Stillness and Clarity (Tao Te Ching 45)

45

The grand system seems defective.
But, it will never malfunction.
Grand abundance seems empty.
But, it is inexhaustible.
Grand justice seems crooked.
Grand virtuosity seems unskilled.
Grand eloquence seems unlearned.
Motion warms us when it’s cold.
Stillness cools us when it’s hot.
Clarity and stillness
bring the world into alignment.

WRITTEN REFLECTION

In the opening lines, he refers to the idea that evolution has created a situation in which human infant heads—with their massive brains relatively speaking—are too large for the birth canal. Other mammals are typically born with fully formed brains. They need to be ready to learn, to hunt, and be aware of their surroundings shortly after birth. Human babies, on the other hand are needy and helpless for their first few years. Their brains finish developing, their skulls harden up, and learn to walk throughout their first few years. The pain this causes women, and the vulnerability of the infants seems to this songwriter to be an indication that a blind or indifferent force is behind the whole system of biological life. Put another way, if the God of his evangelical upbringing—a directly creating and controlling deity—is responsible for the world as we experience it, it seems he could have done better. 

According to the Tao Te Ching, the system of the world appears to be defective. Note that it only appears this way. Perhaps the paradox here is best explained by understanding the way the Tao works. For instance, if we take the way nature helps organisms and systems adapt to their environments, what sometimes seems like a setback or a defect, is in fact what makes biological life so amazing. Trial and error on the grand scale leads to complexity and beautiful diversity of existence on this planet. 

Admittedly, a theist who absolutely rejects the mechanisms of evolution will not resonate with this idea. Fundamentalist Christianity seems to have increasing difficulty explaining the “design” of the natural world, Taoist philosophy seems rather compatible. To return to the Father John Misty lyric, the fact that nature has witnessed a highly developed species like homo sapiens, despite the difficulty of getting so much computing power into our noggins is an impressive feat. In other words, the very evidence that is brought forth in the song “Pure Comedy” as evidence of the absurdity of the world might be used to support the idea that the natural system that emerges from the Tao may seem defective but is in fact perfect. It may seem empty at times, but it is in fact inexhaustible. 

Each of the paradoxes that follow resonate with the early Martin Luther’s religious philosophy, articulated in his Heidelberg Theses: “A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the thing what it actually is.” (thesis 21). For him, a theologian of glory was one who arrogantly thought they could achieve spiritual advancement through hard work. Luther instead emphasized the spiritual “yin” of grace: receiving with humility the delightful paradoxes of life in which we find life underneath death and holiness behind a crucified Galilean’s mocked and beaten body.

What’s the takeaway here for practical living? Perhaps it is the way in which what seems cruel and heartless in nature may work, ultimately, for the wellbeing of our world. 

Consider, for example, the unsettling ideas of the pastor and economist Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834). In his famous work An Essay on the Principle of Population, he noticed that whenever humans get better at food production, they also create an overpopulated society that had to be brought back into balance through famine, war and disease. This grim perspective, along with other mechanistic understandings of the world, led economics to be dubbed “the dismal science.”

The problem with condemning Malthus and Malthusian views of economics is that it seems to be based squarely on universal human experience. But what this chapter from the Tao Te Ching seems to offer is perhaps a bit more hopeful. If we humans understand the Tao and live in harmony with nature, we can learn to thrive instead of create conditions primed for suffering and death. 

To see how this is so, consider the many pandemics that have devastated humanity. Many viruses, for instance, emerge form inhumane agricultural practices. Keeping massive populations of pigs and chickens in tiny pens or cages, all packed together in their own filth, creates ideal conditions for pathogens to thrive, mutate, and jump over to humans. Hence, “swine flu” and “avian flu” depend on unbalanced pig and chicken farming. While we still aren’t exactly sure where COVID-19 came from, the theory that it emerged from “wet-market” or live-animal selling at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market. 

Cultures without these livestock and market practices tend to avoid the devastation of large scale pandemics. For example, shortly after 1492 when Europeans arrived in the New World, the indigenous people were devastated by pathogens, probably carried by Spanish pigs throughout the land. By the time that European conquerors showed up, they arrived to find (whether they knew it or not) that villages and cities had been reduced by 80 percent or so by diseases like small pox. The Native Americans, it turns out had no immunity against the viruses that had arisen in Europe through highly populated areas with dense populations of livestock. 

Despite the sorrow and calamity here, it’s worth noting that as “Mother Nature” does correct human excess we can also learn lessons from famine, plague, and war. These lessons are in fact the lessons mentioned later in the Tao Te Ching as Lao Tzu’s three great treasures. These are compassion, minimalism, and non-domination. These three treasures are remedies to the three great Malthusian death angels. Famine is averted when we compassionately distribute our resources, plague is averted when we avoid excess through minimalism, and war is averted when we embrace a way of non-domination. In other words, if we live in balance, we will live happy, rich lives and we won’t have to have nature forcibly bring us back into balance through calamities.