Working my way through Ellen Chen’s Tao Te Ching, I arrived at chapter 17: “The best government, the people know it is just there.” In addition to describing leadership in tune with Tao, this also foreshadows the modern sentiment that the government that governs least, governs best. This lofty notion lies at the heart of libertarianism and makes us pine for an ideal world — one that, unfortunately, is probably incompatible with complexity of modern society. (I’ll leave that thought hanging in case anyone would like to comment.)
Then chapter 18 seemingly takes up a new topic by stating, “On the decline of the great Tao, there are humanity and righteousness.” The meaning here, on which most translators agree, is that when mankind loses its grounding in Nature, it begins to rely on artificial prescriptions for behavior. [I prefer Chen’s translation for its careful attention to meaning; for more reader-friendly wording, click here.]
There is a correlation between the two chapters, because each has to do with society becoming detached from the Tao. Ch. 17 goes on to say, “The next best [government], they love and praise it. The next, they fear it. The next, they revile against it.” This is so reflective of today’s situation it’s almost scary. People of all political stripes fear the government (especially when it’s controlled by the other side) because they see “humanity and righteousness” being forced down their throats via legislation. The Right doesn’t like government-as-doctor, the Left doesn’t want a federal arbiter of public morality imposing religion in the civic arena. Yet who but the government — which in a democracy is supposed to be nothing other than ourselves — can protect us from the predatory actions of the ruthless among us?
Chen has an interesting comment regarding those opening lines of Ch. 18:
We read in the Chuang Tzu that when nature was perfect human beings did not know humanity or righteousness. Their condition being pre-moral, they were naturally good without knowing good from evil. When moral ideas appeared nature had already suffered a loss. Only when humans had lost their original solidarity with the rest of the natural kingdom did they become conscious of the moral values of humanity and righteousness, exalting humans above other creatures. Moral values are thus purchased at a price.
Remind you of anything? This is the Eden myth as seen from the perspective of another culture. Whatever mess we’re in today (take your pick), we’re in it because we’re only human and have a propensity to make value judgments and there’s really no going back. Yearning for simple government is like yearning for Eden — or for Never Never Land. Like Peter Pan and the Lost Boys, some people just don’t want to grow up and face the music of having to figure out how to live together in a civilized society. But moral values are indeed purchased at a price, and sometimes we just have to pay it.
[As an aside, let me briefly mount my soapbox to point out that this ancient Chinese conceptualization of a pre-moral human condition challenges the Christian fundamentalist belief that the story of Eden is a true and exclusive recounting of actual events (see previous sermon). For another interesting take, consider Julian Jaynes’ The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976), which hypothesized that as recently as what we refer to as “antiquity” (as opposed to prehistory), humans obeyed voices in their heads that they attributed to “the gods” and did not arrive at the state we now call consciousness, with its concomitant value judgments, until the brain had made an evolutionary leap. (Extra credit for diagramming that sentence.)]
The TTC is simply telling it like it is, no advice rendered. And in this instance, I think it’s telling us that an ideal society is so far in our past that it’s not likely to lie in our future. But the basis for the ideal is something to keep in mind for living in the present.
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