Start With Why to Eliminate Whys

A disagreement with the Tao Te Ching about the best way to Wu Wei.

Hello, good people! First, I had another article, Hidden in Plain Sight: Putting Tech Before Teaching, which published in Quillette last week. I hope you’ll check it out!

Also, today’s Stuff can be read without context, but it is best seen as a continuation of the argument I made on April 12th in How to Want Fulfilling Things. Onward!

From the Ages

“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 ritual.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.”

Source: Chapter 38, The Tao Te Ching, Gia-Fu-Feng and Jane English Translation

From Today

“While the people who navigate life through bargaining and rules can get far in the material world, they remain crippled and alone in their emotional world. This is because transactional values create relationships that are built upon manipulation.”

Source: Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope

From Us

The Tao Te Ching aims to help people bring themselves into accord with the Tao, which can be roughly thought of as the way of the universe. To harmonize with the Tao requires you to drop categorizations and reductions so that you can see reality as it truly is, unclouded by the assumptions most people typically bring to their daily experiences. This is meant to produce a more natural, harmonious, and intuitive way of life. 

Taoists often refer to an ideal known as Wu-wei, which is typically translated as effortless action. The first line excerpted above—“... when Tao is lost, there is goodness.”—focuses on just this. When people are in harmony with the Tao, they have no need for concepts such as goodness or virtue. They naturally behave in a way that observers would label virtuous, but they do it out of their innate flow. They have no ulterior motives and they are not trying to conform to anyone else’s desires. Most notably, they aren’t blinded by their own fixation on embodying a specific virtue. To the Taoist, this last part is important because, as another translation states, “The man of low virtue can lose sight of some virtue by never losing sight of it.” 

But this man of “low virtue,” who insists on trying to embody virtue through effort and self-reflection, is still very much preferable to your average dude. In fact, in my last Stuff on cultivating the right emotions, I argued that it was important to take this low virtue approach. My contention is that the Taoist conception of effortless virtue is not quite as innate as many Taoists would like to believe. With really good models, some virtues might seem innate. But, more often, this reflexive goodness is only possible after first committing to the sort of self-cultivation they refer to as a life of low virtue. Virtues become automatic and intuitive, because they’ve been identified, contemplated, and practiced.  

In his book, Everything is F*cked, Mark Manson explains how values evolve as we mature. As young children, we’re basically pulled along by nothing but our desires to gain pleasure and avoid pain. As we mature, we develop the ability to consider long term cause and effect. We can decide to do “the right thing” (even if not for the right reasons) because there are downstream benefits. We can study to get better grades and have better career options. We can exercise to look or feel better. As we become true adults, according to Manson, we begin to do things for no conscious reason other than that they are the right thing. Ulterior motives erode. I chase down my napkin when the wind blows it away, not because I want people to praise me for not littering, but because it is right. There is no why. 

To some extent, maturity is about eliminating our whys so that we can live with more Wu-wei. But to do this often requires that we train and arborize certain intuitions. 

The remaining devolution described by the Tao Te Ching seems to capture much of what we see in modernity. I’ll quote the rest again, so you don’t have to reference above:

When goodness is lost, there is kindness.

When kindness is lost, there is justice.

When justice is lost, there ritual.

Now ritual is the husk of faith and loyalty, the beginning of confusion.

As concepts of character were devalued and moral relativism proliferated, schools and mainstream opinions placed more focus on just “being kind.” Yet, as I explain in chapter 2 of my book, unmoored by deeper values, this kindness has often been used to justify mass infantilization and dependency. With greater infantilization, unselfish kindness then erodes in more people and we have to resort to justice (the law) more often to mediate human interactions. But of course law without common values or virtue becomes nothing but a vehicle for exerting power. When our legislators, leaders, and institutions grow corrupt, then all we have are empty rituals. This is perfectly embodied by the modern school setting where teachers and administrators are governed by a set of policies that they know to be misguided and ineffectual. Yet few ever utter a word. It is just the way it is.  

The scale and heterogeneity of modern society contribute to this. As societies become larger and more complex, determining what actions are best becomes much more complicated. Virtue is not nearly as natural a consequence of the environmental defaults. In larger societies, people are more disconnected from the effects of their work and the work of others. They can operate with more anonymity and society can flourish despite the incompetency of many of its members. Thus, it's possible to believe that it is kind to perpetuate other people’s dependency and impulsivity. People can go their entire lives without having to cultivate the sort of virtues that naturally develop when one is working on skills and contributing to society.

But modernity is not going away. So here are my take home messages from this meditation:

1. We should take the cultivation of virtue seriously if we want to live well. The Tao Te Ching argues against cultivation, but, again, I think that in modern society early cultivation equals later freedom. This isn’t as rigid as it sounds. In fact, it is the route to effortless action. 

2. Virtues are often cultivated by diving deep into skill development. Training is clunky at first but it creates effortless action by making excellence a habit.

3. Lean into Dunbar-sized groups (based on Dunbar’s number—roughly 150 members or less). There are many social and individual benefits that come from contribution to a community. When we invest in the people and groups around us, good things often happen by default. Life becomes more effortless—more in line with the Tao.

4. And read the Tao Te Ching if you haven’t yet. An easy, short daily reader. I’ve been through it a few times now and every time I open it again I feel a bit more peaceful and a bit more aligned with nature. You don’t have to agree with every line to benefit.

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   Thank you very much for reading and sharing with your kindred spirits! Have a great week and, as always, life is too short to be normal.

   Shane