Daoist Morality

I recently got around to watching the movie "The Reader". For those of you who might not have heard of it, this movie is about a young man who has an affair with an older woman who turns out to have been a guard at a Nazi concentration camp. He only finds this out years later after both have gone their separate ways and he attends her trial while attending law school.

It is a very good movie and I found myself absolutely captivated by Kate Winslet's performance as Hanna Schmitz, the Nazi guard. Indeed, I was so struck by the film that I went on to read a translation of the novel it is based upon.

The story is basically a mechanism for the author to deal with a key problem for Germans of his generation: how to deal with an older generation that was tarnished by co-operation with the Holocaust. This is not a hypothetical situation. Almost everyone of a certain generation in Germany has had the opportunity to wonder what his parents did during the Holocaust.

In the book, the narrator never does come to peace with Hanna. He has a connection to her that he cannot sever, but on the other hand, he refuses to allow himself to manifest any sort of human connection with her. As a result, he spends his life denying her the friendship that he feels he should offer her and feeling like he has betrayed her. In both the movie and the book Hanna commits suicide shortly before she is released from prison after the narrator rebuffs her attempt to connect during a visit. The book ends with him still unable to sort out his feelings, in contrast, the movie ends at her grave where he has finally made his decision and honours her by telling his daughter about his relationship.

The book is probably a more honest statement of how many Germans feel, but the movie has a more hopeful ending.

A key scene in the movie and book both takes place after Hanna's death where the narrator takes on a task left to him in her suicide note. Hanna wants her entire life savings given to one of the few surviving victims of her particular camp. The woman adamantly refuses to accept any of the money, as she feels that this might look like some sort of atonement. The idea is that there is no room for forgiveness in the heart of the victims.

This is very similar to a core theme in Simon Wiesenthal 's book The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness. It too is about an SS killer, but in this case it is a dying man who is asking forgiveness from a specific Jewish inmate. (This is a true incident that happened to Wiesenthal.) The story is told in a short book and various people from different religious traditions are asked to comment on whether or not they would be willing to forgive if they were confronted by this situation.

I've spent a lot of time thinking about this and have come to the conclusion that when people refuse to forgive even the most vile behaviour they are operating on a flawed conception of what it means to be a human being. That is, the conventional view of human beings is to see them as having souls, free will and the constant opportunity to choose between two very obvious and different sets of actions, one right and the other wrong. I come from a different perspective. I see people as being dominated by peer pressure, strong emotional tendencies stemming from our past experiences, and social ideas that form the language and structure of our thought processes.

People think that it is "obvious" that it is evil to torture and kill other human beings. But if we look at recent history, I can see people who in support of what they believed are the noblest ideals were willing to kill thousands in terrorist attacks and for others in support of other (but, I would argue very similar) ideals were willing to authorize torture and trample on the civil liberties enshrined in their government's constitution. Murdering millions is not the same as water-boarding a few suspected terrorists and wire-tapping lawyers. But Eastern Europe in the 1940's was not the same world we inhabit now.

Eugenics was not considered the raving of lunatics, but rather the latest in science. My mother, who trained as a nurse at this time, used to tell me once in a while about how the "dull, subnormals" were going to eventually destroy the human race because they were out-breeding the more intelligent. Obviously, this is something that she picked up during the few weeks she spent learning about social issues. The idea of protecting the race from "dilution" was so much a part of the air, that even the political elite of Canada were willing to send "defective" children to schools where they were sterilized, without consent. The province of Alberta had a regulation that gave a board of appointed "experts" the right to force sterilization on people they deemed defective and therefore, a threat to the gene pool.

This is just part of the context that people like Hanna Schmidt would have inhabited. Add to that a background that discouraged curiosity, encouraged conformity, an abusive background that may have triggered inappropriate violent emotions, etc. and we have the making of a violent prison guard. I would argue that if many of us were to have had exactly the same background, context and set of circumstances we might end up doing much the same thing.

Indeed, I happen to believe that there actually is a Holocaust happening right now before us. That is, our behaviour to the environment will eventually be viewed with much the same horror that we feel towards the Nazis. I suspect that ordinary Germans were about as oblivious to the plight of the Jews as many people of today are about the prospects of global climate change. Many people refused to believe the stories they heard and what they saw just as many people today refuse to believe the warnings of scientists.

Ultimately, I think the thing to remember is that there are no rules sent down from on-high by God----for God doesn't exist. Nor is there any sort of immortal soul that tells us what the "right" or "wrong" thing might be in any given situation. Instead, all we have are the circumstances of individual life and culture that influence our consciousness. They flow like a river through time. We call that river the "Dao" and all we can do is be like a leaf that floats with the current.

Environmental Vow: Part 14

An Alternative Model of Freedom

I've raised the idea of restorative justice not to solve the problems of our criminal justice system, but instead as a bit of a “thought experiment” to illustrate the different ways in which the concept of “freedom” can be understood. My suggestion is that the ideal encapsulated in the ethic of “self-actualization” and “follow your bliss” (at least as popularly conceived) is based on a flawed definition of freedom, one that is specifically centred on the individual. As I've suggested, as people naively express this ideal in their personal lives, it boils down to “do your own thing”. And, as I've pointed out, the ethic of “doing your own thing” has no real answer to the question “Why not become a crack whore? Couch potato? Greedhead? Sex Maniac? etc.” Adherence to this ideal has not only discredited so-called “progressives” in the eyes of the Right, it means that they have no moral grounds for suggesting that there is an imperative (moral, religious or patriotic) for people mobilize in order to deal with our climate catastrophe.

At this point, I'd like to introduce a more sophisticated definition of “freedom”, one that can go a long way, I believe, in answering the problems that have arisen from the “do your own thing” worldview. Marcus Tullius Cicero, the ancient Roman, once wrote that “Freedom is participation in power.” This definition will probably sound startling to some readers, so it might be helpful to mention that I first heard this quote mentioned by the consumer advocate and community organizer Ralph Nader. What he was saying was that “freedom”, in the political sense, does not flow from the absense of the Gestapo or the Inquisition, but instead from how engaged the citizenry is in the daily life of their society. It is possible to consider an enlightened dictatorship with complete freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc. But insofar as the people who live in that state do not have feel that they have any control over who is making the big decisions in their life, they still live in a dictatorship and they are not “free”. As a result of this reasoning, Nader was saying that if you want to be politically free you have to be actively engaged in the political process.

I believe that this new definition also works when we go beyond the realm of politics. “Power” is more than just government. Engineers and scientists, for example, gain power by learning more about the physical world that surrounds us. Even ordinary people who know how to fix a leaking toilet or change the operating system on their computer insofar as they can do so participate in the power of modern technology. It is certainly the case that when people are confronted by something that they don't know how to repair or even operate they feel especially powerless and unfree.

I would further suggest that the fundamental issue is not the specific knowledge that a person gains from learning about the machinery that surrounds them. Just because I can change the operating system on my computer doesn't mean that I know how it works or could even write a very simple program. The “mastery” I feel is ultimately pretty shallow and inconsequential. But the process of learning how to download open source software and install Linux on my laptop has resulted in my becoming personally “engaged” with the technology in a way that cannot happen by going into a store and buying a new computer pre-loaded with a MS Windows package.

In much the same way, the “freedom” that Cicero and Nader are talking about comes not from having all that much real control over the political process (even citizen groups have to have leaders and followers, after all.) Instead, the relevant issue is how much the person has invested their own personal well-being into the group project. This means that when we think about the phrase “freedom comes from participation in power”, the emphasis should be upon participation, not power.

At this point we can see where the value of restorative justice comes into play. It sees the key issue in criminal activity as being that of an individuals's alienation from society instead of their personal “evil”. The solution, therefore, is to reintegrate the offender into the community instead of merely punishing him. The Lakota elders reintegrated the murderer by making him responsible for supporting the wife and children of the man he killed. The modern example I gave teaches the offender that there really are individual human beings who are harmed by property crimes like burglary, which thereby deflates the comforting illusion that their offenses are only against impersonal, inhuman insurance companies. Insofar as this initiative is successful, it means that if the would-be criminal contemplates committing similar crimes in the future, the crime will have to be understood specifically as an act that is done to specific human beings who will suffer as a result. This makes the crime “real” in a way that it wasn't before, which is to say that the criminal has been brought back into the community of man.

Once we start seeing freedom in this way, we can see how religious people like the Benedictines and soldiers like General Wolf could see themselves as being “free”. Insofar as they felt that they were emotionally “participating” or “engaging” in enterprises much bigger than themselves---the monastery or regiment---they felt “free” in the same sense as understood by Cicero and Nader. Obviously the individual soldier driven into the army by poverty or oblate given to the Benedictines while still a young child, did not initially “participate” very much in the “power” that compelled them. But even so, many of these people no doubt did end up identifying with the community that they found themselves in, accepted its ideals, and ended up finding satisfaction in the life. Proof of this fact exists around us insofar as many people still find enormous personal satisfaction from living in religious communities. Similarly, a great many veterans of the Armed Forces are tenatiously loyal to their branch of the service even many years after being discharged.

The important point to understand in using Cicero's definition is to change the emphasis from that of being free from constraint to that of engagement in something bigger than one's self. The “free” man is not one that is free from coercion---a necessary, but not sufficient state of affairs---but rather one that is engaged with something that fulfills him. The philosopher Jean Paul Sartre pointed out much the same thing when he suggested that there is a difference between what he called “freedom from” and “freedom for”. Many people seek freedom from constraints of one form or another (work, rules, etc), whereas the truly free man seeks freedom to follow some sort of higher idea (art, justice, etc.) This is where the difference lies between the crack whore and a great man like Martin Luther King Jr. comes into play. The former never set out to become enslaved to cocaine, it was just the result of a series of bad choices and/or consistently bad luck. The latter, on the other hand, devoted himself to the ideal of civil rights and did what was necessary to pursue it. Both came to a bad end, but the former is a sad tragedy whereas the latter was heroic martyrdom.

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.