"Guided Meditation", Hypnosis, and, Sitting and Forgetting

I sometimes go to "meditation" sessions organised by various religious groups and I am often appalled by the confused ideas people have about "meditation". One of the things that especially bugs me is what goes by the name "guided meditation".

For those of you who have not heard of this, it consists of people sitting and relaxing while a group leader narrates some sort of scenario to the people sitting and relaxing. Sometimes it involves getting people to visualise breathing in "white energy" and breathing out "black energy". At other times it involves visualising a walk with Jesus. The last time I was at one of these things, it was suggested that we feel some "loving energy" go from our hearts into the earth---in order to heal it. (There was an environmental theme to the church service that week.)

Several things disturb me about this activity.

First of all, it is based on a world-view that seems to accept the existence of a dangerous type of self-delusion. That is, that our personal emotional states have some direct impact on the physical world around us. The problem with this idea is that it is manifestly false. Contrary to the New Testament, faith cannot directly move a physical mountain. Nor can it fix a flat tire or a broken leg. And it most certainly is not going to end global climate change!

What it can do is get an individual or a group of people to work on a specific task that might seem beyond their ability. Faith can inspire a nation to work together and then they can move mountains. The evidence for this is all around us---from the pyramids of Giza and Central America to the cathedrals of Europe.

The problem is when people confuse these two things and substitute the former for the latter. It is one thing to share a vision of a better world and let that inspire an individual or community to work at some great goal. It is another altogether to suggest that having the vision is some sort of action in and of itself. The Notre Dame cathedral was built, in a sense, by faith. But it was also build by the hard work of hundreds of masons working over generations.

And this raises another of the problems with guided meditations. They usually suggest that people develop their faith without bothering to explain what exactly people are supposed to have faith in. This means that pretty much the entire edifice of Eastern religious wisdom gets left behind in favour of some sort of vague "positive think" spirituality that has more in common with Amway than the Dao or eightfold path.

Most of the time this boils down to some sort of vacuous version of "love conquers all". This invariably means that all people have to do is experience a specific type of emotion as much of the time as possible, and avoid anything that might be "negative", that the world will spontaneously become a better place. The practical result is a person who refuses to do any of the heavy lifting required for social transformation---which invariably involves nasty stuff like debate and struggle.

At worst, this sort of things results in some sort of guru worship or some other form of abuse of the self by the person behind the calm voice offering instruction.

This raises the last thing that really disturbs me about this practise: it seems to be not a heck of a lot different than hypnosis.

The popular notion about hypnosis is that some sort of mysterious power allows someone to "put" someone else into a "trance" that then allows the hypnotist to force them to do things that they would never have been able to do otherwise. My understanding is that this is a completely false picture. Instead, what seems to happen is that the "hypnosis experience" is a sort of social role that individuals can enter into and which allows them to loosen up the conventions that restrict the way people allow themselves to act.

When a stage hypnotist, therefore, gets someone to cluck like a chicken, he is not putting a person into a trance and getting him to actually become a chicken. Instead, he is convincing the person that he is now "hypnotised" and a "hypnotised" person clucks like a chicken when he is told that he is now a chicken. He is not entering a complex and new state of poultry-hood, however, he is just having the social convention of "act like a grown-up" removed and replaced by the social convention that now says "it's OK to pretend now, like you did when you were a child".

In the same way, when a hypnotist tells someone to "release a blocked memory", they are telling the subject that "it's OK to fantasise now". (Hence all the horrible stories of people convicted of ritual Satanic abuse---even when no physical evidence exists to support the victim statements.)

This is not to say that hypnosis is a bogus phenomenon. It actually exists, and it has significant value in some situations. The problem comes from people who come to it with a naive psychological world view that assumes that each of us is some sort of Cartesian individual mind totally isolated from everyone else in the world. Instead, a more nuanced approach is to understand that each of us lives in a cultural context where the way we think, talk and experience the world around us is mediated by the set of rules that we learned when we were very young and are still learning every moment of our lives. People get "hung up" by the way their cultural complexes influence their internal life. The ability to enter into the "hypnotic subculture" often allows people a way of "rebooting" their lives by letting them find a culturally safe way of redefining who they are.

From a meditative point of view, however, the point of spiritual practice is not to sculpt our cultural conditioning into different forms. Instead, the job is to cut through it altogether in order to connect with the Truth. (Or at, least, get to a closer approximation of it.) This cultural conditioning is what the man who practices "sitting and forgetting" is supposed to be "forgetting". It is the Maya that the Hindu Yogi and the Buddhist nun are supposed to be cutting through. The realized man does not become so by having someone else insert some sort of vacuous statement about the need for "universal love", or "positive think", or "mind over matter" into his consciousness. He becomes enlightened by entering into the void that exists when we strip away all that social conditioning and see the world (and his being) as it truly is.

Traditional Chinese Medicine

I sometimes hear from people who assume that because I am a Daoist that I am a fan of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM). I suspect that the hidden assumption is that TCM must be grounded in Daoism, so anyone who studies the Dao should have some affinity to it. While I will admit that I haven't done a lot of study of TCM, but that doesn't mean that I don't have a negative opinion about it.

The first thing that I think people should understand is that not everything that comes from Chinese culture is "Daoist". Both Roman Catholicism and Western medicine have their origins in Europe, yet we would never assume that Roman Catholicism would have anything to do with Western medicine, or vice-versa, would we?

More importantly, I think we need to understand that TCM comes from a pre-scientific tradition. That means that none of it has fallen under the careful, collective scrutiny that our Western medicine has. Some parts of it probably works, but most of it is probably about as effective as medieval European medicine was. Lest people take issue with this, I would direct their attention to the following URLs.

The first, "Be Wary of Acupuncture, Qigong and Traditional Chinese Medicine", comes from the excellent medical website known as "quackwatch" and gives a very good overview of TCM. The next two come from the excellent publication known as the "Skeptical Inquirer", and are titled "Traditional Medicine and Pseudo-Science in China" , and a second part article in another issue. At least from these three essays, it seems that there are very good reasons to suspect that a large amount of TCM is worthless or worse.

Some folks might be scandalized to hear someone who calls himself a Daoist---and a religious Daoist at that---being so dismissive of this sort of thing. I would argue, however, that this is because so many people have fallen for the fallacious idea that the age of an idea gives it merit. "Ancient Chinese wisdom" is probably the phrase that comes to mind. But the fact of the matter is that this appeal to age is not much more than an old-fashioned appeal to authority. And Daoists have always been notorious for deflating appeals to authority.

The other thing to remember is that contrary to what people might think, Daoism is not really that ancient. Confucianism---which really is a faith that revers the old---existed long before Daoism. And its real claim to fame (i.e. as "the school of Ru", or "rujia"----which is the better way of describing Confucians---is based upon their knowledge of ancient esoterica, most notably the rites and rituals of the Zhou and Shang.) In fact the rujia existed before there was, by definition, any sort of "Ancient Chinese Wisdom" simply because it was only later, after the ascendency of the Chin empire, that the word "China" came to describe the area and civilization complex.

And if we are going to be totally honest, China is not even the oldest civilisation on Earth. That honour goes to Europe, which can trace its written history back to the Egyptians and Sumerians---both of which have literature that exists to this day because our scholars have learned how to read both some types of cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphs. People who might balk at this assertion have to realise that "China" has gone through as many dramatic changes as Europe has. The geography has changed back and forth (hence the debate about whether or not Tibet is part of "China".) Its written language has changed so much that modern Chinese readers have about as much hope of understanding Zhuangzi in the original text as I had in reading "Beowulf" when I was at university.

In the face of this extensive history, "Daoism" only stretches back a small way. For example, tradition gives the dates for Laozi in the 6th century BC---about four hundred years after the founding of the Zhou dynasty and over a thousand after the founding of the Shang. Moreover, the founder of the Celestial Master movement, Zhang Daoling, was extant in the second century of the present era---which makes the religion slightly younger than Christianity and only slightly older than Islam.

Moreover, the Immortal most associated with the development of internal alchemy, Zhang Sanfeng, and the legendary creator of taijiquan, is said to have been born as either as early as 960 or as late as 1279 AD. By definition, this makes him not an "ancient", but rather a "medieval". In effect, the founder of neidan was a contemporary of Saint Boniface, Thomas Aquinas or someone who lived between them.

In contrast, if we were to look at the roots of "traditional Western Medicine" (if such a thing existed), we would probably go back to people like Hippocrates (460-370 BC), who coined the oath that Western doctors take to this day. We should also include rationalists like Socrates (469-399 BC) and Aristotle (384-322 BC), who are often called the inventors of the scientific method. So if age is the only criteria to use for accepting something, then "Ancient European wisdom" has as much right to our allegiance as "Ancient Chinese wisdom". And given the choice, I'll opt for double-blind studies over the Yellow Emperor's Classic.


The thing to remember is that Daoism is not about preserving tradition. Instead, it is about finding the truth.

Living in a Dream

A while back I wrote a post about the "episodic" nature of human existence. This was an attempt to explain one of those prosaic things with very profound implications that comes to a person as a result of internal alchemy. That is, in case you can't be bothered to read the original post, that our experience of self-consciousness doesn't exist in a continuous stream but rather in isolated bits connected by our memories. As the Buddhists would say, we have no real experience of an ego, just individual moments when various sense experiences come together and become self-referential. (This is the doctrine of "anatta".)

To build on this point, however, it is important to understand that the illusion of self comes from the ability of memory to tie together these transitory self-referential experiences and suggest that they are bound together like the beads on a rosary.

The complexity resides in the fact that memory itself is a phenomenon that simply cannot be trusted to give us an accurate description of the past.

Most people have the naive idea that our memories exist like some sort of video tape recorder that records our experiences and stores them somewhere where they can be retrieved more-or-less the same way we had them in the first place. This is not true at all, however. Indeed, it turns out that memories can be constructed through suggestion.


Take for example the famous case of the Swiss psychologist Piaget. He had a very vivid memory of an attempted kidnapping where unknown attackers were fought off by his nanny.

"I can still see, most clearly, the following scene, in which I believed until I was about fifteen. I was sitting in my pram, which my nurse was pushing in the Champs Elysees, when a man tried to kidnap me. I was held in by the strap fastened round me while my nurse bravely tried to stand between me and the thief. She received various scratches and I can still see vaguely those on her face. Then a crowd gathered, a policeman with a cloak and a white baton came up, and the man took to his heels. I can still see the whole scene, and can even place it near the tube station."

It turns out, however, that Piaget's memory was totally false. Years after the fact his nanny spontaneously confessed that for some reason she had made the entire episode up. Piaget could only surmise that his vivid recollection could only be the result of the many times he had heard her repeat the story to others.


A lot of sad stories exist about how our naive understanding of memory has resulted in terrible persecution of innocent people. Take a look at this very informative essay by an expert in field to see how easy it is for a "therapist" to convince people that they have memories about things that simply did not take place. This might be just an interesting piece of information if it did not also come with the knowledge that a great many people have been wrongfully accused and convicted of crimes they never committed. See this modern example. Pick away a bit more at this thought and consider the following: a great many people are convicted by eye-witness testimony at criminal trials. But as the above links show, memory can be very easily manipulated by police and others simply by the way they conduct their interviews with people. Lest people still believe that they know what they see, take a look at the video at this link.


If it is possible to have totally false memories planted in our minds simply because someone else strongly suggests that they did in fact happen, and that even when we are distracted we can miss a great deal, then we should be really careful when we consider our own self-image. Is our perception of what happened to us in the past an accurate record of what really happened? Or is it some sort of conditioned reflex that comes from the culture we inhabit?

I know in my case I sometimes have to watch myself with my memory because I have extremely vivid dreams. The issue is that these dreams seem so real that I begin to think of them as events that really have happened to me. For example, I have a very strong memory of going fishing once when I was a child and seeing a tanker truck emptying its load into a crystal clear stream with fish in it. It seems like a memory, yet I cannot for the life of me remember a time, place or opportunity where I could have possibly seen this thing happen. (I grew up on a dreary farm and my childhood consisted of work and very little else.)

There are several very famous stories in Daoist literature about dreams, perhaps the greatest being Zhuangzi's inability to tell if he were a philosopher dreaming he was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming he was a philosopher. I suspect that most people see this as an amusing story, but I suspect that if we really did think about the relationship between dreams and our consciousness we'd be really, deeply disturbed. Most of us go through our lives without having this point deeply affect us. But the mindfulness that comes from neidan practice points out the ultimate hallucinatory experience of being alive.

I once took a very strong dose of magic mushrooms and experienced the full gamut of what we normally call "hallucinations". Two things really stood out. The first was sitting on my bed and watching my alarm clock running backwards. The second was some sort of strange "self evident" realisation that it was patently absurd to be afraid of dying. The more I think about that experience and the really powerful role that my dreams have in the way I look at the world, the more I question the self-evident facts of my personal existence. I suspect that a fully realised man might have his "common sense" so shaken by this sort of thing that he no longer experiences the world around him in a similar way to ordinary folks.

The Sage is not Humane

One of the chapters of the Dao De Jing that "new age" people rarely quote is number five---the one that compares people to "straw dogs".

Heaven and Earth are not benevolent.
To them men are like straw dogs destined for sacrifice.
The Man of Calling is not benevolent.
To him men are like straw dogs destined for sacrifice.
The space between Heaven and Earth
is like a flute:
empty, and yet it does not collapse;
when moved more and more emerges from it.
But many words exhaust themselves on it.
It is better to guard the 'within'.

Richard Wilhelm trans.

I've been thinking a lot about the issues behind the first half of this chapter lately. I've been ruminating about a prediction by James Lovelock that says that by the year 2100 80% of the human race will be dead because of runaway climate change.

A while back I decided that the actual death of all these people (mainly through starvation, disease and war caused by them) is ultimately irrelevent. After all, we all die in one---mostly unpleasant---way or another. What bothered me more is the idea that we would enter into some sort of terrible dark age, which would set back human progress at best for a long time and at worst forever.

It occurred to me lately, however, that this is a real misread of humanity. It assumes that people will share and share alike until everything is gone. Reading history quickly disabused me of that notion. People are quite happy to spend resources on luxuries (like the internet) while millions of unfortunates are starving outside the walls. And the fact of the matter is that modern technological civilization is very good at killing people who do not have the same sorts of weaponry. So once the wall has been built, there will be little chance that it will ever be breached.

In addition, it seems to me that if it does become clear that climate change is now out of control due to positive feedback, that debate is going to quickly centre on methods by which mankind can directly intervene to reverse the warming effect. People are already talking about this seriously, and it appears that some methods would be inexpensive enough for middle-sized countries to attempt. (These include things like seeding the clouds with light-reflecting sulfur dust.)

Of course, any sensible person should be loathe to start monkeying-around with the global climate when we are in the midst of a crazy unconscious experiment already. But having screwed-up nature, people are going to have to start learning how to jury-rig the system to keep some of us alive. At the same time, hopefully, people will begin to appreciate what used to exist and make an equal effort to restore the natural systems wherever possible. So if Lovelock is right, and the Sahara Desert jumps over the Mediterranean and engulfs Southern Europe, whomever is still around will hopefully be planting trees in order to reverse the trend.

Having worked through the depressing first half of the DDJ's fifth chapter, I think I begin to understand the second:

The space between Heaven and Earth
is like a flute:
empty, and yet it does not collapse;
when moved more and more emerges from it.
But many words exhaust themselves on it.
It is better to guard the 'within'.

This is a statement of faith in the Dao by the enlightened sage. The Daoist doesn't labour under a sort of "Pollyanna" viewpoint---he understands that there is no God above who cares about what happens to anyone here on earth. (Looking around at the misery that surrounds us should disabuse anyone of that fantasy.) But the sage can also see that both nature and human society (e.g. the "space between Heaven and Earth"), for all their problems, don't seem to be willing to collapse. No matter what sort of catastrophes befall the Earth, people still find some way of responding with energy and creativity.

Lovelock himself seems to embody this attitude. Even though he is making the most pessimistic of predictions, he is still full of optimism and believes that when the catastrophies begin to pile up those individuals who are lucky enough to have a fighting chance of survival will be united by a real sense of purpose. The way he explains this is in reference to when he was young during the Second World War---"everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday". (Kind of a tough holiday for the Jews, Russians, etc, though.)

While I don't know if I would describe the painful demise of 80% of the human race as "one long holiday", I do understand what he is getting at. As the "Old Ones" suggest, there is no sense 'exhausting oneself with words'. It makes a lot more sense to 'guard the within'. As someone who has spend decades of my life trying to warn people about the coming era of horror, it just seems more important to guard my within and have some faith in the people around me to come up with some sort of solution when the problem becomes inavoidably obvious.

Perhaps the hardest task that confronts the internal alchemist is to give up his humanity. Yet this is a task that confronts all who leave the land of dust and walk the path that leads to realisation.

The Humble Things That Help Us Grow

I've been busy for a while doing the sorts of things a hermit does in the summer and it occurred to me how important they can be for a spiritual life. In fact, this thought came while I was picking red currants off the bush that grows in my neighbour's boulevard.

My lower back was a little painful and I was a bit bored, but my cat was dancing around me (she loves it when I'm out doing yard work) and I was listening to the birds and street noise. It takes a long time to pick these tiny little berries and in this case it took me about two hours to fill a little basket. And that little basket, in turn, only created enough jelly to fit one pint jar.

Of course, this makes absolutely no economic sense. But it does teach me the lesson of patience and it reminds me about how much work goes into food. I try to remain mindful of this fact, and to that point I have a poem from Journey to the West taped up on the wall over my kitchen table:

Hoeing millet in the noon-day sun,
Sweat drips on the ground beneathe the millet.
Who understands that of the food that's in the bowl,
Every single grain was won through bitter toil?

A few days later I put up a year's supply of peach chutney. Again, there is a lot of work to do, but it centres me and puts me back in touch with nature.


Also, when I preserve my own food, it allows me to eat stuff that simply cannot be purchased in the stores and which I know full well how it is made. If I was very rich, I could buy red currant jelly and peach chutney from a very expensive food store---but for most people this stuff is simply unobtainable unless you make it yourself.

More to the point, it gives me an ability to live much more "rooted" in my local environment than other folks who eat everything from a system that removes them totally from producers and the world around them.


A naive person can look at all the work and just see meagre results. But I see the embodiment of my attempt to live a life of integrity in a specific place, at a specific time---instead of being yet another modern man who is totally cut off from the world around him.

In the last part of the book of Liezi, he leaves his master and decides to live a simple life that includes taking care of his farm and helping his wife with her housework. Once he does this and stops looking for enlightenment, he finally becomes a realized man.

People seek to gain amazing spiritual powers through heroic acts of meditation and asceticism, through arcane rituals and by seeking enlightened masters. But I think that the road to wisdom comes from learning to accept a little boredom and being happy with little things like a jar of home-made jam.

Karma, Fate and Post Traumatic Stress Disorder

A while back I heard a fascinating radio documentary about how the events of our childhood influence the development of our nervous system. Basically, it suggested that our patterns of behaviour---both psychological and physiological---are shaped by the experiences that we have from infancy up until young adulthood. The science of this is pretty well established and includes both statistical studies of human beings and animal model studies with rats and monkeys.

I can attest to this fact by my own experience.

I suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and was in therapy for years to deal with it. In my case, the most obvious symptoms it manifested were wild re-occurring nightmares (which did cease after treatment.) Unfortunately, there are other, more subtle symptoms, which will probably be with me as long as I live. These include a propensity to having a volcanic temper (it may just be aging, but I think that this is also subsiding) and a significant, pervasive distrust of both other people and the future in general.

Just to give you a flavour of what it is like, it involves things like feeling very weird to sit in a strange room with my back to the door. It also involves constantly thinking that a new acquaintance is trying to "pull a fast one" one way or another. I also get the "creeps" whenever I am too physically close to another person (when I go shopping at the Farmer's Market I usually have a strong urge to run out of the place as quickly as possible.) One final thing, I never seem able to take anything in the physical world for granted: I am always afraid that when I do home renovation that the wiring will burn the house down, the pipes will leak or the building will collapse.

The people who were quoted on the radio documentary made the point that these "symptoms" shouldn't be viewed as some sort of "illness", but instead as "adaptation strategies" that may not be appropriate in our context. If someone grows up in a chaotic society where it really isn't a good idea to trust strangers---let's say Somalia---then my "Post Traumatic Stress Disorder" would help me survive. But for someone living in the "peaceable kingdom" of Canada, it means that I am constantly putting people "off" and missing opportunities that fall into my lap.

If the radio documentary is right, these secondary symptoms will stick with me because they are not something that has been done to my mind, but rather are intrinsic to the way my brain developed. Post-traumatic stress disorder is not like the wound that is caused when an axe hits a tree, it is more like what happens to a tree when it grows bent over because a heavy object is holding it down. Patch a wound in the bark, and it will eventually heal. Take away the weight holding a full-grown tree bent over, and it will never straighten up.

While contemplating my personal experience plus the evidence from scientific research, I was drawn into thinking about what all of this has to say about the ideas of karma and fate.

Most people are vaguely aware of the idea of karma. Usually folks think that it refers to the idea that when we do something bad we will be punished for it in the future. The reason we have the poor and suffering is because they did evil in a previous life.

My reading in Buddhism tells me that this is a misunderstanding of a subtle idea. As I understand it, that religion teaches that the actions of our life puts into play certain chains of causality which spread out through the universe and continue past our individual deaths. Since Buddhists do not believe that there are such things as souls or even egos, (the doctrine of anatta), they do not believe that individual people are "reincarnated" into bodies after death. Instead, chains of causality flow around the universe and continue to do so through future generations. (This idea is encapsulated in the metaphor of "Indra's Net".) In a way, what this is saying is "our deeds live long after us", and, "the sins of the fathers will afflict their children unto several generations".

"Karma", therefore, is not so much a question of people doing "good" and "evil", and therefore being sentences to "punishment" and "reward", as more of a scientific principle that each and every act carries with it a set of consequences. These consequences carry on from generation to generation, and they in turn set the stage for even more acts that in turn have consequences that set the stage for future actions. For the Buddhist, therefore, one of the points of a religious life is to try and sever the chains of negative karma. This isn't so much to make life better for the specific individual, but rather to make life better for the entire universe. As such, it fits into the Mahayana concept of the Bodhisattva---a being who will not be enlightened until all of the universe is also enlightened at the same time.

(Of course, there are a lot of contradictions in all of this. For example, how can there be a Bodhisattva in the first place if there are no souls because of anatta? My feeling is that this lack of consistency is an artifact of having to use a language that is based on a different understanding of human psychology and metaphysics.)

Daoists have been influenced by Buddhist teachings, which is why you will sometimes find a Daoist figure talking about karma and rebirth. I think, however, that it is more accurate in Daoism to talk about "fate" rather than karma.

"Fate" is a complex concept in that it holds various meanings that have to be teased out before we can understand the term. For example, some people believe that it means that a person simply cannot escape some sort of determined event no matter what he does. In a sense, therefore, my post traumatic stress disorder is something that happened to me and no matter how much I try, I can never erase its effects. Obviously there are things in life that are like this.

Another type of fate comes from accepting the specific viewpoint that we bring to the table of life. We do have some control over our long-term development, such as deciding to join the army instead of going to college. But the decisions we make are strongly coloured by the experience we had as children. So, it might be that we want to join the army because we cannot stand our parents and it is the easiest and quickest way to be free of them. By the time we gain enough insight to be able to pick and choose the best course of action, our lives are usually more than half over, many life choices have already been made, and our personality has set itself pretty firmly in one particular direction.

The idea that people are governed by their fate is alien to the spirit of the Western world. But from the perspective of Daoism, I think that it makes sense of a lot of the craziness I see around me. The Dao consists of a very large number of people---all of whom are doomed to pursue the path that fate has given them. The realized man understands this fact and ceases to judge other people because he understands that they only have a very limited ability to change the course of their behaviour.

Oddly enough, what limited freedom the realized man has comes from admitting that people (including himself) have these constraints on their freedom. The Daoist doesn't believe that freedom comes from fighting against fate, but rather by going along with it and taking advantage of the opportunities it offers instead of trying to create ones that never can be. The Daoist surfs on the crest of waves without trying to fight against them.

Morality Follows the Dao

Last week I heard an economist by the name of Jeff Rubin talking about his book, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller. Basically, his thesis is that because of peak oil there is going to be a very significant increase in the price of energy and that this is going to reverse globalisation. People will stop eating food out of season and imported from far away. Local industry and agriculture will revive. People will get rid of their cars and start using public transit. Vacations will be spent at home instead of at exotic tourist destinations. Suburbs will decline and revert to farmland while people emigrate to the inner city where they will live in high-efficiency higher-density housing.

In effect, people will start living far more environmentally-friendly lives.

Rubins emphasised that this change will not be because of some sort of ethical change in individuals but rather because they will be adapting to economic forces. (Although he certainly seems to relish these changes as significant improvements in the way we live our lives.)

This interview got me thinking about morality. Most of my life I have been someone who has pretty much seen the world through Puritan-coloured glasses. That is to say, I have had a tendency to look at what people do in terms of consequences with an emphasis on "right versus wrong". For example, when my friends go on vacation trips overseas I tend to fixate on the huge amounts of CO2 that their jet flight sends into the atmosphere, thereby adding to global warming. (As you might imagine, this makes me the life of the party.)

Listening to Mr. Rubin, the absurdity of my viewpoint was pretty obvious. Not because there are no consequences for our behaviour---such as wasting energy---but because it is wrong to think that human beings base their behaviour on moral reasoning. Instead, as near as I can tell, for most people morality is a much more of a "epiphenomenon" that is used to justify our behaviour which is almost always based on self-interest, emotion, habit, and so forth. As such, moral reasoning is sort of like Kipling's "just so stories" that try to explain why it is we do a certain thing without really doing much more than present a plausible fiction.

Take the example of women's liberation. In my lifetime I have seen a tremendous improvement in the choices available to women. But ultimately, I don't see much evidence that this has come about from masses of people changing their opinions because of consciousness-raising. As evidence for this, I would suggest the truism that all feminists will admit to---young women who have opportunities that are beyond their grandmothers wildest dreams steadfastly refuse to allow themselves to be labelled "feminists". If life is better for today's women, it is not because they have chosen to organise and fight for their rights!

If you look at women's liberation from the point of view of economics, however, this jarring disconnect makes sense. Women gained their liberation not because it is morally just, but rather because it was economically expedient.

First of all, in the 1960's the buying power of working-class jobs declined dramatically. This meant that it was no longer possible for men to work at a lower-middle-class job and support a household---complete with a stay-at-home wife. This means that in order to keep ahead of the credit card payments, the average family now has to have two breadwinners instead of one. When women began to bring in a significant fraction of the household's wealth, they began to have more say in how that home is organised.

Luckily, this decline in purchasing power happened at the same time that a whole new "service" sector was developing in the economy. This provided the huge numbers of jobs that were needed to give the wives work. But those jobs were significantly different from those of the manufacturing sector. They tended to be social in nature instead of numerical. That is to say, in a service job the the bottom line is whether or not the customer is satisfied. In a factory, it is how many widgets get turned out in an hour.

This new economic sector change has made a big change in the way our society sees things. So-called "women's work" has been to "keep things together" for the families and community. That means that they tended to place a greater value on harmony than on being "right". Men, on the other hand, have typically believed that none of the niceties matter as long as someone "produces". The language people used to use to describe a married couple illustrates this point: he is a "good provider" and she is "happy home-maker". In a service-based economy, being a "happy home-maker" has more value than a "good provider". In a world where "getting along" is increasingly important, we are changing the way we do politics, education and just about everything else to insert that new priority into the way we do things.

As a result of this change in the workplace, not only are women gaining in influence, but so-called "feminine values" (i.e. "getting along" versus "getting things done") are becoming more and more important. This shift in values is obvious at the academic library where I work. Increasingly, students do not sit at isolated carrels doing research on their own, but rather in groups that work together on projects.

In fact, I'm told that groups of individuals now take on-line exams together---and pool their knowledge using instant messaging software while actually doing the test. I suspect that if you asked these young people whether what they are doing is cheating, many of them wouldn't think so. This is because a cheat like this is only unfair if some people can do it and others cannot, and, you believe that the action being taken hides incompetence in the person being tested. In a world where information can be accessed instantly through the Internet, what real value is there in having facts in one's memory? Most of the jobs that these young people will end up filling will be ones where an ability to work together in a group is going to be far more important than being able to retain knowledge through individual study. As such, yet another values complex, i.e. "cheating", is changing in response to our economic and social reality.

I don't want to over-state the case. The women's liberation movement no doubt had some influence on the current improved status of women. And environmental groups will be able take some credit even if the increased price of oil is what finally prods people into living more sustainable lives. But, I don't think that any morally-based social movement in and of itself is capable to rendering real change in society.

In fact, it may very well be that in many cases the movement itself---and the moral viewpoint that informs it---is caused by the clash between different elements of a society that are experiencing different realities. The individual women who led the women's movement in the sixties may well have been the first fraction of the population who found themselves being significant "breadwinners" in dual-income families and chafed against a social system that was still very popular with the women who's husbands still "brought home the bacon". (I've certainly met women who would have loved to have been at home with the kids but had to work because of financial reasons. If someone has to be at work anyway, then they'd certainly want to get paid as much as men and force the boss to keep his hands to himself---.)

When I was working my way through this idea a passage in the Dao De Jing came to mind.

When the highest type of men hear the Way, with diligence they're able to practice it;

When the average men hear the Way, some things they retain and others they lose;

When the lowest type of men hear the Way, they laugh out loud at it.

If they didn't laugh at it, it couldn't be regarded as the Way.

Chapter 41, Hendricks translation.

At first glance the passage doesn't seem very apropos. But I suspect the reason why my subconscious seems to think it is, is because it is a statement about how the ultimate reality of life---the "Dao"---has both an objective element to it, yet at the same time is seen quite differently by individuals, depending on their own particular state-of-mind. Ideas are important because they animate people and create unity of purpose. But those ideas don't have traction with most people unless they fit into the day-to-day economic reality they inhabit. Object and subjective, a sage can see the multi-dimensional reality of an issue while the average man can only make a joke.