The Useless Tree

And Still Another Taoist July 4th

I've run this post before; but, what the heck, it's summer and internet traffic is down, so maybe you haven't seen it before.....

    It may seem improbable but I think we can find a Taoist angle on the US Independence Day, July 4th, holiday.

   Patriotism and nationalism, which are basically what July 4th is all about, are rather alien to the Taoist world view.  Indeed, far from celebrating the accomplishments of the nation, the Tao Te Ching (passage 80) urges: "Let nations grow smaller and smaller/ and people fewer and fewer."  The ideal is a primitive, we might even say pre-nationalist, small-scale political community centered on common production and close family life.  Not much of an "imagined community" there.

     But there is one element of the holiday that a Taoist might connect with: the line in the Declaration of Independence that states our unalienable right to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness." 

      As for Life, the "Te" (or "De" in the Pinyin transliteration) of the Tao Te Ching, denotes the integrity of each thing in the larger context of Way (Tao).  As such, I take it to imply a recognition of the value of each thing in itself, each life in itself, as in this passage from Chuang Tzu:

Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing [beauty], the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange - in Tao they all move as one and the same. (23)

    As for Liberty, we have this statement from Burton Watson's introduction to Chuang Tzu:

The central theme of the Chuang Tzu may be summed up in a single word: freedom. (3)

  "Freedom" here means, for Watson, "free yourself from the world," but it is not incompatible with other notions of political liberty that might be celebrated in the US today.  For Chuang Tzu, governments should not interfere in our pursuits of freeing ourselves from the world.

     And as for the pursuit of Happiness, Taoism, in its philosophic form, is very much about happiness.  It tells us that we should not reify Happiness (maybe Chaung Tzu would have counseled Jefferson not to capitalize it in the Declaration) nor pursue it in a purposive and directed manner; but we might find happiness precisely in that process of detaching ourselves from worldly worries and desires and embracing "nothing's own doing" (wu wei).  Watson also has this to say:

Finally, Chuang Tzu uses throughout his writings that deadliest of weapons against all that is pompous, staid, and hold:  humor.  Most Chinese philosophers employ humor sparingly - a wise decision, no doubt, in view of the serious tone they seek to maintain - and some of them seem never to have heard of it at all.  Chuang Tzu, on the contrary, makes it the very core of his style, for he appears to have known that one good laugh would do more than ten pages of harangue to shake the reader's confidence in the validity of his pat assumptions. (5)

    Sounds pretty happy to me.

    So, have fun today, and remember those Taoist principles of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness!

On Being Powerful

Good news today on the foreign policy front: the US has finally started to make progress in opening up its relations with North Korea.  Don't get me wrong.  I have nothing but disdain for the government of NK. But the question is, and has always been, how best to deal with a bad situation there.  The Bush policy of isolation and pressure did not work.  And in a rare instance of learning on the part of that same Bush administration, the failed policy was changed and that has yielded today's announcement by the president. 

    I have long felt that the best way forward in US NK policy is to encourage as much economic and social openness there as possible.  This might have the effect of preserving the regime but it would also redound to the benefit of average North Koreans.  They would come to have more opportunity to eat (which in itself is a major problem there still) and live their lives with a bit less constraint.  That is clearly the story of the opening of China these past thirty years.  While politics in the PRC remain draconian, society has certainly liberalized, people have more social and cultural space and, of course, the economy has boomed.  If NK experienced half of what has happened in China it would be better for all concerned. 

    And this brings me back to the Tao Te Ching.   Among its many lessons is one in how to be powerful, as in this excerpt from passage 61:

A great nation that puts itself below a small nation
takes over the small nation,
and a small nation that puts itself below a great nation
gives itself over to the great nation.

Some lie low to take over,
and some lie low to give over.

A great nation wanting nothing more
than to unite and nurture the people
and a small nation wanting nothing more
than to join and serve the people:
they both succeed in what they want.

Great things lie low and rest content.

      We do not have to take this literally; that is, the ultimate outcome does not have to be "taking over" of the small by the large.  Rather, it is a matter of each getting what they want.  The point, then, is how the powerful should exercise their power.  Force and domination produce resistance and conflict, denying the interests of the powerful and raising unnecessary costs (see Iraq war).  Alternatively, if the powerful accommodates and engages with the less powerful, and if the powerful is willing to bear the costs of compromise, then better outcomes are possible.  It reminds me of US policy toward Europe and Japan after 1947.  The US encouraged the creation of what would eventually become the European Union and it, for many years, worked to open its economy to the exports of Germany and Japan.  In so doing, the US absorbed the costs for constructing a relatively open and productive world economy, a global structure in which the US thrived.  Openness and engagement ultimately served the interests of both the US and Europe.  Openness and engagement have similarly served the interests of both the US and China more recently.  So it is good to see some glimmer of openness and engagement between the US and NK.

     Great things lie low and rest content.

Wandering in the Tao Te Ching

Perusing the book, worrying about work and how much I am not getting done, I put this down here as a reminder to us all:

To work at learning brings more each day.
To work at Way brings less each day,

less and still less
until you're doing nothing yourself.
And when you're doing nothing yourself,
there's nothing you don't do.

To grasp all beneath heaven, leave it alone.
Leave it alone, that's all,
and nothing in all beneath heaven will elude you.

 - 48

A Chuang Tzu Video

   Just found this on youtube.  It's a fun five minutes.

Blindsight, The Movie

     We saw Blindsight on Friday night.  A great film, but one that raises a question about how we understand disability. 

      First, some background on the film, without too much in the way of spoilers.  The story focuses on a school for the blind in Tibet, set up by a remarkable woman from Germany who is herself blind.  She gets in touch with a man who was the first blind person to climb to the top of Mount Everest.  Together they organize an expedition for six of the Tibetan kids to climb a mountain right next to Everest, an extraordinarily challenging trek from anyone.  The movie follows the journey from its inception, showing us how difficult life in Tibet can be for blind people, how the kids gain a stronger sense of their potential in the world from facing the challenge, and how the ideals of American mountain climbers (whose goal it is "to summit") clash the values of Tibetan society (which is generally less concerned about getting to the top).  It's a great story with absolutely stunning cinematography.   Highly recommended.

     Now for the question about disability.  The movie conveys the sense that the kids are seen by society, and see themselves, in a different light because of the courage and persistence they demonstrated on the trip.  And that can be a good thing.  But it makes me wonder: is that the best way for us to understand disability?  I think not.  Generally, this is an consequentialist justification for human worth.  The kids are valued, or are valuable, because they did something or had a certain effect on the world.  Although it is good to realize that people with disabilities can have all sorts of positive effects on the world, it is dangerous to use this as a primary means for appreciating disability.

   The danger lies in the potential that some minimum expectation of effectiveness or productivity could emerge, a standard that would then come to define, implicitly or explicitly, some portion of the population of  disabled people as "ineffective" or "unproductive" or, worse, "useless."  It could then be a short step from that determination to a devaluing of certain disabled lives with all sorts of practical effects: the loss of health insurance, the termination of special education programs, the denial of social services.  We must always be on guard against the grimmer possibilities of utilitarian thinking.  I am against productivity as a standard of human worth.

     Don't get me wrong.  I think what the kids did was great.  And the people who helped them do it, and who made this movie, have rendered an admirable service.  But, at the same time, I also think that the kids would be just as valuable as human beings whether or not they had had this experience.  And the other kids at the school who did not have this kind of opportunity, and disabled people of all circumstances everywhere, are all also as valuable and "useful" as human beings as any other abled person.  Chuang Tzu may have said it best:

Hence, the blade of grass and the pillar, the leper and the ravishing beauty, the noble, the sniveling, the disingenuous, the strange - it Tao they all move as one and the same.  In difference is the whole; in wholeness is the broken.  Once they are neither whole nor broken, all things move freely as one and the same again. (23)

Young and Restless in China

    Two nights ago I watched a great documentary on PBS, "Young and Restless in China."  The website for the program is really quite good.  It is possible to watch the whole thing on line, or to just select 10 minute or so segments (the whole thing is about two hours long).  It is really worth it.

    One of the main ideas that comes across, and one that links into my interests, is the cultural and psychological instability created by extraordinarily rapid economic and material change.  The film follows nine different Chinese people, from various social strata but all in their 20s or 30s, over four years as each experiences new opportunities in life.  Clearly, the process of individualization is a powerful part of each of their lives.  The new economy and society encourages them to develop their personal talents and interests and to strike out on their own, however much that may sometimes contradict family desires or interests.  One young woman rejects the arranged marriage her village-bound parents try to make for her.  But the tension between individual desire and family connection does not always produce and unproblematic personal liberation.  One of my favorite stories was that of Miranda Hong, a marketing executive, who, as the website describes, tries to "...to juggle home and work, the demands of her husband and her parents, and still find a place for herself."  It has a very American resonance.

      The film makes clear that the uncertainty and ethical fluidity of this period of rapid change in China have led many people to seek out new sources of moral guidance.   One fellow became a Christian.  Although it was not explicitly discussed in the documentary itself (or not, at least in the hour and a half that I saw), the resurgence of Confucianism and Taoism and other strands of traditional Chinese thought and culture can be explained by that same search for answers to the large questions of life.   The re-imagination of tradition is discussed in the "roundtable with China watchers" on the website the accompanies the film.  Here are a couple of excerpts:

Perry Link:

[The biggest issue facing the country now] is the problem of what ethical and social values to believe in. It is deep in Chinese culture -- in fact, it is coded into the very grammar of daily-life Chinese language -- that one should "be a person" properly. But what exactly does that mean?

In "traditional Confucianism," the basic duties -- of being a good father, a good son, a good ruler, subject, husband, wife, friend, etc. -- were pretty well known. That doesn't mean that everybody always behaved well, of course, but at least everybody knew the standards, could use the values as their own moral compasses and could count on the fact that other people also knew the standards, so that public criticism of someone else's misbehavior could rest on a common basis.

Modern Chinese revolutions aimed to "knock down Confucius and sons," and, after some decades of confusion, in the 1950s socialist values truly did take hold as new answers to the question of how to "be a good person." But the disasters of late Maoism -- the Great Leap famine and the Cultural Revolution -- turned people cynical about socialism, and the devil-take-the-hindmost moneymaking of the post-Mao years has made even the language of socialism utterly irrelevant to daily life.

Maureen Fan:

Of course, old values still apply -- going home for Chinese New Year and getting married to please your parents, for example. But the importance of these pulls is shrinking. A former researcher says society is now a fast-food culture: Many people are impatient, and if old values and traditions don't immediately pay off for them somehow, they will lose interest in that, too.

Still, many young people seem, in the end, loath to offend their parents; for example, the many cases of gay sons or daughters entering into marriages of convenience to keep up appearances or give their parents a grandchild. Confucianism is making a comeback [in] schools, best-selling books and TV programs as people recognize the fragility of old-fashioned values, and yet many Chinese have no idea what Confucianism really is, reducing it in some cases to just a few of its tenets such as filial piety or loyalty.

     The question we are left with, then, and one that I have no easy answer to, is: what will contemporary Confucianism and Taoism therefore be in present-day China?  They cannot be what they were traditionally.  Chinese society and culture have changed too much for that.  It would seem that if they are to be relevant and meaningful in today's China they each have to be accommodated to the more individualized and personalized contemporary culture.  Otherwise the young and the restless will look elsewhere for meaning.

Taoism for Kids, with Reflections on Orientalism

Last weekend my daughter was babysitting an eight-year-old acquaintance and I took them to see a movie, something appropriate for the younger girl.  Thus, I found myself watching the new Dream Works movie, "Kung Fu Panda."  Perhaps this is a commentary on my lack of intellectual depth: I don't see the deep and serious film, "Youth Without Youth," I see the pop cultural triviality.  Oh well, just the life of a parent, I guess...

    In any event, two things came to mind: 1) the Taoist themes that are quite accessible for children; and 2) the question of orientalism.

      Let's discuss orientalism first.   In its Saidian expression, orientalism suggests the depiction of a foreign culture in a manner that subordinates and exoticizes it for purposes of domination, or something like that.  Is that going on here?  I think not.  The childish images of Chinese animals as  people could appear to be infantilizing ancient traditions of philosophy and martial arts.  But for orientalism to really be at work a significant power differential has to be in play: the politically and materially more powerful cultural creator stands above the less powerful source of images and ideas.  I don't think this is now the case for at least two reasons. 

     First, China is no longer weak.  It is a dynamic economic power with significant military power and global political influence.  Chinese people can and do push back against any foreign-created images for whatever reason they want (as some are now doing against Kung Fu Panda's producer Steven Spielberg for his Olympics-related criticisms of China).  China is also the producer of its own cultural products that move out into the world and shape understandings and desires.  Indeed, through its tourism industry the PRC actively participates in something like the the orientalization of its own culture, selling, and profiting from, the commodification of social difference.  Yet even if that characterization - the orientalized now becoming the orientalizer - is debatable, the colonialist power differential that Said assumed in his analysis (he was, after all, focusing mostly on periods of formal colonization), simply does not exist now in the case of China.

     This is not to say that American and other perceptions of China are free of bias.  Far from it.  There will always be politically and culturally influenced differences of perception and understanding.  Rather, I only mean to suggest here that the power inequalities that underwrite the dominating effects of orientalism have changed.

      Secondly, on the question of orientalism, the global context has changed in other ways.  Globalization, the accelerated flow of cultural images and ideas across the world, transforms, I believe, the dynamics of cultural politics.  In Said's analysis, the images created by Western power holders had a certain authority based on their rarity.  The total number of images of the "East" and the number of Western travelers to the "East" were both rather small.  Thus, those images that were created did not have to compete with many others and, so, came to claim a large and important place in the imagination of many people in the "West."  Not so today.  Kung Fu Panda, and any other foreign-created image of China, must now jostle with thousands, perhaps millions, of images and ideas and narratives, produced in many locations, including China, that depict many facets of Chinese culture or provide multiple perspectives on any one aspect of Chinese culture.  Globalization multiplies and diversifies the sources of cultural production, and accelerates their movement internationally, to such an extent that no one source can claim the kind of authority that the purveyors of orientalism could in the past.  In short, it's hard out there for an orientalist....

     In short, the power relations between the US and China have changed so much in the past thirty years that I think the Saidian notion of orientalism no longer captures the political-cultural dyanamic between the two.  To repeat, bias and perceptual difference persist, but not in the same political context nor with the same political effects as classic orientalism. 

     Thus, I will assert that, whatever its flaws, Kung Fu Panda is not orientalist.

      But is it Taoist?  Long story short: yes, it has obvious Taoist themes, even if they are subsumed within a formulaic children's animation.

       Warning: spoiler alert

       The main theme of the movie is: nothing matters.  By "nothing" is meant that there is no particular skill or knowledge that will universally solve life's problems.  Each person has his or her own set of abilities and disabilities (Te, or integrity), and those innate qualities shape our destiny.  While it is true the Panda works himself (unpersuasively) into being a martial arts master - which might suggest that we can become something that is not innately within us - he does so only after his teacher discovers what truly motivates the Panda: food.  Silly though it may be, this is an example of the particularity of Te in Tao.  

       In order to make this theme stand out clearly, the movie uses the character of the Panda's father (inexplicably a duck.  Who is the mother?) as a foil.  He is a noodle maker.  That is his Te, and the Te of his family for generations (to get a bit Confucian about it...).  That is where he finds his place in Tao.  And at a critical point in the narrative he reveals to the Panda the secret ingredient of his secret ingredient noodle soup: there is no secret ingredient.  In other words, the secret ingredient is nothing.  Wu-wei, nothing doing; nothing's own doing. Do nothing and nothing will be undone.  Nothing is the key.

     I only wonder how American kids will respond to that message.  Do nothing.  I can hear the frustrated parents howling already.....

Chuang Tzu at the Movies

     Somewhere in the past six months I missed this: a movie with clear Chuang Tzu resonance.  I stumbled upon it today, when I clicked on this post by Juhn Ahn at the Immanent Frame.  He is adding to a continuing discussion at that site of a Francis Ford Coppola movie, "Youth Without Youth," based on a novel by Mircea Eliade.  The New York Times review of the film is here. 

    Having not seen the movie nor read the book, I am at a loss to comment.  So, I will only say how good it was to see Juhn Ahn bring Chuang Tzu into the conversation, which none of the other posts on the film do.   And let me add this funny parental guidance from the NYT review:

“Youth Without Youth” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). Gun violence, sexual congress, female nudity, metaphysics.

    We certainly do not want to expose the youngsters to metaphysics!

    Has anyone seen the film?  Is it good?

That Theodicy Thing

       

      A good review in the New Yorker this week by James Wood, surveying the problem of theodicy - i.e. how is it that human suffering and evil can be countenanced by an omnipotent, omniscient and benevolent God?  Wood embeds his theological points within a personal narrative of struggling with his own beliefs, tallying up the pros and cons of faith in God:

Theodicy, or, rather, its failure, was the other major entry on my debit side. I was trapped within the age-old conundrum: the world is full of pain and wickedness; God may be jealous but is also merciful and all-loving (how much more so, if one believes that Christ incarnated him). If he has the power to alleviate this suffering but does not, he is cruel; if he cannot, he is weak. I wasn’t consoled by the standard responses. Suffering is a mystery, I was told, as is God’s absence in the face of suffering. But this was what I was also told when prayers failed to make their mark: the old “incomprehensibility” routine. It seemed to me that the Gospels, central to my family life, made some fairly specific promises and laid on us some fairly specific obligations; yet that specificity could simply go on holiday whenever God himself seemed to have gone on holiday. (“God moves in mysterious ways.”)

     He ultimately rejects God, though he seems open to those who have not.  And this brings me back to Chinese thought, which is, unfortunately, not included in this or most standard Western recitations of theodicistic questions.  

     I have blogged about something close to this question before, what I called the "religion problem."   And I have made reference to the Augustinian invocation of free will in reflections on my son, Aidan.  So, my comments here will be brief.

     One approach to the problem of evil is simply never to bring God into consideration.  This does not have to be an anti-God position, a settled and militant atheism; rather, it can simply be a world-view that makes no reference to God.  Perhaps he is there, but we cannot see or understand him; and, most importantly, there are ways of coming to terms with the terrible things that happen without bringing him into it.   I have found and developed this orientation through my engagement with ancient Chinese thought.

      Of course, historically speaking, there were understandings of ghosts and spirits and super-natural forces that circulated around and through the minds of the people who wrote the classic texts of Chinese philosophy.  But the thought itself, at least as far as Confucianism and Taoism are concerned, can be understood without reference to god-like presences.  What matters more, in these ways of thinking and apprehending the universe, is an open acceptance of natural forces beyond our control and the vagaries of fate and destiny.

      "Way" and "Heaven" best summarize such a godless orientation to the world around us.  "Way," of course, is both undefinable and defined in various particular ways.  Here is a passage from Chuang Tzu and a short comment I made in an earlier post:

"The Tao [Way] has its own nature and its own reliability: it does nothing and it has no form. It can be passed on, but never received and held. You can master it, but you can’t see it. Its own source, its own root – it was there before heaven and earth, firm and constant from ancient times. It makes gods and demons sacred, gives birth to heaven and earth. It’s above the absolute pole, but is not high. It’s below the six directions, but is not deep. It predates the birth of heaven and earth, but is not ancient. It precedes high antiquity, but is not old. (Chuang Tzu 87)

     "Instead of the certainty of a singular source of truth, Taoism asks us to open ourselves to the multiplicity and vastness of Way.   There may be a kind of "order" to Way, but it is not an order that we can define concretely or apprehend completely.  Instead of searching for neat answers, we just have to accept our inability to comprehend Way.  Surrender as opposed to mastery is called for."

      That is one Taoist way of letting go of the search for precise and comprehensive answers to the questions posed by theodicy.  Yes, bad things happen.  But many of them are out of our reach.  People will, at times, do horrible things to each other.  They always have and, most likely, they always will.  Acceptance of that history and likelihood does not relieve evil doers of responsibility - they are, after all, violating Way - but the recurrence of evil should not surprise us.  The question is less a matter of "why would God let this happen?" than it should be "how can people be dissuaded from performing bad deeds"?

       Confucianism  is very much here-and-now and people oriented.  It is all about cultivating our better angels (in a much more extensive and specific manner than Taoism), in hopes that the "evil doers" among us will either be brought over to the side of Humanity or will be punished and limited in their ability to harm others.  Again, no reference to God or a transcendent divine power is necessary for a Confucian response to evil.

      Bottom line: if you find yourself caught up in conundrums of theodicy, just let it go.  There are answers to the problem of evil, effective answers that tell us why bad things happen and what we can do to heal ourselves and prevent future malevolence, all without the unresolvable problem of God's role and responsibility. 

The Needham Question.....and the Chuang Tzu Answer

       Jonathan over at Frog in a Well has a post about the the "Needham Question," named for the great historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham: Why didn't China develop theoretical science in the manner of early modern Europe?  He does a good job of reminding us how fraught the very question is:      

Half a century of scholarship has produced a massive aggregation of knowledge about science and technology in China which shows, among other things, that scientific and technical progress continued throughout the early modern period (which, started a half millenium earlier in China than in the West) but that China’s population obviated the need for the kind of massive “labor saving” capital equipment, so industrial production moved in other directions.

    He also recommends an article by Nathan Sivin, "Why the Scientific Revolution Did not Take place in China - or Didn't it?

    Here is a quick summary of some of the most common reasons given for China's supposed lack of theoretical science:  

....China’s bureaucracy siphoned talent away from a potentially entrepreneurial merchant class, China did not have the spur to competition that Europe’s many warring states inflicted on each other, China’s totalitarian government quashed initiative.

      I'm not a historian, and will defer to those who dig deeply into this issue, but let me throw out another factor that may have contributed to a certain skepticism toward grand, abstract, theoretical scientific explanation:  Chuang Tzu.

     Chuang Tzu's aversion to abstraction and analysis is well known.  Chapter two of the book that bears his name is, among other things, a powerful statement of epistemological skepticism that works against the modern scientific enterprise.  "Those who divide things cannot see" - that, in itself, would seem to reject the scientific method.  

      Of course, Chuang Tzu wrote long, long before early modern transformations came to China.  But, however we date those broader historical eras, his book was still being read, and had thoroughly permeated the intellectual culture of China, when the precursors of modern science were taking shape there.  To some extent, his skepticism may have given some pause to those Chinese thinkers who were predisposed to move toward abstract theoretical explanation.  In some ways, Chuang Tzu prefigures the "linguistic turn" in twentieth century Western philosophy, a turn that ultimately leads to a fundamental critique of modern science.  At the very least, Chuang Tzu may have planted a seed of doubt in the Chinese intelligentsia toward grand scientific theorizing.

     I would also throw into the mix the destructive effect of Qin Shihuangdi.  His attack on the intellectuals and destruction of texts had a particularly deleterious on the Later Mohists, an indigenous Chinese logical tradition that, as Graham suggests, might have (and that is a very hypothetical "might have") developed into a foundation for something like a more abstract scientific argumentation.  Their texts were not re-discovered until the 19th century.

     Between Chuang Tzu and Qin, theoretical science faced some powerful obstacles, both material and intellectual, in early modern China.

(Sorry if the formatting of this post is odd.  Typepad has changed its system and I am trying to get used to it.)