tao te ching lxxx

Reduce the size and population of the state.  Ensure that even though the people have tools of war for a troop or a battalion they will not use them and also that they will be reluctant to move to distant places because they look on death as no light matter.

Even when they have ships and carts they will have no use for them and even when they have armor and weapons they will have no occasion to make a show of them.

Bring it about that the people will return to the use of the knotted rope,

Will find relish in their food

And beauty in their clothes,

Will be content in their abode

And happy in the way they live.

Though adjoining states are within sight of one another and the sound of dogs barking and cocks crowing in one state can be heard in another, yet the people of one state will grow old and die without having had any dealings with those of another.

Vignette LX speaks of the spirits not losing their potencies when the empire is ruled in accordance with the way but that these potencies will not harm the people.  The spirits attribute the sage for this restraint, the sage the spirits—a mutual accord.

So, here, we also have forces; instead of spirits, we have tools of war, travel, ships and carts, armor and weapons, power and movement and speed and complex trans-state transactions.  So, here, we have a gap, infinite in practice, between the capacity of the force and its use.  Like muscle that doesn’t crush people but instead uses its capacity to build sustainable local environments, the key to humanity taking its place on the earth—that is, withdrawing and refraining from usurping the places others (species and things, such as swamps and lakes and trees) quite naturally have—is not a reduction or numbing of energy, but a redirection of energy, a building of spiritual steam engines, a transformation of the relations between potency and work, energy and object, existence, death, and contentment.

How do we reduce the size and population of the state without genocide and war and famine and superbugs?  Or, in other words, how do we bring about return without catastrophe?  Isn’t this the strategic question facing our species, the drumbeat of our day?

daodejing 77

Is not the way of heaven like the stretching of a bow?

The high it presses down,

The low it lifts up,

The excessive it takes from,

The deficient it gives to.

It is the way of heaven to take from what has in excess in order to make good what is deficient.  The way of man is otherwise.  It takes from those who are in want in order to offer this to those who already have more than enough.  Who is there that can take what he himself has in excess and offer this to the empire?  Only he who has the way.

Therefore the sage benefits them yet exacts no gratitude,

Accomplishes his task yet lays claim to no merit.

Is this not because he does not wish to be considered a better man than others?

 

The difference between heaven in Daoism and heaven in Christianity is a matter of geometry and possibly genitals—or at least their corresponding spiritual potencies.  In Dao, heaven collapses—through a radical relativizing—the relation between things (the relation between relations), and so any expected moral hierarchy, by drawing a circle around heaven and earth.  In Christ, man sustains the expectation of moral hierarchy by drawing arrows (teleologies, etiologies) between heaven and earth.  Time, death, origins are central monuments, inexorable, in Christ; they are as wispy and nomadic as words, in Dao.

 

Yet we have in both this notion of good, of justice.  In Dao, of goodness apart from its opposition to evil, of justice apart from its opposition to the law (of words apart from their opposition to silence, of things apart from their opposition for their opposition is a part of them).  A goodness without center or end; a goodness that, if it has a means, its means is not particularly known, other than as one knows the memory of a dream.

 

The sage does not offer what she has essentially, only what she has in excess.  Yet if the sage has anything essential is no clear outline.  Regardless, the sage does not offer what she has in excess to the deficient or the low, but to the empire, bypassing the rough dualities of high and low, heaven and earth.

 

This is the only authentic democracy.  The tree is the tree and does not consider itself better than the cockroach.  The human is the human; why should it be better than the slug or a bog?  I am i; why should i be better than you?

 

If i am muscled, beautiful, successful, rich, talented, famous, fortunate, how easy it is for me to take credit for my state, to draw taut lines of causation.  I am powerful because of my will, my drive, my virtue, my persistency, my blood and heritage, my intellect, my kindness, my perspicacity and judgment.

 

But Dao collapses such pleasant conclusions, such self-serving satisfactions.  Was not this person formed this way, in the same way as a particular tree (by genetic formula and context—in the case of the tree­: wind, soil, environment; in the case of the human: culture, home, environment)?  How can he then take credit for what has been formed into him, what he has been formed into, when he is the murky sum of a formula and a context, a tentative addition, a transient conglomerate of murky inputs and tangled roots?

 

Dao dissolves virtue and morality through their absolution.  It places humans in their place—not slightly lower than the angels or made in the image of God or the unacknowledged legislators of the world or a virus to be eradicated or something to tell the oceans how to live their lives … but as a myriad set of somethings among myriad sets of myriad sets of somethings.  And who can be better in such a context?  One only is, on a sea of is-ness.  This is the way.