goal ceases to be personal and instead becomes collective. We go through our life attempting to gain insight through our glimpses of realization and try to hand them on to future generations---by personal interaction with others, through writings (like this blog), works of art, and, the institutions we create as collections of people. If some people think that this is not enough, I would suggest that it is all that sustains people who devote their lives to art, science, public service, etc.

Why should religion be any different?