Now imagine that you are traveling through that forest. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way to be traveling in a forest? Do you want a man-made highway running through it? Do you want a car to drive on that road? Maybe a hiking path? Or do you even really want to get out of the forest? Maybe you are happy with a trail? Or how about just a guide — someone who really knows this forest and who can make your time here worth while.
Now imagine a life. Make it a good life. Actually imagine a life you can’t really imagine because real life is always a surprise; real life is a source of wonder and of encountering that which is beyond our own selves. It contains danger, and pain, and beauty, and grandeur. So imagine a life you can’t quite imagine — a life haunted by wonder.
Now imagine that you are living that life. How do you want to do it? What is, in your mind, the best possible way of living through a life? Do you want man-made structures cutting though it to make it easier to navigate? Do you want a way to insulate yourself from the extremes of the life? Maybe some rules for how get through it? Or do you even really want to get out of the life? Maybe you are happy with some general guidelines for living it? Or how about just a guide — someone intimately acquainted with suffering and joy, with living itself and can make your time in the life worthwhile.
This comparison begins to get at what I think my favorite poem in the DaoDeJing is getting at. Poem 38 reads in part as follows:
A truly good man is not aware of his goodness,And is therefore good.A foolish man tries to be good,And is therefore not good.… Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.When goodness is lost, there is kindness.When kindness is lost, there is justice.When justice is lost, there is ritual.Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.Knowledge of the future is only a flowery trapping of the Tao.It is the beginning of folly.This echoes one of the best quotes from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity:
…though Christianity seems at the first to be all about morality, all about duties and rules and guilt and virtue, yet it leads you on, out of all that, into something beyond. One has a glimpse of a country where they do not talk of those things, except perhaps as a joke. Every one there is filled full with what we should call goodness as a mirror is filled with light. But they do not call it goodness. They do not call it anything. They are not thinking of it. They are too busy looking at the source from which it comes.And the same sentiment appears in the Mystic Muslim Poet Rumi:
Beyond good and bad, there is a field, I’ll meet you there.Aristotle made similar points when he talked about morality, calling it not at act, but a habit. Of course each of these thinkers had different ideas about how to achieve this state of goodness, but the thing they all seem to agree on — to have discovered — is that the good life, the right life, is an un-reflective sort of thing. That is, they saw that living well is not about a technique. It is wandering in a forest, not getting through the forest. Specifically, for each of these folks, any ethical system is a degradation from the whole point of things. Ethical systems are, at best, a concession to our brokenness.
I find that DaoDeJing breaks it down most clearly, starting with the the first step down from right-being (the Tao/Dao). The poem presents, in roughly narrative form, a brief taxonomy of ethical systems, all of which have had their own moments in history.
Non-Ethics and Flourishing
The Tao
As a Christian, I would characterize being with the Tao/Dao as being with Christ. It is following the suffering King, the Prince of Peace, and Lord of Joy in the dance of life. To follow Jesus is to give up on the notion of where we are going and to focus instead in who we are with. It is a matter of being rather than a matter of getting somewhere. This is existence characterized by relationship and love, it is being in the forest; nobody knows what it leads to, we only know that it is right it is flourishing.
Virtue Ethics
Therefore when Tao is lost, there is goodness.
The loss of un-reflective, flourishing existence, is goodness. A preoccupation with becoming like the sort of person who just is un-reflectively good. This is the ethics enunciated by Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas, it is a system built, not out of an intimate knowledge of the Tao, but of a careful observation of those who do. To characterize this shift in Biblical terms, it is the fall, an attempt to systematize and know what is beyond knowledge. It is a diminution because it is an attempt to squeeze the infinitude of possibilities of being into our finite minds. It is the centipede’s dilemma: we stop dancing in order to work out how we were doing it and find that we cannot start again. So we begin to study other dancers and awkwardly ape their movements.
Kantian Ethics
When goodness is lost, there is kindness.
When that proves unsustainable, when we discover that we do not have the mental or moral fortitude to make ourselves into good persons, we resort and therefore diminish to kindness. Kindness — treating people correctly, as people — is also characteristic of un-reflectively good people but it is not a rule it is something they simply are. This is the ethics of people who know what flourishing looks like and are trying to discipline themselves towards it. Imagine someone who is trying to behave in a kind way, not because kindness is a natural reaction for them but because they know that they ought to be, it feels a little uncomfortable doesn’t it?
Divine Command Theory — the Rules
When kindness is lost, there is justice.
When people trying to be kind to one another fails to hold society together we resort of laws (what Laozi characterizes as justice though I don’t particularly like that definition of the word). We make rules prohibiting harmful behavior and then we institutionalize ways in which to harm the people who break those rules. At this level we get the many ethical systems which insist on rigid set of rules (or the principles from which those rules ought to be derived). This is also the level on which our whole system of human rights operates — it is the level below which we have tried to guarantee we will not go. This is where most religions live and operate in discomfort together with other less religious secular systems and the classically liberal understanding of human rights.
Utilitarianism, Objectivism
When justice is lost, there is ritual.If we take the concept of ritual out of a classical Chinese context and put it in a contemporary Western one we get something like social norms or manners. When basic allegiance to human rights and laws fails to guarantee social coherence or human flourishing, we resort to being polite to one another. The whole idea here is that we need to just not hurt anybody. Think about the number of calls there have been recently for a return to civility or decorum. The yearning for norms which are enforced by social acceptance rather than institutional violence seems to be the last gasp of a society trying to hold together as a benefit to its own members. When it fails, there isn’t much left; all of our barriers to evil have been broken. We are no longer un-reflectively good, we are not trying to emulate goodness, virtue holds insufficient attraction for us, our laws have become brutal and unjust, and social acceptance has become tyrannical and stifling.
The Narrative
It is worth pointing out that this downward progression can also be characterized as forward movement. Each system is built, in some ways, on a recognition of the failures of the types of system above it. Virtue ethics begins with the recognition that there is flourishing and that we aren’t doing it. Justice ethics recognizes that those who try and fail to be virtuous without structural and institutional constraints tend to end up making things worse for everyone (think about the misogyny of the Roman empire’s ultimate conflation of virtue with masculinity) so, giving up on making people better, we bring in rules backed by the threat of violence in order to establish a sort of lowest common denominator in our relationships with one another (and sometimes, but far to rarely, the rest of the world). But those power structures and systems always seem to end up disenfranchising and ultimately marginalizing and oppressing people so we dismantle them, we deconstruct them, and we narrow the scope of our concern to harm and fairness. At this point we are probably having some trouble enunciating any justification for those to concerns (instead the easy thing to do is to become appalled with anyone who would dare to question them) but we are clinging to them with intense focus. This is also a movement forward, the concerns at each stage were real and serious concerns; with the failure of each previous stage the scope of our moral universe narrowed but also intensified, it is a process of “Maybe we can’t do all of it but we will at least manage this area of greatest concern”. But the thing is doomed, it must eventually fall to pieces as the debates about negative and positive rights emerge, as harm is accepted for the sake of preventing more or different harm to those more worthy of protection.And then we are back where we started, or at a Looking Glass Land image of where we started. The systems have failed, the destination has evaporated or proved impossibly distant. There is only a lost wandering in the woods. We did not know good and evil, then we learned it, and now we have lost it again. It was always beyond us, the question is what comes next. We were, then we thought we knew but did not know, now we begin to know that we do not know.
Now if only we could stop trying to get somewhere and just be, we might begin to dance again
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