4. Nothing-Knowing
Just as the fussiness of something-doing leads Lao Tzŭ to uphold nothing-doing, so does the fuzziness of something-knowing lead him to applaud nothing-knowing: an emptiness of mind akin to the selflessness of speech in the famous quotation, "He who speaks does not know; he who knows does not speak." Nothing-knowing has to do with more than self. A key to the ultimate nothingness, it has to do with creation, how it is and how it may be experienced.
Do nothing-doing.
Manage nothing-managing; taste nothing-tasting.
Exalt the low; multiply the few.
Requite hatred with virtue.
Elsewhere, Lao Tzŭ's counsel is more personal: "Give up learning and you will have no anxieties." And he contrasts the hopeful condition of "stupid stupid" with the hopeless condition of "clever clever."
To most Western scholars, such language suggests distaste for the edifices of intellect they inhabit, and it is conventional for those of them who know anything about the Tao Teh Ching to dismiss it as mystical and quietist and mindlessly subjective. And yet it is not mystical in the sense of seeking absorption in the All; nor is it quietist in the sense of withdrawing from the here and now. Written in the form of a handbook on how to govern (possibly because those who governed were then the only people who knew how to read), it is intensely social in its purposes and dedicated to the well-being of commoners, not the power of rulers. The book, morever, is obdurately factual. Lao Tzŭ treats what is as inviolate, avoids subjectivity, and turns his back ahead of time on the superstition that later Taoism embraced. Subjectivity and superstition result from relating reality to one's self and trying to control it, while factuality results from relating to Tao and avoiding any effort at control.
The Tao of Lao Tzŭ is reality without seams, with no separations of any sort between natural fact and spiritual fact, both so conuningled in the whole of Tao as to have no separate significance. It is whole. It is not a patchwork quilt of diverse theories that try to explain the universe and make it intelligible to beings of limited intellects.
But to reason thus is to turn an introduction of Lao Tzŭ into a cogitation about him. The book of Tao, like Tao itself, is to be known by nothing-knowing, by being open to it, by absorbing it, by becoming intimate with it, not by building mental constructions on top of it.
Without going out of the door
You can know beneath-heaven.
Without looking out of the window
You can see heaven's way.
The farther you go, the less you know.
Thus the Sage
Knows without walking,
Sees without looking,
And does without doing.
This is the wholeness of Tao. But unless there be that wholeness, unless there be Tao or Truth or whatever other designation shall be given to undivided reality, then absoluteness of fact is only too easily compromised by the egocentrism of the observer. Indeed, the Tao Teh Ching penetrates sharply into the confusions of our Faustian way of thinking. However remarkable may be the results of the scientific method in the realm of practicality, in the realm of actuality the method can be vitiated by a will to control nature through understanding it, conceptualizing it, cogitating it, cutting it down to human size, and subjecting it to the operations of one aspect of man's being, his intellect. Knowledge is thus given an ego spin, and remarkable simplifications and personalizations often result.
Such departures from factuality have been chronicled for more than sixty years by students of the history of ideas. The consequences include arguing ahead of the facts, elaborating on the basis of limited facts, treating mathematics not as a tool but as itself a fact, assuming that facts too distant to be examined are structured the same as facts close at hand, and – particularly important today – imposing unconscious personal imaginings upon factual reality.
Projection of this sort may be nothing more than an attempt of a con- ventional sort to explain nature. But it may also be gross deceit in the form of misstatement of fact, and it may be made, as even the daily news- papers have reported, to further personal interests in scientific investiga- tion. Reported have been frauds involving biological and psychological research; the frauds seem to be spreading. In some cases, the intention to deceive is hidden, statistical manipulation being used, sometimes unconsciously, to make data prove what the investigator started out to prove. But in other cases, the raw data themselves are falsified. Deceit of this sort can be self-deceit. If I hold that facts are not sacred, I can find myself at the mercy of the notion that the universe is not meaningful but that I am, and that I can make of everything precisely what I will. It is difficult, indeed, to be in a relationship with even simple everyday facts without being in a relationship to an ultimate Truth from which a fact emerges to be exactly as it is. The egocentric choice, of course, is to gather more and more data and have it pertain less and less to anything beyond self. Hence:
To get learning, add to it daily.
To get Tao, subtract daily.
In some areas where data are quantified, notably the sciences that are called social, fad and opinion hold sway, and investigators are known for the positions they take rather than for the facts they discover. And when social science turns into social action, ideological purity, whereby a man stands unshakable wherever he stands, is valued above facts. Such purity resembles orthodoxy so closely that it may well be theology's offspring. The purists inform me that God will be wroth if I, one small unit in the large human race, do not declare acceptance with mind and will of a series of their abstractions about him.
Such misuse of fact leads to calling things by name: scientific things like atoms, natural things like genera, divine things like theologies, and human things like behavior patterns. A considerable part of human learning amounts to little more than a pigeonholing of reality, very much in the manner of the stone-age people who sought to control things by knowing their secret names and by intoning the names under proper conditions and in a suitable sequence. Trying to control reality by naming it – or by having a special vocabulary for describing it – is so unappealing to Lao Tzŭ and using names to exalt self is so abhorrent that his teaching may indeed be said to consist simply of not having names.
Tao is always without name,
Simple and small ....
When law and order arose,
Names appeared.
Aren't there enough already?
Is it not time to stop?
When naming things nowadays, it is frequently possible to reinforce the names with numbers and thus to further the illusion of control over things. Or over people. Through intelligence tests, aptitude tests, and psychological tests, the names of the characteristics of each individual can be derived from the numerical position he occupies on a master code of rank. This position can then be used to determine the future of every human being as regards educational success, personal adjustment, and business and professional advancement. Thus are the superstitions of name and number ritualistically linked. But the consequence of such illusion is violence to fact and violence to the human beings subjected to it.
Consider, for instance, the new numerical nomenclature of the American Psychiatric Association, which recently brought out a third version of its formidably titled "Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders," the so-called DSM-III, a code that is supposed to rationalize the care of the mentally ill. Essentially it is a ritualistic device that will complicate present treatment of psychiatric problems and confuse research into future treatments, but will do so in such a tidy numerical way as to suggest progress in mental health. The rationale of the code is to provide hundreds of numbered names and computerized numbers that are supposed to coincide with actual disease entities, and that can be used, first, as a basis for deciding treatment, second, as a method of research, and – when combined with a numerical scale of severity – third, hospitalization and accreditation, and, fourth, insurance reimbursement.
But nobody knows whether there are any such things as specific disease entities in psychiatry; many experienced practitioners hold that there is rather a spectrum of symptoms with one set of symptoms fusing into the next without fixed boundaries. Patients are not this, that, or the other; they behave in this way, that way, or the other way. Factual symptoms rather than conceptual diagnoses provide, therefore, the best basis for treatment and research. In a conceptualized system, the patient gets lost and insight gets suppressed. There is not a need to categorize, not a need to judge, compare, contrast, and subject to theory. Rather there is a need to be present and to be open to whatever is going on. Individual man, whether he is out of his mind or in it, is not much more understandable than the Tao from which he springs.
When Lao Tzŭ says that "not to know and to be knowing is sickness", is he not referring to that which is indeed beyond cogitation and beyond every attempt at knowledgeability? He is no enemy of all knowing. Indeed, he emphasizes that "to know and to be unknowing is best." Rather he is the enemy of exactly that sort of knowledgeability which denaturalizes and dehumanizes life and make of itself deceit. Clever is his word for it, and the word he sets in opposition to it is stupid. The stupid man clings to Tao; the clever man turns away.
Why are the people hard to govern?
Because they are too clever.
Clever government is a curse.
Not-clever government a blessing.
To know these two things
Is to follow the ancient pattern,
And to know the ancient pattern
Is original virtue.
Original virtue is far-reaching and deep.
It leads all things
Back to the great harmony.
Nowhere has the Tao Teh Ching better demonstrated its social utility than in its critique of cleverness. It is the habit of governments to outfox themselves, and over the dynasties the simple teachings of Lao Tzŭ have helped Chinese governments pause long enough to rescue themselves from at least some of the consequences of overreaching themselves. Western governments overreach no less; they need nothing so much as the nothing-knowing of Taoist stupidity, for they suffer from cleverness in aggravated degrees. For who but exceptionally clever men could persuade themselves, for example, that supplying advanced weapons in large quantities to almost all the contesting powers in the Mddle East would decrease the likelihood of the use of weapons there? A stupid man, seeing more weapons, would see only more wars. And what but advanced cleverness would make officers of government believe that threats of war are the best way to prevent war? A stupid man, hearing dogs bark, would guess that they were likely to bite. He is not up to complicated methods of getting peace out of bellicosity.
Perhaps no aspect of life in the U.S. has been recently afflicted with greater cleverness than the economic aspect, and certainly no topic has occasioned a greater outpouring of knowledge than inflation. The last five federal administrations, Republican and Democrat alike, have dealt with it by restricting money and credit, even expressing hope for a beneficent recession and undertaking to limit help to the poor: first to obey the ritualism of holding goverrunent costs responsible for economic ills and, latterly, to encourage investment.
The cleverness of such programs is shown by the many economic complications their authors are able to rationalize away, such as decreasing industrial productivity and decreasing interest in productivity, increasing industrial mergers and increasing interest in mergers, together with the impact of skyrocketed fuel costs and high interest rates on costs and prices. The clever man masters the complexities of an economic situation and resolves them in an overall conclusion that is intended to mold the economy. The stupid man, by contrast, does not try to understand the situation but tries simply to look at the facts that compose it, trusting that later on the facts will themselves prompt the decision least likely to bi objectionable. Lao Tzŭ says:
Many words exhaust Truth.
Keep to the empty center!
For Tao, the empty center is also the center of man's multiform personality, with its unfathomable ability to explore unconsciously whole fields of activity that the conscious mind overlooks, and to let courses of action emerge through rumination about facts rather than through conceptualization of them. Indeed, there is a different way to look at reality than the conventional way we hold to be the only way.
As method, economics may be less reliable than a guessing game, which benefits at least from randomness. Its pretensions to science, logic, and mathematics (now that the computer is upon us) make it possible to talk up proposals that appear suicidal to anyone of no more than average stupidity. Influential economists are quite able to explain away such matters as the revolutionary change-over of an economy based on low-cost fuel and low-cost money to one based on high-cost fuel and high-cost money, the latter in the form of the interest rates that recently over- whelmed the automobile, construction, and savings-bank industries. Such changes, the stupid man might suspect, are likely to produce extremes of inflation and prostration, but the clever man has developed a mental grid through which he examines what is going on and by means of which he rejects what does not fit the grid. How else could he support the adage, which rose to popularity during the 1920's, that the cause of inflation is simply and exclusively the high cost of government?
Only a few decades ago, there were said to be not more than a dozen individuals in the country able to discuss such topics as the cost of money, the flow of money, and what might be called the equation of money. When these individuals talked, most bankers and economists took leave. The topics were held to be too complicated for general discussion. Indeed, the equation of money is influenced literally by everything that happens in the world, including what is said to be a part of economics and a very great deal of what is said to be no part of it. Included, in particular, are psychological factors, conventionally dismissed as undeterminable. Money can be said to move in the manner of a mobile of gigantic complexity, afl of whose innumerable units can be put into varying and unexpected rates of motion by the simple touching of one very small and very distant unit. Money experts used to wait months and even years, watching not for the right answers to give but, for the right questions to ask, playing in this way the wait-and-see game of stupidity. Nowadays, however, clever bureaucrats and economists have pontificated hopes for a recession which would, they dogmatized, cure the nation's ills, and they did not stop talking until the recession actually arrived.
The clever answer to the productivity problems was to divert money into investment. But the problems date not from some suppositious time when investment capital started to dry up, but rather from an actual time some twenty-five years ago when investors began to develop an appetite for quick profits from mergers, acquisitions, and conglomerates in preference to the slow profits that accrue from funding higher output at lower prices. Forgotten was the phenomenal outpouring of goods during World War II and the immediate post-war periods, along with the dedication to public service developed during those times.
Concentration on productivity to the degree of preoccupation with it was widely understood to be the only way to carry so wasteful an operation as world war. But peace, too, has operations of incredible waste, in addition to wars that are less than total and preparations for wars that may be total. The productive operations of the U.S. economy have to carry drone operations of enormous bulk that are always weighing the economy down; e.g., the operations of the unneeded goods sector of the economy, the useless services sector, the theft and chicanery sector, and also those sectors that support law and order in the form of the legal, penal, and military systems. The portion of the country's economic effort used up in attempts to curb wrongdoing is alone enormous, and – like other drone operations – it always tends to unbalance the economy. But it is also beyond critical discussion in public.
Many economic problems may be beyond discussion. At any given time in any given culture, people probably do not really know what their basic economic problems are. Otherwise they would be easier to solve. It strikes moderners as obvious that the economic problems of feudalistic Japan resulted from an imbalance, as Sir George Sansom was among the first to point out, between the numbers of the aristocrats, which increased polygamously, and the number of farmers who grew rice to feed them. But no one at the time was aware of this imbalance, even when a new social class came into existence in part as a result of it. Probably, the U.S. economy has problems of comparable importance of which we are similarly unaware, possibly as concerns effort lost in drone operations or wasted in supporting shibboleths about competition. Meanwhile there is always another Way, a way in which disaster is not the inescapable consequence of ignorance:
The lesson of nothing-speaking
The use of nothing-doing:
Rare attainments beneath heaven!
For when experts fail, only nothing-knowing can succeed. A passive waiting for something to happen is transformed into an active force by simple awareness of the Way by which things happen whenever people are willing to let them. It is a way of getting outward results by inward stillness and sureness. It is a way of insight, a way of bearing the confusions of life until answers to problems work their way to the surface of consciousness. The contrary way of outward knowledge, of identifying the causes of problems, of assembling pertinent facts, and of drawing logical conclusions, appears to be a way out of confusion. But it is no way out at all, since what is causal, what is pertinent, and what is logical are questions too intricate for human untangling, whenever there is more involved than simple objects and numbers. Why not welcome confusion? Why let it lead to frustration and then solidify into neurosis? Confusion is a natural state of being from which, whenever it is comfortably borne, meaning emerges.
Cleverness lacks meaning; it provides no more than ego-centric thrill. When meaning is absent, social dissolution starts to occur, and the ordinary activities of life become as if tinged with death. Yet even when it disappears, Tao remains.it is found whenever sought.
