Daoism and the Dominant Paradigm

At work the other day I was asked to cover up some furniture with so that when some contractors came in to do some construction work they would be protected with dust. It wasn't a terribly difficult job, but it put me in a totally foul mood. This carried on with me for the rest of the shift, over the night, and on into breakfast the next morning.

I mentioned my emotions to my partner, Misha, and we talked about them over bacon and eggs. We came to the conclusion that the reason why I was so annoyed was because I had been asked to do a half-assed job that served almost no useful purpose, and, which resulted in totally unnecessary waste to the planet---and there was effectively nothing at all I could do about it.

The thing is that I was asked to use plastic film to cover up the stuff. And plastic film is useless at this job---even though most people use it. It doesn't drape properly, it is repelled by static electricity, and, it is so light that it gets moved even by the slightest air current. You can't tie it up with string, it is slippery so it slides off items easily, masking tape doesn't stick well to it, and, it actually attracts dust which doesn't stick to it (that's a neat trick)---which means that when you take it off a piece of furniture the dust will slide off it onto what you are trying to protect. For these reasons, I never ever use it for this purpose at home. Instead, I have a heavy-canvas drop cloth that I've used for years. It has none of the problems I've mentioned above, and on hot sunny days I can clean it off with soap, a deck brush, and, a garden hose.

So part of my funk was just about the half-assed, ridiculous job I had been asked to do.

Another part of this exercise in futility was the fact that once the work was done the plastic film would be removed and tossed into the garbage, and from there into a landfill. I'm a bit of an expert on our local municipal government as well as a manual labour drone, so I know about how much time, money, and, political anguish goes into solid waste issues in my town. So the idea that we would create another bit of stupid garbage in order to just go through the motions of protecting some not-terribly valuable (and easily cleaned) furniture just seemed irritating as Hell. 

My partner Misha took this annoyance and ramped it up a notch by pointing out that there is no sense at all blaming any of the people involved in this process. Each one of them exists in a system of thought and organization that creates a logical justification for the decision to do something inherently wasteful with only marginal utility. That is, the idea that the cost of disposal and the impact on the environment are rarely part of the design criteria of any decision. And, that in many cases it is more important to be seen to care about an issue than it is to actually accomplish anything. Until society decides to put an actual cost on environmental destruction, it is called an "externality" and ignored. And, in order to ensure the smooth functioning of a large, horizontally-organized institution, it is very important to let each individual know that their concerns are being considered by management. This means that people are rarely told "No, that's a dumb idea" and instead are told "OK, I'll get someone to do that right away."

The really annoying thing about all of this is the fact that as a species we are skating very close to the edge of an existential environmental disaster. I personally believe that we have already overshot the carrying capacity of the earth  and we are causing a lot of very expensive and deadly extreme weather due to anthropogenic climate change. And yet, none of this seems to filter down to the level of ordinary human behaviour around things like construction. There is nothing at all like a consensus around having to get "all hands on deck" to save humanity, instead it's just "the same old, same old." Until the government makes a collective decision to take climate change seriously and mobilize society to the same extent it did to fight World War Two, it is ridiculous to expect most ordinary people to just spontaneously "get with the program"---because there really isn't any "program".

We can mobilize the public to fight a war,
why can't we mobilize them to save our civilization?

When I'm able to get my rational mind to keep my emotions under control, I realize that as Daoists my lovely Misha and I have isolated ourselves from the rest of the human population. We see things so differently from people who "buy into" the "Dominant Paradigm" (DP) that sometimes we must seem like Martians to ordinary folks. And it goes the other way too. I often find it hard to understand how these people think. Mostly, however, I find it profoundly frustrating to be around what I call "DP'rs". I know that they cannot do any better, so there is no sense blaming them for their individual choices. But that doesn't mean that I am not annoyed with the casual and unconsciously brutal way they affect the natural world and future generations. To a large extent that's why I have spent most of my work life trying to avoid being around them. But sometimes I cannot avoid interacting with DP'rs, and this generates negative emotions.

I suspect that this has always been the way with Daoists. It's true that global environmental destruction is not something that loomed large in ancient China, but there was always the casual brutality of the ruling class towards the peasants (that's why Daoists were involved in the Yellow Turban Rebellion), or, the tendency of military leaders to smash and destroy anything or anyone in their way (that's why Changchunzi met with Genghis Khan to try and soften his aggression towards the Chinese people.) When you make the effort to "embrace the void", "hold onto the One", and, "follow the watercourse Way", you find yourself more and more estranged from DP'rs.

The Transition of "Conventional Wisdom"

As someone who still finds himself attracted to the world of politics (like a fly to a venus fly trap, alas), I've been watching various different elements of the political ecosystem. This ranges from the loony American debt ceiling debate, through the municipal politics of Toronto, through the tragedy in Norway to the farce in Greece. Looking at all of these different elements together, I've come to the conclusion that they all have one thing in common: we've reached a "tipping point" in the evolution of "conventional wisdom".

People involved in radical politics understand that in a liberal democracy the terms of debate are severely limited. For example, none of the major parties will ever suggest that we need to radically change the way our government works. They all believe in roughly the same thing----a capitalist state with some welfare state provision for the poor. No one is talking about nationalizing the mines or locking up dissidents in concentration camps. (No matter what the rhetoric may suggest.) It's pretty much been this way since the end of the Second World War up until now. All debate in elections and Parliament has boiled down to seeking the percentage of emphasis----so many dollars for guns, so many for butter, so many for business, so much for the poor; and; the best means----low taxes, government incentives, strategic investment, free trade versus tariffs, etc.

This sort of stability is essential to the long-term viability of democracy. If people in parliament really did have radically different visions of what the state should do, at best this would result in procedural logjams as each fought tooth and nail for their vision. At worst, this could degenerate into civil war.

Well, I think if we look at the USA, I think that the case can be made that this government is suffering from procedural a logjam because the conventional wisdom has broken down and the Republican and Democratic vision is so far apart that it is almost impossible for them to agree on anything.

In parliamentary and municipal governments a different result comes from the same cause. Premiers and mayors work in a political system where they are not bound by the "checks and balances" that Barack Obama does. This means that they can actually make the changes that they seek without being stymied by the opposition. But come the next election they are sometimes replaced by administrations that then move to undo their work. In either case, administration of the state ceases to be effective because there is no unified vision at work.

As I see it, this dysfunction is not a long-term phenomenon but rather a specific period of dynamic chaos that exists between two islands of stability.

As I mentioned above, there has been a sort of "conventional wisdom" or "common sense" that has existed since WWII. A few parts of this consensus have been based on the idea that energy is cheap, nature can be taken for granted, there should be a sort of hierarchy in society, and, that the only viable morality flows out of the Bible.

Prior to the age of fossil fuels the cost of energy was a constant drag on economic growth. It takes a huge amount of wood to make charcoal to make iron. This puts a real limit on the amount of iron that a society can use. The same can be said about a great many other elements of our society. When the price of fossil fuels goes up, it means that money that used to flow to other things----such as wages, taxes, etc----is now used to purchase that energy. Since the price of oil by the barrel is currently around $100/barrel this means that any energy intensive activity in our society (or, damn near everything) has had to cough up an astounding $85 extra dollars for energy, per barrel, over what it did in 1988, when oil cost only $15/barrel.

All of a sudden, the cost of energy is now a part of the equation. Yet people who still adhere to the old consensus simply cannot figure this point out. That's why they constantly complain that there is a "conspiracy" by oil companies to gouge the public. It's also why they fight tooth and nail against creating a more energy-efficient society, simply because they cannot conceive that the cost of energy as being an intrinsic part of "just the way things are". These are the people who's answer to Peak Oil is the empty phrase "drill baby drill" or who make ridiculous claims about the promise of shale oil. Having lived most of their lives with energy being trivial in cost, they simply cannot accept that something so basic has changed dramatically.

A related issue is that of global climate change. People who have lived their whole life believing that nature is an "externality" that can be ignored simply cannot believe that serious amounts of money has to be spent on preserving the ecosystem. As a result, they have fled into denial, believing that some shyster economist that they read on the internet knows more than the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists.

Probably of equal import is the way women, gays, and, people of colour have become significantly more equal. This change is so pervasive that a lot of folks don't understand what a cataclysmic change this has been in the way people relate to each other. But for people who took it for granted that white men had exclusive access to various elements of society this change must seem like a tooth-grindingly awful change for the worse. Certainly it must make many feel like they have been totally short-changed by a system that changed the rules just when they got to the age where they could reach for the brass ring.

This change is more than just that of women in executive office, of course. It also means that the nature of work has changed dramatically. For example, the idea of "service" has become an integral part of many workplaces, which makes the sort of gruff, "macho" ideal that many blue collar grew up with an actual impediment to employment.

Finally, many people grew up on the idea that morality comes from submission to a set of moral rules that were codified in the Bible and explained by their local church. The idea that people would be able to come up with alternative sets of moral rules (e.g. that it is immoral to discriminate against gays), and actually suggest that this new morality is actually better than the old, has also caused a great deal of anger.

What I'm suggesting is that the Conservatives are right, there is a "culture war" at work in our society. Moreover, I would also suggest that they are also right in feeling that they are losing that war. It might not seem that way, because their militancy has allowed them to organize and exert influence beyond the actual numbers would support. But this is just a rear-guard action. No matter how much they howl "drill, baby drill", the price of oil has nowhere to go but up. And women, gays and people of colour are not going to go back to the kitchen, closet or Jim Crow.

It comes down to the numbers. The people who support the old status quo are older, and they are not reproducing. The people who are supporting the new consensus are growing rapidly. To cite one specific example, the battle to stop gay marriage is well on its way to being over. This is simply because the polling numbers show that a growing majority of Americans simply don't believe that the government should ban it. As I see it, the problem for conservatives is that once something like this becomes legal and people see that it doesn't lead to the horrible results that they suggest (the decline of Western civilization) people simply forget what the fuss was all about. (A similar phenomenon happened with abortion. A recent poll in Ontario suggests that only 8% of the population believe that it should be outlawed. That horse has left the barn too.)

The wild instability we are seeing in our political systems is coming about because in any transition from one conventional wisdom set to another there inevitably comes a point where both points of view are roughly balanced. At that point, a shift of support one way or the other can result in a huge victory for one at the expense of the other. Fortunately for the people who support the new consensus, however, this is just a temporary situation. Eventually, the new consensus achieves large enough support that the old once simply becomes incapable of every winning any more elections. It then dwindles down to being an angry, increasingly radical rump.

These rumps can cause problems for their society. The shooter in Norway and other terrorists like Bin Laden are fueled by resentment that their vision of society is so out of date that they cannot win at the ballot box, so they seek to win with the rifle. But they simply cannot win. Their actions do nothing more than convince the other side that they are even more right that they were before. This is why the Norwegian's promise to become "even more tolerant" will probably be successful. People resent being terrorized and it usually hardens people's resolve more than anything else.

I'm trying to suggest that "progressives" should avoid despair when they look at the way Conservatives seem to be able to wreak havoc on the world around us. I think that in ten years or so they will be fundamentally a spent force. That doesn't mean that the future is going to be all rose water and white gloves. There are objective problems that people are going to have to work hard to deal with, such as climate change and peak oil. But the current time of political paralysis is, IMHO, going to pass by fairly quickly. At that point we will have a new consensus and society will mobilize in order to deal with these crises---just as our grand parents did to deal with WWII.

What does all of this have to do with the Dao? A lot of people suggest that Daoism is not much more than walking in the woods with a smile on your face. But I would suggest that it is also about learning how to see the underlying, subtle laws that lie underneath the surface. I would also suggest that it is about developing a sense of equanimity that allows a person to focus on the big picture in order to stop hyperventilating about the problems that face her here and now.

"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 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.)

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?

One Dao or Another

I just got finished watching an interview with Gwynne Dyer on Democracy Now. For the last bit of the show, they brought in Vandana Shiva to have a little debate between the two.

Dyer was saying, as part of his Climate Wars thesis, that the human race simply isn't going to get its act together fast enough to prevent significant climate change. As a result, there will be significant starvation in the global South, which will have serious military consequences in terms of mass migrations, failed states and war over dwindling water supplies. He said that as a result of this catastrophic failure to control greenhouse gas emissions the scientific community is now seriously looking at geoengineering solutions to manage the global temperature---such as seeding clouds with sulphur dioxide.

Mr. Gonzales kept trying to suggest to Mr. Dyer that "the corporations" and the military would use this sort of engineering to exploit the poor. He was also trying to suggest that even with global warming there wouldn't be any absolute scarcity of food once inequality was taken from the face of the earth.

When Ms. Shiva came on, she suggested that if people totally changed the food system to one based on organic agriculture and local food supplies, that there would be so much carbon sequestered in the soil that a large part of the problem would disappear.

Dyer agreed with Shiva about the solutions she offered. But he said that there simply wouldn't be enough time to institute all the social changes her prescription would need to actually happen. Her response was to say that the change is already happening and if people didn't live in the mindset of engineers and soldiers they would recognize that it is already happening around them.

I work at a top flight agricultural university and I haven't seen any of the big changes that Shiva seems to be talking about. I do hang with scientists, though, and all of them are deeply worried about the future. I also hang with politicians. Many of them are stupid as a sack of rocks and most of these don't think that climate change is an issue. The others feel their hands are tied because of the stupidity of the other politicians and the general public----and the enormous lethargy and torpor that our incredibly complex economic, legal and political system impose on social change.

What really struck me about the exchange was how totally and completely Shiva and Juan Gonzalez were refusing to listen to what Dyer was saying. They have a vision of why there are problems in the world and any argument or evidence that doesn't fit nicely into that paradigm simply gets trimmed to fit it---like people laying on a Procrustean bed.

I attempt to understand the world around me. I look at the flow of complex interactions and give it a name: "the Dao". And that name is how I identify myself as a religious person to the people I meet. When I watched that interchange between Dyer, Gonzalez and Shiva, I couldn't help but feel like Gonzalez and Shiva had become totally unglued from the Dao and were following some sort of delusion or mirage. It underscores what is probably one of the most important virtues that I honour: the ability to look the truth full on and without bias. I don't suppose this would be considered a Christian virtue, I'm not even sure that it is a traditional Daoist one. But it seems very important to me.

Living Without a Car

In my last post I mentioned that I've taken a vow to never own an automobile. A fellow asked me to write a few words about this, so I'm making the time to do so now.

I tell people that I decided to never own an automobile or fly in an airplane again as part of a pledge to limit my footprint on the earth. It was relatively easy to do both of these things because my interest in travel pretty much died-out at an early age. Moreover, I grew up in a family of traditional peasants from Southern Ontario. People in that class never did travel much because they needed to be present twice a day to take care of their livestock. (Farmer's called it "being tied to their cow's or pig's tail".) In a couple decades of marriage my parents went on one two week vacation to Chatham Ontario, and only because my father had won the trip by selling seed corn and my brother and I were old enough to take care of the chores while they were gone.

Of course, times change. And it is essential for country people to drive cars. I got my driver's license at 16 like everyone else, and did things like drive to movies. But one thing I did do from a much earlier age was drive tractor. And sitting in a tractor seat for 10 hours a day taught me to hate sitting on my butt bored out of my skull. Long distance driving ultimately seemed to be more of the same, so I never really thought that "road trips" were all that cool. That was reinforced by a job that I had one summer for the Ministry of Agriculture---it involved spending 10 hours a day driving down dusty back-roads auditing crops.

What this did for me was dramatically lower any interest I might have had in acquiring a car. Everyone else in my family moved heaven and earth to get their first one, whereas I just built my life around doing without. This meant I tended to live in the older parts of town, which were built before most people bought cars and where it is still possible to live without one. Once in a while I would rent a car, but eventually so many years had gone by without doing this I let my license lapse and can no longer legally drive.

A lot of people find it hard to believe that anyone can live without a car, but this is easily refuted by the fact that many people do. The issue is one of adaptation. Without a car large areas of the community are simply off limits for living, working or shopping. If might be that there is public transit, but unless it is very good---and in many places it isn't---it just isn't worth the hassle. This needn't be quite the problem you might think if you just build your life around it.

I live close enough to work that I walk there every day. I also live close to the down-town, the farmer's market and transit hub. In a world without autos, this would be a "desirable" place to live. It once was, as you can tell by all the once very nice homes that have been converted into cheap apartments and rooming houses. I bought one with another person, which we have converted back into the top/down duplex it once was. We paid a very low price for it, but it needed a lot of work. My friend the Mayor tells me that as the price of energy increases and the city intensifies, our neighbourhood will only improve in value while the more remote suburbs will collapse in value. Paradoxically, in my town the cheapest place to live is the one where it is easiest to live without an auto.

I say "paradoxically" because you save a pant load of money not having a car. The average middle-class person in Canada spends about $8,000 annually on their transportation. Since a bus pass in our town only costs about $72/month, or $864/year, the pass costs a little under one tenth of a car. I don't use a pass because I rarely take the bus and either walk or bike. For larger purchases, I have a bike trailer that I got for $100 (I got a heck of deal by buying a prototype from a person who owns a company that builds them.) For even bigger purchases, I will take a bus and hire a cab to bring home what I've bought. I also bike over to lumber yards and have things delivered. I also have friends with pickup trucks who are usually more than willing to do barter deals where I help them with stuff in exchange for the odd dump run or trip to the building supply store. If worst comes to worst, if you look at the classified advertisements on things like Kiiji or Craig's List, there are always people you can hire with pickups who are willing to do your small jobs for a modest fee.

Needless to say, if you are saving $8,000 a year on not having a car, this gives you a lot of flexibility with regard to other things. This raises an important point, however. Some people see not having a car as a way of avoiding the necessity of making that extra $8,000 per year. In a sense this is true, but people have to remember that it is much, much, much easier to live a modest lifestyle on a middle-class income than on a poverty one. Really poor people can't buy homes in areas where it is easy to live without a car. They can rent, but one of the things that comes from low rent is instability. Land lords that only ask for cheap rent are usually "land banking" the building until they can tear it down and build something new. This means that people on reduced income often find that they have to pack up and move over and over again.

This is not only wearisome and potentially expensive (there are always moving costs---even if it is just goodwill amongst friends), but it stresses the lifestyle you've built up. People who live without cars exist in an ecosystem in the same way that hunter/gathers do. If you move a culture from one area to another, there are problems in that people lose some of the cultural knowledge about where the best hunting, fishing, plant gathering areas, etc are. In the same way, if people have to pack up and move on a regular basis they have a hard time building relationships with neighbours and don't learn important survival skills like where the cheapest necessities are to be had locally.

Another thing to consider when doing without a car is what sort of impact it is going to have on your personal relationships. In North America many family members have adopted lifestyles that are totally car dependent. This means that if you opt out of owning a car you could end up being frozen out of family events like Thanksgiving and Christmas because it is impossible to get to the homes of people hosting these events without an auto. Also, just because you decide to not own a car doesn't mean that any significant others you may have in your life want to do so. This means you run the risk of either "bailing" on these connections or ending up forcing people into becoming your chauffeur. If you do end up relying on others to drive, it is imperative that you make big efforts to show how much you appreciate this by doing things like offering to buy gas, take people out to supper, etc. You are saving a lot of money buy not owning a car, show that you appreciate the help with some of that money saved.

One other thing that you should remember is that it changes your consciousness dramatically when you stop driving. It means that you no longer can do things as spontaneously. You have to plan out your itinerary around transport so you don't end up wasting time on extra trips. It also means that you have to be careful to only buy as much as you can carry on your back or on your bike in one trip. My ex and I really noticed this fact when we got involved. She ran around in her car from place to place and would make plans on the fly. I would carefully think out what I needed and how I was going to organize my trip to get it. The car enabled her to do what she did whereas not having one forced me to do what I do.

Another thing thing people probably won't think about unless they try it, is how not owning a car changes your understanding of velocity. If you drive a lot you get used to several ton objects flying around at very high speeds. This is a very odd and dangerous state of affairs, as our annual accident reports will bear out. If you don't drive or even ride in cars much, you being to start experiencing how very odd this state of affairs is in a visceral fashion.

This means that I am literally afraid of cars. I see them roaring down the street, controlled by people who have precious little control over their emotions and who are not terribly bright or self-conscious. This makes me very careful when I do things like cross the street or ride a bicycle. It also absolutely terrifies me when I ride in a car. I usually try to hide in the back seat and recite mantras in order to avoid freaking out. Unfortunately, people often force me to ride "shot gun" because of their misguided attempt to show me "respect". This makes things even worse. If I don't watch myself, I end up flinching or even crying out at various situations---which bugs the hell out of drivers. Lately, I've developed a strategy that helps by envisioning Daoist immortals flying around the car and defending it. This at least keeps me from freaking, which helps. (I doubt the driver would be helped much though if he knew what I was doing.)

One last point. Part of living without a car has to mean living where it is possible to do so. I read somewhere that during the last big hike in gasoline prices that poor Americans suffered much more than poor Canadians. Poor Canadians tend to live in urban areas and are serviced by public transit. Poor Americans tend to live in rural areas and drive everywhere. I suppose it is possible to live in rural areas without a vehicle, but it would be a lot harder than it is for me to live in the middle of a Canadian city that has done a lot more than most to keep its downtown viable. But then again, choosing where you live is part and parcel of the whole livestyle.

Faith and the Dao

I've devoted a significant amount of my adult life (actually most of it) to working actively to try and prevent things like global warming. Recently I've had to accept that not only is it too late to prevent climate change, it seems clear that the majority of citizens will not take it seriously until we are in the midst of a catastrophe. This means that it is almost impossible for the government to take serious action because if they do, they will replaced in office by some glib moron who is happy to pander to people's wilful ignorance.

The problem confronting me is the extinction of plant and animal species that I believe are remarkably beautiful and have every right to continue to exist for millennia to come. It is also the needless suffering and pain that will be inflicted on billions of people because of drought, flooding, starvation and disease. Contemplating the reality that faces the immediate future of humanity puts me in the same sort of place that used to confront people who were described as having a "crisis of faith".

I've always had a hard time with the notion of "faith". Ultimately, no matter how it was described to me, it seemed to boil down to believing in something that you have a very strong reason to think isn't true. People come up with all sorts of arguments to say why we should do this, but it strikes me that the "leap of faith" in practical terms comes down to people who enjoy something else more than they respect the truth.

The Christians I've met seemed to have faith based predominately on sheer stupidity. Most of them seemed to just have never thought about the issues that would undermine their belief system. But underlying that ignorance I suspect there was for many a deep layer of wilful blindness. They simply had too much of a stake in the Church experience to put any effort into something that would undermine it.

The Buddhists I've met were somewhat different. But it struck me that their faith in things like karma and the illusoriness of life turned out to justify an even more comfortable existence than the Christians. At least Christianity preaches charity and a great many Christians of all stripes do get out and do good work. In contrast, most Buddhists reduce their entire charitable engagement with the world to the single act of teaching meditation. This makes sense in that if you believe that there is nothing but mind, then training the mind is all that is necessary. The result, though, is that most Buddhists tend to not do much of anything at all to make the world a better place. (Of course, this also means that they also don't tend to do anything to make the world a worse place, either. That is no mean feat when you consider the insanity that organized Christianity foists upon the planet.)

Neither one of these types of faith make a lot of sense to me, which puts me at a bit of a disadvantage when it comes to my sense of equanimity. I don't want to walk around obsessing about how the world is going to hell in a hand-basket. But neither do I want to shut off my reasoning facility in order to believe the comforting lie that somehow it is either just an illusion or that at the very end Jesus Christ will make it "all better" through some sort of massive bending of the laws of nature.

The only solution that I've come up with is a Daoist one. I just have to accept that even though it might look like people have the ability to change their behaviour and save the planet, the actual fact is that they can't. People are part of the Dao, and the way the Dao of the Earth is working itself out, people need to create an environmental catastrophe that will shock human civilization into making significant changes. It is sad that in the process many beautiful and wonderful species like monarch butterflies and Siberian tigers will go extinct. It is also sad that millions will drown and starve as Bangladesh subsides under the ocean. But "Heaven and Earth are not kind, they treat people like straw-dogs". The dinosaurs are dead and gone, incinerated by an asteroid. And the peoples of Akkadia and Sumer too are long gone, their people butchered by invading armies.

The source of my sad emotions is the delusion that human consciousness and rationality somehow trumps the machinations of forces that have existed from time immemorial.

The Different Types of Religion

People often express real surprise that when I say that I see a role for religion in our society. To be honest, I often find myself thinking the same thing. But having said that, I can see some worth, in principle, of something even if I myself often find it intensely distasteful in practice.

As I see it, there isn't one single thing that can be described as "religion". Instead, it seems to me that there is a very amorphous, trans-cultural phenomenon that manifests several very different, and often mutually exclusive, tendencies.

One line of tension occurs around the issue of whether one wants to accept people the way they already are versus whether or not they need, for want of a better term, "improvement". Consider, for example, the differences between Buddhism and Fundamentalist Christianity.

In Buddhism, the key issue is whether or not a specific person gains a specific type of wisdom known as "enlightenment". This insight is not granted as any special dispensation by a god, but instead is the result of specific, impersonal laws that govern the entire universe. Everyone is at least potentially able to gain this insight. There are a myriad of different systems for achieving this state, but ultimately everything boils down to a training regime aimed at dramatically changing the mental state of the individual believer. As a result of this emphasis, I would call religions like Buddhism "Wisdom Religions".

In Christianity, however, the issue is one of whether or not one accepts the "atonement" offered by Jesus.

"Atonement" has existed in a lot of different cultures who saw the concept in slightly different ways with a common outcome. In some societies the wrong-doing of an entire community was "transferred" in some way onto one particular being (sometimes an animal, sometimes a human being) which then suffered the consequences of that sin for everyone else (often a painful death). Another way of looking at it is to suggest that the sins of an entire group of people have amassed a "sin deficit" with the Gods. This deficit is paid, not be taxing each and every individual but by using up the entire life of one person. Yet another way of looking at it is to see the Gods as being annoyed with human behaviour, which means that they need to be "bought off" with a bribe. For example, supposedly the Gods of the Mediterranean area (Jehova, Zeus, etc) like the smell of blood and burning meat, so sacrifices were offered in order to get the "powers that be" to "look the other way" when the community screwed-up mightily (which, of course, was all the time.)

This atonement idea is very old and has manifested itself in many different cultures. In Iron Age Europe, for example, people used to murder individuals and bury their bodies in peat bogs as human sacrifices.

(Presumably the Northern Europeans thought of these bogs as portals to the Godly realm.) China also has a history of both animal and human sacrifice, but being a practical people, very early on they decided to cut out the "middle-man" and simply pay off their gods with money. This resulted in the creation of "Hell Banknotes" which have existed in China as long as currency. The idea is that you burn them in a fire and the smoke goes to the other world and pays off the Gods. You can buy these bills at most Chinese import stores.

Christianity is an outgrowth of this atonement type of religion in that Jesus assumed all the sins of the entire human race, was tortured to death, and, as a result, members of the Christian community have their "sins washed away in the blood of the lamb".

On the face of it, this is a totally absurd idea in that it assumes that a person's misdeeds are something like a financial debt that can be paid off by another person. (I once had a fellow tell me that if Hitler accepted Jesus Christ on his death bed he would go straight to Heaven. In contrast, a man who lived like a complete Saint all his life but did not "accept Jesus" would go straight to Hell.) Obviously, most people do not see crime and punishment in these terms, or else we would settle all criminal cases through the payment of fines. Billionaires like Bill Gates would literally be able to get away with murder! If this idea is offensive to most people---why would we accept the idea that Christ on the cross as somehow making other people's behaviour "OK"?

But that is only if we look at it from a purely personal point of view.

More than anything else, atonement religions are about building a sense of community. The New Testament has a great many things in it, but one of the stronger threads talks about what the group of believers should be like. (Traditionally the translation is as "the Kingdom of God", but the Jesus Seminar chose to translate the term as "God's Imperial Domain" which I like a lot better because the "Kingdom of God" emphasizes the rulership of God whereas when I think of "God's Imperial Domain" I think more of the duties of citizenship.) This is the focus of several parables, such as the one that compares God's Imperial Domain to a mustard seed that grows into a tree and the other that says it is like yeast hidden in dough.

The important idea is that the small, insignificant, and humble becomes an important force in society---like a weed seed growing into a large tree or yeast making bread grow. The same sort of thing comes out of the "Sermon on the Mount". Consider the following:

"Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.

Christ is saying that the weak, powerless, insignificant are actually the real "players" in society. They are the ones who have the ear of God and who are on the "fast track to success".

This has tremendous implications for someone who wants to build a community. Before anything else, it means that a Christian church is not an elitist institution. It can open its doors to any and all who seek to enter. Moreover, because all the real "heavy lifting" of the religion is done by Jesus---through atonement---it means that the expectations for anyone joining are very minimal. Contrast this with a Buddhist Sangha, where the expectation is that the individual is psychologically prepared to submit to a very stringent set of monastic rules and undergo a very disciplined life of meditation. The Christian message is bound to attract more "bums in the pews" than the Buddhist one.

The second thing about an atonement religion is that it sets the members of that particular group at odds with "the Other". All atonement religions are, almost by definition, "chosen people". This is because they have entered into a contract with the powers that be through buying into the act of atonement. This is different from a wisdom religion, in that even though it has a stringent "entry price", the group itself doesn't believe that it is entitled to have any sort of privileged role in society. Buddhists seek wisdom, but are willing to accept that there are other paths to that same wisdom. Christians, instead, believe that Christ's atonement is the only way to achieve salvation. Wisdom religions, therefore, are cosmopolitan whereas salvation religions are parochial.

This stuff about "atonement" might seem a little hard to believe, but it is actually very powerful stuff for many people. The reason why is the same as why so many movies have violence in them. That is to say, when you see the depiction of violence (e.g. explosions, gun battles, fist-fights, etc) your nervous system kicks into action, your adrenal system kicks in, and you go into a heightened state of arousal (e.g. "fight or flight".) In an atonenment religion when the tribe dragged a human sacrifice to the altar and killed them in front of everyone, everyone felt a vicarious thrill as they participated in the act---even if as just spectators. The same sort of thing still has power in todays society as was witnessed when Mel Gibson produced a movie about the torture and execution of Jesus Christ. In a sense, the atonement religion makes sense because the heightened adrenal reaction is a type of "altered state of consciousness" which many people will crave.

There are, of course, other ways of creating a group venue for this sort of heightened awareness. A religious group can have an orgy. Or it can give its members hallucingenic drugs. Or it can have something far less drastic---like holding a series of exercises in bonding---like church dinners, musical events, work "bees", charity drives, etc. But either way, the point is that some sort of collective experience takes place where people's emotions are channelled in a way that allows the individual to bond with the group.

In my own case, because of my loopy childhood, a part of me has always been seeking a sense of "belonging". I remember when I started going to the Unitarian Church that I was profoundly moved by the way people honestly welcomed me into the congregation. After I joined the congregation, however, it eventually became clear to me that I have precious little in common with the other members of the community, which sent me back to being a hermit.

People are social animals. And the only way that our society is able to make progress is if people join together in groups to work together. And the only way I've seen to get people to do this is if we use emotional attachment to do so. And this, in a nutshell, is what I see organized religions doing. The problem comes when the content of the religion is counter-productive: people get brought together to build a community devoted to doing profoundly stupid things. I suppose what I would like to see is some sort of religion that was able to bring together people the way an atonement religion does but then went on to teach them how to better themselves like a wisdom religion does.

This has become a long, rambling post. I've already put too much time into it, so I think I'll just post it. This is supposed to be a diary, so I hope readers won't mind if some of the posts are not much more than thinking out loud.

Life is fleeting---

I enjoy playing around with plants. This year a friend from work gave me some Datura seeds that have grown into some handsome plants in my patio. Yesterday I had a beautiful bloom in the morning.



But the thing about datura blooms is that they are very short-lived. So I took some pictures of them as the day progressed. They add up to being a bit of a metaphor for the transitoriness of life.



Like most people, when I was young it seemed that life could go on forever or at least for a very long time. As someone is who is now past middle-age, however, life seems to me more like a candle that is very quickly burning itself out. I suppose the reason why it seems this way is because as we grow old we gain more and more personal experience. When we compare this to today's events, the days seem relatively shorter because they become a smaller and smaller percentage of our life.



A related effect is that when I was young I was more concerned about the individual than the collective. When it seemed like I was going to live forever, my life was the most important thing. But now that I feel like a candle that merely burns for a small period of time, I more and more find myself concerned about "passing on" the flame of my life to illuminate others. (Amongst other things, that is why I bother to work on this blog.) This is a common thing in people's lives and I notice that the academic library where I work almost always has senior citizens working on historical research in order to keep the past alive for future generations.



One of the reasons why I am disengaging from politics is to find the time---while I still can---to try and share what little I have learned about Daoism with future generations. It would seem a shame to let all the endless hours of work that I have spent in study and practice fall away simply because I couldn't find the time to teach. This is especially important because Daoism is in danger of either disappearing through lack of interest or being horribly polluted by the terrible teachers that have recently appeared. I shall try if for no other reason but to honour the memory of the teachers that I have taught me.



Human effort is by its nature short-lived. Once the blossom has fallen there is nothing more that it can do. Then it is all up to future generations.

The world will not end---

I went to a family get together last week and while there I noticed something extremely surprising. One of my nieces handed my brother-in-law a copy of the Al Gorevideo "An Inconvenient Truth". Later on, I noticed that all of my family was engaged in a variety of animated discussions about global warming and the need to make big changes in our lives. It seems that after 30 years the penny has finally dropped with my family. Moreover, if I can believe the polls, it looks like the same thing can be said about the rest of Canadian society.

Oddly enough, I didn't really know how to take this. Probably as a result, I went through a period of depression (or as the Jesuits would say "desolation".) Yesterday I finally finished the A.C. Graham translation of Liezi and it finally dawned on me that I can walk away from environmentalism with a clear conscience. This is not merely an empty realization, as I went to a meeting that night and bowed out of a commitment that I had made to take on a position of responsibility in an upcoming very important political campaign.

As a Daoist, I have always believed that it is insane to wear yourself out in the pursuit of personal gain. I have also developed a very jandiced view of most forms of altruism---most of which strike me as being a the result of a form of blindness not terribly different from that which motivates most venal acts. For example, I once took it upon myself to try and help a homeless young woman only to find out that she was the author of almost all of her own misfortunes and any help that she received from family, friends or the government only served to "enable" her self-destructive behaviour. In retrospect, I realised that my attempts to help were motivated by my own equally dumb conditioned responses. (Namely, the folly of putting yourself into another's shoes. In actual fact, most people are very different from each other and empathy is almost always delusional.)

But I have always thought that the environment is different. It strikes me that it is a crime against nature and future generations to damage the ecosystem. In retrospect, I now realize that I was also afraid that we would end up killing off the human race. A lot of people I meet in the environmental movement say that this wouldn't be such a big deal, but I have always believed that they were simply lying to themselves to appear "cool" or to simply win a debate. Perhaps this fear of human extinction was a form of displaced fear of my own mortality, but either way it was my primary motivation for the huge effort I have put into ecological politics for the last two decades.

But now I realize that the extinction of the human race is probably not a real consequence of global warming. A population crash is possible, and people are already dying from the effects of climate change. But extinction is simply not in the cards. Instead, the fight is for both the plants and animals; and the individuals who will suffer greatly from things like hotter heat waves, longer droughts, and the flooding that will happen when the polar caps melt. (Good bye Bangladesh--.)

This is sad, but it is not really all that different from other human disasters. Plagues, famines, wars, and so forth have been the lot of humanity ever since it first became civilized. (These were all grim realities when the Daoist masters Laozi, Zhuangzi and Liezi were writing.) I have done my bit at trying to raise people's consciousness and it is now up to them. I will now turn my back on the environmental community. My duty is done and I can now pursue my true love, which is following the Dao.

More Depressing News

I was listening to an engineer on the CBC yesterday and he made an off-hand remark that was stunningly obvious, yet which I had never heard anyone say before, and, which has tremendous implications for all of humanity.

This guy made the point that since natural carbon sequestration (i.e. the process by which carbon is taken out of the atmosphere, trapped chemically and then deposited in the earth's crust) is incredibly slow by human standards, if we are ever going to stop a runaway greenhouse effect, the human race is not only going to have to stop increasing the amount of CO2 it is emmitting every year, it is eventually going to have to reduce its total emmissions by an astounding 97%! That's right, only 3% of present emmissions get sequestered every year, according to this fellow's calculations.

Now I suspect that this fellows assertions were a bit overblown, simply because it strikes me that it would be incredibly difficult to come up with a number for the amount of carbon sequestration over the entire planet. But when you think about it, all through the history of the earth there has been some pretty intense recycling of carbon, with the only significant imput of new carbon coming from volcanos and the odd comet strike. What this would mean to me is that the CO2 that gets sucked up and turned into coal or limestone must be pretty small per year or else carbon would have become a pretty scarce commodity. So if his precise number is suspect, I don't think his general idea is.

This means that all the fighting and squawking that is going on with regard to Kyoto is just the begining of a very long fight to reduce our collective impact on the planet.

The Tory Green Plan and Despair

The media has been all abuzz with the latest government plan for dealing with global climate change. As was expected, the Conservatives have come up with a program that really doesn't take the issue seriously. I was watching the CBC news last night and the usual morality play came on one more time. The government economists said that the economy cannot afford to follow the Kyoto Accord, and the climate scientist pointed out that Kyoto was supposed to be only the first step and much more has to happen beyond it if we are going to avoid a tremendous catastrophe.

As someone who has spend most of his life trying to help the human race avoid collective suicide, my later years are becoming a horror. No matter how hard my friends and I scream, the "powers that be" seem incapable of listening. I've attempted to be very careful through this process. I've bitten my tongue, tried to be "upbeat" and "positive", etc---even though part of me wants to get angry and hit everyone who lives their life as if there is no problem at all.

I wish I had the sort of religious faith of a Christian who can go through life in the assumption that nothing we do on earth really matters and the great "Daddy in the sky" will set everything right. But that simply seems like a cop-out to me. At times the one thing that does give me some release is to remember Zhuangzi's meditation on the issue of scale. If we remember that the life of humanity is a tiny pimple on the butt of the earth; and that the earth itself is a tiny planet around an average star, in an obscure corner of an average galaxy, in a universe that is so huge and so old that it is impossible for humanity to understand. And moreover, that our universe may simply be one of an infinite number that exist; and that it may simply be one that was created in a big bang only to collapse and be recreated in an infinite number of big bangs.

Well, then, we simply are just frogs sitting in a well thinking that we are everything. But I cannot help but care about what shape this well is going to be in for the tadpoles that are still swimming in the water---.

Yin and Yang, versus Good and Evil

I just got off the phone with a friend who was concerned about a recent agreement between the leaders of the Green Party and the Liberals. To make a long story short, the leaders of both parties have agreed to not run candidates against each other in the next election.

My friend was concerned that this agreement was undemocratic because it bypasses the Electoral District Associations of both parties. I'm not a big fan of giving too much power to "supreme leaders", but I see the issue in a significantly different way. I see it as two people who are very, very concerned about the future of the planet and who have agreed to take a tentative step towards a "government of national unity" during a time of crisis. The government did exactly the same thing during WWII---which the leader of the Liberals specifically referred to as an precedent. It's too bad we don't have a system of proportional representation which would assure that Greens would get elected to Parliament. (The latest poll numbers I can find say that the party is running at 11%, which would give it a lot of seats under proportional representation.) But under the current system this is at least a gesture in the right direction.

As I see it, the problem my friend had was that she was seeing the world in terms of "Good" versus "Evil", whereas I was looking at it from the point of view of "Yin" and "Yang". As I see it, our political system is too darn Yang, and any attempt to reduce the partisanship and build consensus is a move towards balance. (When I was in on the board of directors for the Green Party I viewed it as being far too "Yin", which is why I fought tooth and nail for it to be more professional and rigorous.)

As I see it, Daoism teaches us to through away ideas that a situation is "right" and instead askes us to think in terms of "appropriate". I think our political leaders could all use a little more thought in those terms.

The Button Problem

Years ago I saw a “Twilight Zone” episode titled “Button, Button” that I cannot get out of my mind. It involved a couple with money “problems” that had a visit from a mysterious stranger who delivered a mechanism with a big button and offered them a proposition. If they pushed the button, two things would happen: they would receive $200,000 cash, and, a complete stranger would be killed. After considerable debate, the wife pushes the button. The next day the stranger returns, hands her the cash and informs her that the button will be reprogrammed and given to someone who “doesn't know her either”.

The reason I cannot get this television program out of my head is because that button exists and just about everyone in our society pushes it every day.

Let me illustrate with an example.

Last week I met with some friends for a celebration and conversation got around to travel. It appears that just about everyone there spends a fair amount of their vacation time jetting around the planet. Oddly enough, one of the people there used to make a living doing complex fuel calculations for airlines. He tells me that flying is just about the most fossil fuel intensive thing any individual does in our society. (In fact, he told me that it is common for an airliner to burn through $5,000 in fuel just taxiing around the airport before it gets into the air.)

One of the things that the UN climate change panel predicts, but which hasn't been reported much by the media, is that if global climate change causes the destruction of the Greenland ice cap, sea levels are expected to rise by as much as 7 meters. (They have already gone up by 20 centimeters simply because of thermal expansion.) Just one example of the consequences of only a 1 meter rise would be that 13% of Bangladesh would be under water, which would displace 15 million people and severely damage its rice crop.

The button is being pushed every time someone gets into an airplane and the person that isn't known is some peasant in Bangladesh.

The important issue is that my friends are very, very good people. They would never put a gun to the head of a peasant and blow his brains out. But they are not making a connexion between their behaviour and the environmental consequences. This is the moral conundrum of our age. As a society, how can we convince people to take moral responsibility for the consequences of their behaviour when the results are not only not in plain sight but can happen on the other side of the world to people we've never met and may even happen long after we are dead?

Laozi warns us that the Dao is indifferent to human suffering (i.e. that people are of no more value than "straw dogs".) This means that unless we consciously choose to live lives of moral integrity there is no "Daddy in the sky" who will make it all "OK". It is up to us, each and every moment of each and every day.