3. Nothing-Doing

 

 

The alternative to success is nothing-doing, not a negative restraint and a holding back from life, but a moving forward and a reaching out to the beyond-words reality of Tao. Nothing-doing is actually a way of getting things done; it is also the only way of doing them with the vigor and persuasiveness that results from following the Way. It is not an upside down bit of humor. Lao Tzŭ says flatly:

Do nothing-doing

And everything will get done.

In Chinese, the very character for action reflects distaste for fussy interference with life. Commentators point out that its ancient form appears to have been derived from a representation of a man trying to pull an elephant around by the nose.

But nothing-doing means more than avoiding interference. Negatively, it means not projecting self as the center of all that happens, not impressing one's will on events, not manipulating people and things, not devising grandiose plans or sequences of plans, or simply not combatting other people, not violating nature, not destroying things, not murdering people. Something-doing, which to Lao Tzŭ is virtually synonymous with violence, comes from self-will, which is false to the Way, false to nature, false to the nature of man.

Positively, nothing-doing means something so vital and profound that it is not to be talked about.  It is inherent in the spiritual-physical reality of Tao that pervades all things and all beings, that makes events fruitful by not channeling them but by freeing them: the reality that creates history not out of the decisions of a controlling few but out of the thoughts and actions of everyone alive.  Nothing-doing even provides a compelling means of communicating, whereby what a man is and does speaks louder than what he says. In the long run, nothing-doing always wins over something-doing, but its workings are best described by analogy with soft things like water which wear away all hardness.

The softest things beneath heaven

Overcome the hardest.

Nothingness alone penetrates no space.

Hence I know the use of nothing-doing.

In the something-doing West, that which is natural is held suspect, for there it is believed that it is natural for nature to be violent and natural for man to lie, steal, and kill. Hence man is to be prevented from following his "natural" urges by systems of praise and blame, reward and punishment, manipulation and restraint. Personal violence can be prevented, it is believed, only by organized violence, and it is believed further that this organized violence alone has civilized man and brought him out of a slavery in which he is thought by inclination to have assaulted, raped, and robbed whomever he met. This cornic-strip view of man as a club-wielding animal would be amusing did it not coincide with popular (and, for a long time, philosophical) views of savagery as something that modern man has had to rise above through the agencies of churches, courts, and prisons.

Such a view is witness to the pathetic attempt of Western egocentrics to cloak themselves in the garments of righteousness. Stone-age people, who were still the common people of the bronze-age times in which Lao Tzŭ wrote, were an essentially simple (and essentially matrilocal) people, incapable of projecting self as the center of all that happens, and recent research into prehistory suggests them to be remarkably free of wars and oppressions. They seem to have been dependent on and delighted by daily sustenance, ordinary quiet, familiar conversation, and common affection, as are not a few country peoples, hill peoples, rain-forest peoples, and island peoples still alive today. To be sure, they were undoubtedly very dirty, diseased, short-lived, and extremely superstitious. Undoubtedly they gave way at times to theft, violence, and other forms of selfishness. But they did not organize theft and violence into a manner of living, and they knew nothing about the neurotic involvements of self-will. Indeed, it is from these simpler patterns of living that men and women may have come to recognize the Way, while it is from the far-different patterns of the ages of bronze and iron that they may have developed notions of self-willed violence and deceit.

Of the prophetic voices raised against organized violence, Lao Tzŭ's is one of the earliest:

He who uses Tao to guide rulers of men

Does not force beneath-heaven with arms.

Such things recoil on their users.

 

Where armies are

Briars and brambles grow.

Bad harvests follow big wars.

Be firm and that is all:

Dare not rely on force.

Be firm and not haughty,

Firm but not boastful,

Firm but not proud,

 

Firm when necessary,

Firm but non-violent.

What others have taught, I also teach:

Men of violence come to death by violence.

Whoever said this is my teacher.

Today's new man of violence is one who sees death as the consequence of the outward violence that other men perpetuate, and not as the consequence of the inward violence that he practices unawares himself. He is fascinated with international adventurism of the Bay of Pigs sort. He amuses himself with wildly romantic international spy stories of improbable but egocentric bent. He is often avid for details about the possible scope of atomic destruction. And he is stirred by the contemporary equivalent of saber-rattling which involves nonsensical talk about the tactical use of instruments of annhilation and about survival through the employment of them. Something-doing can produce a marked heartiness of emotion. The new man of violence can experience the bravura of threats and declamations and can thrill to the luxuriant adrenalism of fear and anger, and at the same time be strongly opposed to war in his own mind:. as is practically everyone today, including the professional military.

Only he never observes to himself what is obvious to himself – and to practically everyone of every shade of political opinion – that the nation-state as Westerners have known it for about half a millenium is suddenly at an end. It cannot make its will prevail internationally – not to protect its citizens or advance its interests or secure its sources of raw materials – without in effect committing suicide. The nation-state of yesterday is possible today only for a few emerging third-world countries who fight or threaten to fight only amongst themselves, and even this limited form of statism is seen as a threat to world peace. But the nation-state is not openly recognized as a dead end, and the urgency of finding other instruments to take its place is seldom felt and never acted on. Centuries of something-doing have resulted in nothing done.

An important use of the Tao Teh Ching is to help Westerners recog- nize the hidden attraction to violence that makes them blind to the most ordinary and most obvious dangers of it, ranging from self-destruction to universal annihilation. Clearly this attraction is part of the self-worship of me-first egocentrism. It is also part of the fear and violence that results from the combative atmosphere of daily living and, notably, of daily playing. Even our amusements are steeped in anxiety and shot through with conflict, as shown in sports, advertisements, soap operas, television dramas, horror movies, war-to-be movies, suspense stories supposed to be comic, murder stories supposed to be more entertaining than the old love stories, and the new nonfiction that celebrates violence commingled with sex and hate, not to mention the animal shows on television with their heavy emphasis on the fearfulness of animals eating animals. It is impossible to have one's emotions played up and down upon by such entertainment without losing all sense that violence is a danger and all feeling that there is such a thing as spiritual reality.

The fear and violence of crime are not dissimilar from the fear and violence of war. They attract, they fascinate, they preoccupy: not simply those persons who are actively involved but also those who are passive onlookers. Lao Tzŭ sugests that these two groups are linked, psychologically rather than causally:

When people are hard to govern,

Their rulers are something-doing.

That is why they are hard to govern.

That is to say, the poor commit crime because the rich not only expect them to but also, perversely, want them to: a perversity still common today. Wanted, more or less consciously, by dominant groups is a social system that rewards rapacity while providing obstacles to being raped, and that at the same times permits enough rape to keep people generally athrill with fear, violence, and self-righteousness. This latter condition is possible only when the righteous have the unrighteous to click their tongues over. What is better to click over than criminality? The crime of punishment, says psychiatrist Karl Menninger in his book by that title, is precisely this self-righteousness admixed with hidden guilt for secret unrighteousness. Small wonder that crime provides the principal content of all the media. In contemporary social systems, bottom-drawer people serve to justify top-drawer people in their position, and criminals are everywhere considered the lowest people in the bottom drawer. Besides, they are also misapprehended as including other groups of outcasts, who being thought criminal, can be treated as non-people.

There are other dramas of immorality that incite to crime. A principal one is the universal demonstration of the something-doing success-involved self. The actuality of violence in the home and on the streets arises from that egocentrism not less than does the possibility of violence abroad. Crime nowadays reflects less the material plight of the necessitous (badly supplied with goods but probably less badly than at previous times in history), and more the will of the underdog to have his self gratified, or at least exercised, as effectively as the overdog. As a criminal motive, self-expression has now more push than cupidity.

Defacing nature, destroying property, thieving goods, and setting fire to cities (the very cities to which people flocked for more than seven centuries to find a new life and a new culture): all these are essentially acts of self-assertion and of establishing oneself as a something instead of a nothing. Mugging and murder, in which victor directly confronts victim, are dramatic acts of establishing superiority. Even if the victor is caught, he may still get on television, and this event is almost universally considered the pinnacle of contemporary recognition of self. Murder has become what philosopher Thomas Hobbes thought it to be, the ultimate equalizer. Nothing more grotesquely illustrates the intoxication of success, the inward swagger of it, the upthrust of physical sensation, the flooding of adrenaline, the bloodrush of conquest.

Emotions experienced by the criminal can be experienced vicariously by those who only fear they will be his victims. Compelling indeed are the visceral sensations stirred by fascination for violence. It may well be that the current high levels of criminality represent the cultural choice of a people who do not want to be deprived of the something-doing of daily violence, even though the prisons overflow and the rate of crime goes up until society progressively becomes unable to protect itself. Efforts to decrease crime seem actually to multiply it. Democratic countries have made such great and futile efforts, both in increasing the quantities of laws and in enlarging the size of the legal and penal system that their criminal controls far exceed tlyose of any of the oriental despotisms of times past. Lao Tzŭ, by contrast, says:

The more laws and orders there are,

The more thieves and robbers appear ....

Do nothing and the people of themselves reform.

For Westerners, it is more attractive to do something. A marked reduction in current crime could be effected almost overnight by state sale rather than gangster sale of drugs to addicts, but this alternative is held to be an unrighteous coddling of outcasts, while the idea that crime could be discouraged by decreased popular usage of legal drugs like alcohol (a factor in probably a majority of all crimes) would be held impertinent. It would seem that people who are not criminals insist on living in such a way that there is no way not to have criminals.
 

Don't exalt the worthy:

People then will not compete.

Don't prize rare goods:

People then will not steal.

Don't show what is covetable:

The people's hearts won't be upset....

[The sage] leads the people

To not-know and not-want

And the cunning ones to dare not do.

By doing-nothing, everything is set in order.

 

This prophetic Way – for it is also the way of such teachers as Isaiah, Gautama, and Jesus – is specifically denounced by self-appointed terrorists and supposed revolutionaries who believe that eggs should be broken Lenin-like to make their particular omelets. Conspiracies of misguided violence have long held romantic attractions to Westerners who want to grasp the world and mold it to their own image, at the personal sacrifice of love, life, liberty, and even common honesty. Attempts of this sort at social change are so weighted down with the conventionalisms of self and violence that very little change can take place. Usually nothing can take place at all except wretched criminality. Filled with awe for themselves, the terrorists, the ultranationalists, the separatists, and the other dividers of people exalt their emotion with a frenzied violence that can be described only as utter reaction. Striking sparks in a dynamite factory is hardly progressive. Indeed, nothing can any longer be considered as reactionary as violence, together with the something-doing that is the basis for it. For the problem goes beyond terrorism to the something-doing of people who want to impress their will on the world. It is the something-doing that infects not only the terrorist but the street punk and not only the punk but the citizen who dreams of gore.

But there is another way:

Tao never does anything

And everything gets done.

If rulers can keep to it,

All things will change of themselves

 

Nature speaks little.

Squalls do not last the morning,

Nor downpours the day.

What stirs them up?

Heaven and earth!

Even heaven and earth

Does not long make a fuss.

How much less should men?

The Way works in all aspects of life, personal and social. How it works is a futile question, for the Way is something to walk on and not to think about. For nothing-knowing, says Lao Tzŭ, is a key part of nothing-doing. And that is another chapter.

 

 

 

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