A word after a word
after a word is power.
Margaret Atwood, "Spelling"
To what extent are the different parts of a person's life, art, and thought independent of each other and capable of being evaluated in isolation? In one sense, of course, they must be kept distinct, or we fall into the error of ad hominem argument. We cannot say that Wagner was a bad musician because he was a raving anti-Semite, for instance. But having recognized his anti-Semitism, we can then question how it may have found expression in his music; we can look at Alberich muttering over his bullion at the beginning of Rheingold, for instance, and wonder how much of the power of that scene derives from its evocation of an ancient prejudice.
I propose to do something of the sort with a much-praised text from early China, the Daodejing (Canon of the Way and its Power), also known by the name of its supposed author, Laozi. To avoid this brief note turning into a dissertation, I will be making several time-saving assumptions: that the text we have today dates from several centuries before the unification of the empire under the First Emperor of Qin in 221 BCE, that it has been transmitted more or less faithfully, and -- most controversial of all -- that it comes largely or entirely from the brush of a single author, whom for convenience we refer to as "Laozi."
In brief, I will be suggesting that the political thought of Laozi was retrograde even for the author's time. I believe him to have been a reactionary nostalgic for the return of a past that never existed and never could have existed, in this bearing something of a resemblance to a number of much more recent political figures. He was a very unfortunate innovator in that he seems to have been the first writer in ancient China to advocate not only consciously lying to the common people but also deliberately and systematically undermining their capacity to detect and counter these lies. He has one set of rules for the "enlightened," and quite another for the commoners, which again sets him apart from other thinkers of his time and place. In short, I believe his political thought to be both impractical and malignant.
Should these conclusions affect how we see the more famous, "mystical" side of Laozi? This is a question that each reader must answer for him/herself. Being by nature highly resistant to the truths or delusions of mysticism and spirituality, my own feelings on the matter are not directly relevant to the questions discussed here, and so I have restricted them to a few remarks at the very end.
Traditions of rule in early China
Harried imperial librarians two thousand or so years ago created the "schools" of Chinese philosophy by grouping together writers with similar themes and approaches. Of these, the three categories most often encountered in discussions of ancient thought are the Confucian (in Chinese, simply "The literati"), the Legalists, and the Daoists. Since the schools were established retrospectively, there is a good deal of overlap between them, and works that are "purely" within one school are relatively rare.
The Confucian or literati school claimed to carry on the traditions of an ideal past, which in early days often meant concentrating on a single classical canon to the relative neglect of others. Like the other "schools," it had no organization and no structure or recognized leader. In a sense, this school predated Confucius, in that there must have been teachers of the canons before his time, though we know very little about them and their work. What Confucius added was inspiration and flexibility, the inspiration coming from a change in emphasis, from waiting for Heaven to save humankind to saving humankind as a means of serving Heaven, the flexibility from relating dry and particular rituals to general themes of what was just and right in a larger sense. Instead of teaching one or two texts, Confucius taught morality and supported his assertions by quoting the canons as necessary. Ritual was the first guide in any situation, but if the result offended a scholar's sense of justice, it was justice and not ritual that was supposed to come first. One result of stressing the principles behind ritual was that living in a proper manner became open to nearly everyone, instead of restricted to aristocrats who had the money to lay out for all the latest bling. Confucius even appropriated the old term for a prince's son, junzi, and redefined it as a person living a morally exemplary life, without reference to birth -- eerily similar to the evolution of the word "gentleman" in the English language from "born noble" to "behaves nobly."
Confucians saw the common people as the grass and their superiors as the wind: when the wind blows, the grass bends. This attitude had several consequences, some of which may surprise modern readers. Perhaps most important, being so easy to influence, the common people were at the mercy of the example their superiors set them. This meant that if the commoners were disorderly or criminal, a major part of the responsibility was assumed to lie with their superiors, since if their superiors had set them a good example, they would not -- could not -- have become bad. Superiors were also enjoined to teach the people their duties, and if possessed of a photographic memory and quick wits, it was by no means impossible to rise in society through literacy and literary learning, at least for males. There was no formal objection to women learning the ritual texts, but it would not advance them, except in the sense that their unrewarded diligence was used to admonish lazy or neglectful men. "Even a woman understands that!" is the tag line for more than one didactic tale.
While manifestly unjust by modern standards, sexist and classist and generally obsolete in assuming a particular social structure expresses a universal ideal, Confucianism considered the dissemination of its doctrines a positive good under all circumstances. The rules were unfair, but at least they were public and their exact application was a matter of public debate. The common people were encouraged to learn as much about them as they could; they were to be educated to agree, but at least they were allowed to know what was going on. None of the rituals and regulations that governed the state needed to be kept secret.
The second major school was the Legalist. In many areas, Legalists took opposite positions to those of the Confucians; they considered rituals inherited from the past to be suitable only for the past, if that. They broke the traditional aristocracy and leveled social differences until only two ranks remained: the ruler and his subjects. Officials existed, but only at the pleasure of the ruler; they had no independent status. This proved both the strength and the bane of Legalism: under a hard-working and competent ruler, it allowed quick success, but if the man at the top was not up to the job, it would destroy the state with equal efficiency.
Legalists believed in ruling the state through positive law, regulating every action with precision. Virtue was reduced to a single quality: trustworthiness, both in ruler and ruled. Legalist law, at least in theory, was automatic, extremely severe, and entirely merciless. Legalist thinkers tended to believe that deterrence was infinitely scalable, that doubling the punishments would halve the crime rate, an assumption that should have died in antiquity but retains a zombie vitality even today. Thus, the best way for the ruler to show mercy was to punish even small crimes with exemplary severity, since this would ensure that the people never commit any crimes at all and so would never be punished: "using punishment to eliminate punishment." Legalist thinkers scoffed at the more nuanced variety of justice the Confucians preferred, claiming that it allowed crime to persist and in the long run resulted in more suffering than would have been the case if severity had been adopted from the outset.
Legalist rule thus depended even more heavily than Confucian on the common people understanding what was expected of them. Instead of the canonical texts, Legalists studied the law and taught it to the commoners. In some texts, the commoners are even said to have the right to impeach minor officials for breaking the laws, through an official complaint to the next level in the bureaucracy, resulting in a public trial. The Legalist ideal was every part of life ruled by law, and every part of law on public display, cast into iron or carved in stone, so that everyone could understand what was expected of him or her in every possible situation.
Daoist rule: a contradiction in terms?
The problem of how to rule in a tradition ostensibly devoted to "nonaction" (wu wei) is obviously a complicated one. However, nearly all ancient Chinese philosophy is entangled with political science, and every school had its own prescription or prescriptions for the ideal state. The Daoists had at least three, that of Zhuangzi (3rd century BCE), in my opinion the leading thinker in the Daoist tradition and arguably one of the best writers the world has ever seen, that of the shadowy Yang Zhu, and that of the Laozi. We now know there was yet another tradition, Huang-Lao Daoism, the Way of the Yellow Emperor (a mythical culture hero) and Laozi, but this mixture of Daoism with elements of Legalist thought fell into the shadows fairly early and is now only known through texts excavated from burial sites.
Perhaps it is going too far to accuse Zhuangzi of a theory of government. He is the most thoroughly asocial of ancient Chinese thinkers, in that he abandoned all hope of any form of progress and restricted the understanding of the Way to a few exceptional individuals gifted with inborn talent. Trying to emulate Zhuangzi, according to Zhuangzi himself, is an exercise in futility. The Way cannot be taught, written down, or even spoken of with any certainty (in this, his thought parallels the Daodejing and may be indebted to it). Those who could know the Way, would know it by intuition, without effort; those who could not would at best be able to attain fleeting glimpses of it, only enough to allow them to regret what they were missing.
A much more obscure figure, Yang Zhu, who lived prior to Zhuangzi (his exact dates are uncertain), is credited with the first Daoist theory of government and the state. According to the research of A. C. Graham on the little that is left of Yang Zhu's doctrines, Yang Zhu felt that the altruism and selflessness of an absolutely non-interfering ruler would draw people to him with an irresistible force (once again, we see the assumption that inferiors are shaped by the behavior of their superiors). Such a ruler would thus spontaneously become the focal point of a non-state state, where allegiance to him as the reluctant ruler was predicated on his never demanding such an allegiance. This is certainly a charming picture, in harmony with the general Daoist assumption that trying to mind other people's business for them only makes matters worse, but as a practical program of rule it has some obvious deficiencies. The period during which Zhuangzi and Yang Zhu lived was not called the age of the Warring States for nothing. A practical program of government, one that could be sold to rulers in the lively marketplace of ideas that characterized this age, had to be a bit more substantial than pious hopes.
Laozi, the devious Daoist
The Daodejing presents a mixture of personal reflections and principles by which to rule a state. I am deliberately neglecting the former here, since elsewhere they all but monopolize discussion of Laozi's thought. As I said earlier, the extent to which the political thought of the Daodejing should influence the way in which the other aspects of the tradition are seen is something that readers must decide for themselves.
Laozi is famous for his advocacy of "nonaction" or "no contrived action" (wu wei), a fine-sounding and elegant slogan. Like other fine-sounding slogans, however, its meaning is damnably elusive, no easier to pin down than "democracy" or "freedom." The problem with wuwei lies in defining wei, "doing" or "contrivance." What in fact is contrived? What is "natural"? A Confucian or a Legalist could pledge allegiance to the ideal of "no contrived action" just as well as a Daoist could, since both schools assumed their doctrines expressed natural realities rather than human contrivance. One major Confucian thinker of the late Warring States, Xunzi, was bold enough to champion contrivance, arguing that the very point of civilization was for human beings to contrive means by which they can overcome their inborn greed and live peaceful and moral lives, and was roundly condemned for it in later ages.
To isolate what Laozi considered unnatural contrivance, we have to look at the positive advice he gave to rulers. Let us begin with a passage from the third chapter of the Daodejing whose full implications have usually been neglected, or avoided.
Thus the order created by the sage ruler empties the people's minds and fills their bellies, enfeebles their will and strengthens their bones. The sage constantly acts to deprive the common people (min) of all understanding and desire, and to ensure that the wise dare do nothing (bu gan wei).
This passage assumes that there is something in the minds of the common people, and that there should properly be nothing. It assumes that the common people have their own will, and that they should properly have no will. It assumes that the wise would be inspired to act, and so should be forced into silence ("
dare do nothing"). The last precept we can perhaps excuse by assuming the wise here are "wise guys" who are intent on disrupting the perfect rule of the Daoist sage, but it is not so easy to write off the prefrontal lobotomy Laozi prescribes for the ordinary people of the state. If this is
wuwei, then
all thought and desire must be defined as "contrivances," unnatural evils to be eliminated. Moreover, those engaged in bringing this situation about would have to know how to do it, and have a desire to do it. Here we see the emergence of a double standard: the self-assured "sage" ruling over the deliberately created ignorant. For their own good? Possibly. But it remains hypocrisy of a type foreign to both Confucians and Legalists, who may oppress by our standards, but who both follow a single rulebook that is unashamedly made known to all, and who both value at least some sort of learning unrestricted by wealth or class.
Is the above an outlier, or perhaps even an interpolation? Sadly, no. Let us take another passage, from Chapter 80. This one is often softened by translators, without grammatical warrant, by turning causatives "make...." into pious expressions of an ideal, "let there be...." With the causatives restored, it reads as follows,
Make the state small, make its common people few. Make sure that if the common people have weapons, they do not use them. Make the common people fear for their lives (zhong si, "put emphasis on death") so that they never move far away. Then, although they have boats and carts, they will never have occasion to ride them; although they have armor and weapons, they will never take the field.
It is worth thinking for a moment about how all these "makes" are going to be accomplished. Certainly, ensuring that people fear to change their residences, never venture to defend themselves, and never dare to use boats or carts would seem to require a fair amount of "contrivance." Defining these privations as "natural" is, in my opinion, a hopelessly "contrived" version of natural, one that would require a good deal of violence to bring about. In particular, cart-borne trade had been going on in China for at least a thousand years by Laozi's time; in the tenth century BCE, the victorious Zhou dynasty had recommended it to the defeated Shang loyalists as a way to make an honest living.
A word after a word after a word is too much power
As Margaret Atwood pointed out in the epigram that heads this discussion, "A word after a word after a word is power." We have no power if we are not allowed to put together our own arguments, or if the words we use are defined in ways that restrict the meanings we can express with them. Readers here will hardly need to be reminded that in the past, for instance, when husbands were assumed to possess automatic sexual rights over their wives, a wife could not be "raped" because by definition, rape meant unlawfully forcing a person to have sex, and there was no lawful way a wife could refuse sex to her husband. The meaning of the word defined how the problem could be discussed, and even how it could be thought of. In a similar way, beyond all the more unsubtle forms of coercion mentioned in the passages above, the dominion established by the sage of the Daodejing demands absolute control over the words of the common people, to undermine their power and to negate any chance they might object to the ruler's program. The aim in view is a state of abject subjection, concealed from its victims by deliberate hypocrisy.
Literacy is the most obvious target. In the Chinese tradition, where scribes began by taking down communications to and from the deities in early techniques of divination, the written word has always had an aura that is close to sacred. For the educated in particular, who tended to scoff at the idea they would be rewarded or punished in an afterlife, the written word was the Last Judgment, Heaven, and Hell all in one. The Confucian philosopher Mencius warns that evil emperors will be given reign-titles like "the Dark" and "the Cruel" by historians, and their descendants will never be able to get them changed. Mere force is assumed to be futile, since it is being employed against a spiritual ideal; as the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov wrote in The Master and Margarita, "Manuscripts don't burn." In the eighth century, the Tang dynasty scholar Liu Zhijie expressed this faith in a passage in one of his historical works,
Man lives in his bodily shape between heaven and earth and his life is like the span of the summer fly, like the passing of a white colt glimpsed through a crack in the wall. Yet he is shamed to think that within those years his merit will not be known, and grieved that after his departure his name will not be known. Thus from emperors and kings down to the poorest commoners, from the gentlemen of the court to the hermits in their far-off hills and forests, there is truly none who is not tireless in pursuing merit and fame and impassioned in his thoughts of them. Why is this? Because all have their hearts set on immortality. And what, then, is immortality? No more than to have one’s name written in a book.
If the world had no books, if the ages were without their historiographers, then whether men were sage rulers like Yao and Shun, or tyrants like Jie and Zhou…once death had changed their form, the earth on their graves would hardly have dried before the good and the evil would have become indistinguishable from one another, and both beauty and ugliness would have perished forever. But so long as the office of historiographer is carried on, so long as books continue to exist, though men die and enter into darkness and empty silence, their deeds remain, shining like the stars of the Milky Way. Then when a man hereafter shall study them, he has only to lift the scrolls from their boxes and his spirit may commune with the vast ages of antiquity; he need not go beyond his courtyard door and his vision can encompass a thousand years.
(Understanding History, chapter 11; tr. Burton Watson)
However, for common people condemned to live in an eternal, unreflective present, free of the need to have independent thoughts, or any thoughts at all, written records would be at best irrelevant. Something for the bookkeeping was all that would be required,
Make the people return to knotting cords and using them [instead of writing]. (Chapter 80)
I have emphasized the "return" here because it shows that the writer of the
Daodejing was a
conscious reactionary. He is under no illusion that he is merely preserving the purity of peasant society. His plan is to
impose illiteracy on all the members of the lower orders, to
transform them from literate to illiterate. Due to the enormous prestige of writing, and the fact that literacy was one of the few "up" ladders in the social structure, the ability to read and write seems to have been unusually widespread in ancient China. Laozi was going to have none of that, and although he does not openly advocate a Legalist "burning of the books," that would be the natural result of a blanket proscription of literacy.
And don't think you can talk your way out of it either.....
But why stop your prohibitions at writing? Even the illiterate still talk, constantly, and they might talk about something dangerous that would re-awaken their wills and re-fill their minds with inconvenient thoughts. Thus, logically, the author of the Daodejing also takes measures to ensure that "a [spoken] word after a word after a word" never gets to the point that it might endanger state power. The much put upon commoners of the sage ruler are to be allowed no words to blame -- or for that matter to praise -- the shadowy forces that control their lives behind the scenes:
With the best of all [rulers, his] inferiors know [only that] he exists....When [the sage's] task is accomplished and his work done, the people [bai xing, a more inclusive term than min, "commoners"] all say, "We happened of ourselves to be thus." (Chapter 17)
The ruler is to act on the people, but when he finishes whatever he is doing, the people are to be deceived into thinking that it was their own idea. If this is not a demand for the deliberate creation of a false consciousness, so that the people attribute to themselves or "nature" the results of being worked on by some outside force, I do not know what you could call it.
As we mentioned earlier, it is a universal assumption in early Chinese thought that inferiors model on their superiors. This assumption was shared by Daoist thinkers, as the example of Yang Zhu demonstrates. This means that the ruler in the Daodejing must be a hypocrite as well as a deceiver if he is to maintain his subordinates in a desired state of total ignorance and lumpish incuriousity. Thus, the ruler is warned that he must present a face to the world that is very different from the restless ambition that he would in fact need to carry out his program:
A sage's public persona [shengren zhi zai tianxia, his "presence in the world"] exhibits befuddlement, and when ruling he is impenetrably obscure. The people pay attention to the evidence of their senses; the sage treats them all as if they were children. (Chapter 49)
In public, the Daodejing sage ruler appears to be other than he must necessarily be to occupy his position successfully. He makes himself unreadable by others so as to deceive the sense impressions of his subjects. In other words, he is a conscious and consistent hypocrite. The outward face of rule must be kept suitably witless so that through modeling themselves on this false face, the commoners blunt their intelligence. The author even admits that this is not primarily for "their own good"; it is for the ruler's good -- the ignorant are easier to rule:
Those of old who were expert in ruling according to the Way did not enlighten others thereby, but made them dull of mind. The reason the people are hard to govern is that there is too much wisdom among them. Using wisdom to rule the state will be a calamity to it [or "to him," the ruler]; not using wisdom to rule it will be a blessing....Then [the people] will revert to a stage of abject submission. (Chapter 65)
I have again emphasized the "revert," because it shows the author was perfectly aware of what he was doing. The people were inconveniently prone to thinking, in his opinion, and they had to be returned to primal ignorance -- for their own good, of course. They are not to be allowed to observe the true state of the ruler directly; they are to be deprived of any chance to discuss him orally; and they are to be rendered illiterate so that they have no chance of keeping written records. All opportunity of finding out what their superiors are up to, scanty enough already in a premodern society, much less reflecting on, debating, and evaluating said superiors, is to be systematically stripped away from them. They will not be able to utter a word against their largely invisible rulers. What does this remind you of?
No doubt some will be annoyed by the comparison. But Neo's experience was simply more abrupt and graphic. He is left no mouth to object; the subjects of the Daodejing sage king are left their mouths, in the physical sense, but mouths that have been carefully cleansed and protected from all content that his or her superiors might take exception to. There is not as great a difference between the two as many might assume.
Handle with Care
Does the above mean that drawing inspiration from the Daodejing is wicked or illegitimate? Hardly. Inspirations, like questions, are valid independently of their source. If some scrap of "Laozi" expresses or clarifies something that has been present shadowy and unformed in a person's mind, that person will benefit, even if the writer was tainted with evil, and even if the translation is ridiculously inadequate. In such a case, the thought did not originate with Laozi; it was merely given form by what he is supposed to have said. It still began elsewhere, in the person seeking to clarify some idea of theirs, and it derives whatever worth it has from the quality of that person's thought, not primarily from Laozi, even if it borrows his words.
The situation differs, though, if "Laozi" is assumed to be an authority, rather than merely an inspiration. I do not believe that one can evaluate a thinker without looking at the whole content and context of his or her thought. In this case, anyone who assumes that the Daodejing contains some sort of mystical "Eastern wisdom" that can be swallowed whole would do well to read the entire text and reflect on its context and implications. Alberich sings many songs in many different places, and we cannot understand them fully if we do not, in the literal sense, understand where he is coming from.