Daoist Thoughts on Newtown

When confronted with horrible, senseless crimes like the massacre of innocent children in Connecticut last week, I find myself turning back to the Daoist classics for reflection. It is not that I find answers in the Daodejing and Zhuangzi.  There are no answers, really.  Rather, the old books simply remind us of certain enduring truths that circulate around the terrible things that can happen among humans.

The first thing to note, however, is the overwhelming sorrow that descends upon all of us, parents in particular, when confronted with this horrific scene.  My heart aches for the families caught up in this maelstrom.  I hope they will find a way to absorb and live beyond the grief and loss they now experience.

The needless and violent death of any individual is appalling, of course.  But when children are the victims, boys and girls only six or seven years old, the outrage is even more pointed. Their innocence shocks the conscience. Their lives are still so new, so wonderfully open and bright, that we intuitively feel they should be spared the depredations of the adult world. We want to shield them, to give them a chance to grow and learn.  And now, for these twenty in Newtown, all that has been shot down. An excerpt from passage 55 of the Daodejing (Lynn translation) gets at the tragedy here:

One who has profoundly internalized virtue is comparable to the infant. Wasps, scorpions, adders, and vipers do not sting or bite him. Fierce animals do not attack him.  Birds of prey do not seize him.

Wang Bi, a third century commentator, expands upon this passage:

The infant is free from craving or desire and so commits no offense against the myriad things.  As a result, no poisonous creature commits offense against him.  It is because one who has profoundly internalized virtue does not commit offense against others that others do not try to make him lose his wholeness.

The infant, in other words, in her freedom from desires and wants beyond the most elemental, is a model for us all.  Much of the pain and suffering of human life, the adders and vipers that bite us, emerge from adult avidity: status, money, power. Young children have not yet learned to want such things. And Daoism holds them up as an ideal, a hint for how adults might make their own lives better.  

It is especially cruel, then, when adults violently harm the children who should be resistant to our harms.

Sadly, children come to unnatural deaths all too often, all around the world. It is a consistent and extensive failure of humanity.  In the US, however, this failing takes a peculiar form: the prevalence of gun violence.  It is a baleful and lethal historical legacy.  We, as a society, venerate guns, we seem to worship them, as Gary Wills suggests:

The gun is our Moloch. We sacrifice children to him daily—sometimes, as at Sandy Hook, by directly throwing them into the fire-hose of bullets from our protected private killing machines, sometimes by blighting our children’s lives by the death of a parent, a schoolmate, a teacher, a protector. Sometimes this is done by mass killings (eight this year), sometimes by private offerings to the god (thousands this year).

Daoism immediately sees the terrible folly here: we have taken an unnecessary and inanimate thing and invested it with near magical qualities.  And from that has flowed innumerable harms and sorrows.  Passage 31 of the Daodejing (Ivanhoe and Van Norden trans.) opens:

Fine weapons are inauspicious instruments; all creatures find them repulsive. And so one who has the Way does not rely upon them.

We don't need guns. They simply make the persistant failures of humanity ever more violent and deadly.  They are central to the tragedy of Newtown.  And until we learn the lesson of their futility we will unnecessarily repeat the offense of harming and killing those who should be resistant to our harms.

Comments

[gregorylent]

soul-level agreements from all involved for the good of the human race .. not more, not less.

[Joseph Lemien]

I'm glad to read something that cites a source far from the scene of the tragedy. It is comforting to know that some wisdom is universal, or at least nearly so. Thanks for writing this.

[Fred]

Americans venerate not the automatic but the automobile. We kill 30,000 of our fellows every year with them too.

[MT]

Your comments on killing children are accurate, but not your comments on guns. We need guns largely because there are evil people in the world and most people need more than a random knife or a martial arts course that takes 30 years to complete if they encounter an evil person.

[SNB]

clearly to believe children must be taught avarice, greed and violence has never spent any time around infants or small children or has utterly forgotten their childhood. An infant in a nursery will attack another child for a cookie they possess. When larger they create weapons of their toys to attach the other. To observe the extent they will manipulate their caretakers to give in to their demands is highly amusing. Once of a mind and not soley driven by his wants that child learns that words are a much more dangerous tool with which to best his adversary. Because to small children, even his best friend will sometimes hold the things he wants and will make foolish attempts to gain and cruel words are an exisite way in which to subdue him.

Take this shooter from Connecticut. I have not followed this closely because this president will happily destroy the constitution that protects the rights of citizens by law - not from a criminal but the law exists so that a free people can be a determinate people and remain free - from despots. My appreciation of the constitution and what it created here far outweigh the thought of my right to a gun than just that it is law and being manipulated by the rich for their gain. An unarmed populace will very quickly become the prey of this percentage that just stole millions of homes and the lives savings of millions more.

But back to the kid and how I perceive from words of of this communities own mouth that they themselves turned an odd young man into a hate machine by their treating him as a pariah within their community. His own barber told the news "people told me not to talk to him". A five year old in this community crawled over his dead teachers body and ran down the street with a few others away from the scene to the home of a man near by. After witnessing murders and mayhem the words out of the mouth of one of this cities children were to haughtely criticize the size of his man's house. "Just sayin". You say you don't believe in morality except it might be handy in a civilization. Then to me you are saying if this happened in a less populace country or wild setting, this wouldn't be that big a deal. The five year old was only repeating what his parents taught him, but it says everything about this communities values.

But face it, were it not for the press's ability to manipulate the death of a few white kids when every single day MANY MANY brown and black kids die from guns that will never be turned in because they are owned by a criminal element. So it is to me, not the guns which killed these kids, but possibly more the arrogance of this community where clearly not one single person would make a friend of this young man. Even his own father just split the scene and like this age of reckless and abandoning fathers had his part to in what that kid became.

Yeah, creation groaneth. And still people will believe the least cause where it absolves them from effort or responsibility.

Oh, might obama messiah, save us by taking guns from millions of people who use them responsibly. (gag) Never a thought or care as to how we are willing to treat one another these days and when we fail what was once called common decency we reap violence when we ourselves sow malevolence and arrogance.