The Dao of Pandemic

A nice piece in the SCMP by Lijia Zhang and Xia Chen has roused me to return to this blog. They offer a Daoist take on the current crisis, which, in the most general sense, recognizes root causes: human interference in animal habitats that brings in its wake the jump of viruses from animals to people. They write: 

An expanding human population, industrialisation and urbanisation at breakneck speed have disturbed the ecology, and our continued erosion of wild space has brought humans uncomfortably close to animals. As a result, more zoonoses – diseases transmitted from animals to humans – have emerged around the world in the past two decades.

This is not just a China problem:

Scientists estimate that 75 per cent of new or emerging infectious human diseases come from animals, including many of the worst diseases in recent years: HIV, avian flu, Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome), Mers (Middle East respiratory syndrome) and Covid-19.

It's a modernity problem, a result of intensified human interference in Dao, 道, which we might translate as the "natural unfolding of things."

I want to push a bit further, however, on the paradox that humans pose for Dao: we can simultaneously act in ways that obstruct the natural unfolding of things but those actions in themselves are also within the purview of the natural unfolding of things. While humans can sometimes act against Dao they are never outside of Dao themselves. Seen in this light, pandemics are an inevitable product of the Dao of humankind.

One of the best places in the Daodejing that gets at the paradoxical nature of humankind in Dao is passage 77, which bears quotation in full (Hinton's translation):

The Way of heaven is like a drawn bow pulling dow the high and raising the low:

it takes away where there's abundance and restores where there's want.

The Way of heaven takes away where there's abundance and restores where there's want, but the Way of humankind isn't like that; it takes away where there's want and gives where there's abundance. 

Only a master of the Way can give abundance to all beneath heaven. Such a sage acts without presumption and never dwells on success:

great worth has no need to be seen.

Most people are selfish, acting on base interests with little care for distributional justice and the social and ecological effects of their behavior. That human impulse runs against the "Way of heaven," which is about as close as we ever come in the Daodejing to a definition of the natural course of things.Thus, humans have an unnatural quality about them. However, the text suggests in passage 51, humans are not outside of Way, they are included in the "ten thousand things," which arise from, are nourished by, and eventually return to Dao.

The things that people do, therefore, including the intrusion into animal habitats in ways that bring pandemic, are part and parcel of Dao. 

Does that mean Daoism would tell us not to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus? If our actions that create the problem are "natural" in a sense, should we just let the illness unfold along its "natural" course? No. This question came to mind after a tweet by Alan Levinovitz, which took issue with anti-vaxxers sayng they would avoid a coronavirus vaccine should one emerge:

If you're wondering why an influential pro-life advocate is resisting a hypothetical COVID-19 vaccine, let me explain:

It's because of faith in natural goodness that confuses Nature w/ God. When you worship naturalness, it becomes a universal value.

Here are the receipts. https://t.co/1ikebOzy8Z pic.twitter.com/TIGP1JnKI5

— Alan Levinovitz (@AlanLevinovitz) April 19, 2020

Levinovitz, who has weighed in on the virus crisis, is not attempting to put forward a self-consciously "Daoist" understanding of what is "natural" versus "unnatural," (new book; on my to-read list). But his argument resonates with Daoist philosohical sensibilites. 

Although wuwei - 无为- famously suggests that we "do nothing," or in a fuller sense "do nothing that interrupts the natural unfolding of things," we should not reify it as a behavioral standard, we should not, in Levinovitz's words, "worship naturalness." To hold back completely on acting in the world would run against the natural qualities of being a person. The point, therefore, is not to do absolutely nothing, but to be prudent and careful and limited in our actions, and just as importantly be humble in our expectations about what we might be able to accomplish in the world. 

I know, someone is going to cite passage 29 of the DDJ, one of my favorites: "For those who would like to take control of the world and act on it - I see that with this they will simply not succeed." (Hendricks translation). A clear statement of the folly of attempting to intervene in and improve the world. But, let's go to passage 64, which suggests that careful action at the outset of an unfolding process can be efficacious, as in this excerpt (Hinton translation):

Work at things before they've begun and establish order before confusion sets in,

for a tree you can barely reach around grows from the tinest rootlet, a nine-tiered tower starts with a basket of dirt, a thousand mile journey begins with a single step. 

That first phrase - 為之於未有，治之於未亂 - is especailly apt in the case of vaccination. Ames and Hall translate it as: "Deal with a situation before it happens; Bring it under control before it gets out of hand." Hendricks has it thus: "Act on it before it comes into being; Order it before it turns into chaos." 

Clearly there is a sense here of anticipatory action that can lead to "control" or "order." If you have some sense of the natural unfolding of a virus, and you know you can intervene early in the process to shape that unfolding in ways that might mitigate harm on others of the "ten thousand things" in Dao, then act. And if you are presented with a relatively simple action, receiving a vaccination, that could allow for the continuing "natural" unfolding of your life, your current form in Dao, there is no reason to avoid it.

Perhaps the most important Daoist insight for our present moment, our strange times, is an acceptance of uncertainty. We were settled in our ways, our jobs, our daily routines. We thought we knew what tomorrow would bring. And suddenly now we don't. We have been cast into uncertainty, extending to things we thought were fairly well estaslished. Well, it turns out our apparent certainties are always fragile. We can't know, for certain, how Dao will unfold. The unexpected is never far off. And that's OK. While we shouldn't go to the extreme of thinking nothing is predictable and routine, we should, when things fall apart, let go of our previous expectations, open ourselves to what is transpiring around us, and find a new way forward. Zhuangzi, as usual, got it:

故知止其所不知，至矣

Therefore understanding that rests in what it does not understand is the finest (Watson)

Hence to know how to stay within the sphere of our ignorance is to attain the highest (Graham)

Understanding that abides in the unknowable is realization (Hinton)

Walking on Path, Ma Yuan