Wu and You

WU AND YOU "The only sin is to limit the IS" - Richard Bach "Our body is a machine for living. It is organized for that, it is its nature. Let life go on in it unhindered and let it defend itself, it will do more than if you paralyse it by encumbering it with remedies." - Leo Tolstoy "If, with firm resolve, I had the knowledge to travel on the great Dao [Way], I need only fear that I might try to meddle with it." - section 53 of the Laozi ['Tao-te ching' or 'Daode jing'] On Meddling When you are confronted by any complex social system, such as an urban center or a hamster, with things about it that you're dissatistied with and anxious to fix, you cannot just step in and set about fixing with much hope of helping. This realization is one of the sore discouragements of our century. Jay Forrester has demonstrated it mathematically, with his computer models of cities in which he makes clear that whatever you propose to do, based on common sense, will almost inevitably make matters worse rather than better. You cannot meddle with one part of a complex system from the outside without the almost certain risk of setting off disastrous events that you hadn't counted on in other, remote parts. If you want to fix something you are first obliged to understand, in detail, the whole system, and for very large systems you can't do this without a very large computer. Even then, the safest course seems to be to stand by and wring hands, but not to touch. Intervening is a way of causing trouble. If this is true, it suggests a new approach to the problems of cities, from the point of view of experimental pathology: maybe some of the things that have gone wrong are the result of someone's efforts to be helpful. It makes a much simpler kind of puzzle. Instead of trying to move in and change things around, try to reach in gingerly and simple extract the intervener. The identification and extraction of isolated meddlers is the business of modern medicine, at least for the fixing of diseases caused by identifiable microorganisms. The analogy between a city undergoing disintegration and a diseased organism does not stretch the imagination too far. Take syphilis, for instance. In the old days of medicine, before the recognition of microbial disease mechanisms, a patient with advanced syphilis was a complex system gone wrong without any single, isolatable cause, and medicine's approach was, essentially, to meddle. The analogy becomes more spectacular if you begin imagining what would happen if we knew everything else about modern medicine with the single exception of microbial infection and the spirochete. We would be doing all sorts of things to intervene: new modifications of group psychotherapy to correct the flawed thinking of general paresis, transplanting hearts with aortas attached for cardiovascular lues, administering immunosuppressant drugs to reverse the autoimmune reactions to tabes, enucleating gummas from the liver, that sort of effort. We might even be wondering about the role of stress in this peculiar, "multifactorial," chronic disease, and there would be all kinds of suggestions for "holistic" approaches, ranging from changes in the home environment to White House commisions on the role of air pollution. At an earlier time we would have been busy with bleeding, cupping, and purging, as indeed we once were. Or incantations, or shamanic fits of public ecstasy. Anything, in the hope of bringing about a change for the better in the whole body. These were the classical examples of medical intervention in the prescientific days, and there can be no doubt that most of them did more harm than good, excepting perhaps the incantaions. With syphilis, of course, the problem now turns out to be simple. All you have to do, armed with the sure knowledge that the spirochete is the intervener, is to reach in carefully and eliminate this microorganism. If you do this quickly enough, before the whole system has been shaken to pieces, it will put itself right and the problem solves itself. Things are undoubtedly more complicated in pathological social systems. There may be more than one meddler involved, maybe a whole host of them, maybe even a 'system' of meddlers infiltrating all parts of the system you're trying to fix. If this is so, then the problem is that much harder, but it is still approachable, and soluble, once you've identified the fact of intervention. It will be protested that I am setting up a new sort of straw demonology, postulating external causes for pathological events that are intrinsic. Is it not in the nature of complex social systems to go wrong, all by themselves, without external causes? Look at overpopulation. Look at Calhoun's famous model, those crowded colonies of rats and their malignant social pathology, all due to their own skewed behavior. Not at all, is my answer. All you have to do is find the meddler, in this case Professor Calhoun himself, and the system will put itself right. The trouble with those rats is not the innate tendency of crowded rats to go wrong, but scientists who took them out of the world at large and put them into too small a box. I do not know who the Calhouns of New York City may be, but it seems to me a modest enough proposal that they be looked for, identified, and then neatly lifted out. Without them and their intervening, the system will work nicely. Not perfectly, perhaps, but livably enough. We have a roster of diseases which medicine calls "idiopathic," meaning that we do not know what causes them. The list is much shorter that it used to be; a century ago, common infections like typhus fever and tuberculous meningitis were classed as idiopathic illnesses. Originally, when it first came into the language of medicine, the term had a different, highly theoretical meaning. It was assumed that most human diseases were intrinsic, due to inbuilt failures of one sort or another, things gone wrong with various internal humors. The word "idiopathic" was intended to mean, literally, a disease having its own origin, a primary disease without any external cause. The list of such disorders has become progressively shorter as medical science has advanced, especially within this century, and the meaning of the term has lost its doctrinal flavor; we use "idiopathic" now to indicate simply that the cause of a paricular disease is unknown. Very likely, before we are finished with medical science, and with luck, we will have found all varietes of disease are the result of one or another sort of meddling, and there will be no more idiopathic illness. With time, and a lot of luck, things could turn out this way for the social sciences as well. - Lewis Thomas, "The Medusa and the Snail" As a book, the 'Laozi' can almost be covered completely with a single phrase: Ah! It does nothing more than encourage growth at the branch tips by enhancing the roots. [in other words,] observe where things come from, and follow them to where they inevitably return. In what one says, do not put the progenitor [the Dao] at a distance, and, in what one undertakes, do not neglect the sovereign [the Dao]. Although its text consists of five thousand words, there is a single unity that runs through all of them. Although the ideas [yi] in it range across a vast perspective, together they are all of the same kind. If one understands how the above single phrase covers it, nothing hidden in it will fail to yield to recognition. But if each matter is taken to involve a separate concept [yi], no matter how much argument there is about them, more and more confusion will result. Let us try to discuss this in these terms: How can the occurrence of depravity ever be attributed to what the depraved do? How can the occasion of licentiousness ever be attributed to what the licentious invent? Thus it is that the prevention of depravity depends on the preservation of sincerity and not on the perfection of scrutiny, and the cessation of licentiousness depends on eliminating superficial frivolity [hua] and not on the proliferation of laws and regulations. The eradication of banditry depends on the elimination of desire and not on making punishment more severe, and the cessation of litigation depends on the avoidance of exaltation and not on the perfection of adjudication. Therefore do not try to govern what the people do but encourage their disinclination to do anything depraved. Do not try to forbid their desires but encourge their disinclination to desire anything. Plan for things while they are still in a premanifested state [weizhao] and act on them before they begin. This is all one has to do. Therefore, instead of drying up one's sagehood and intelligence in the attempt to keep cleverness and treachery under control, it would be better to display one's pristine simplicity and thereby still desire among the common folk. Instead of promoting benevolence and righteousness to bring solidity to flimsy social customs, it would be better to embrace the uncarved block and thereby bring the practice of sincerity and honesty to all. Instead of incresing cleverness and sharpness in order to promote the availability of goods and services, it would be better to minimise one's own personal desires and thereby bring an end to wrangling over the objects of frivolous appeal. Therefore repudiate scrutiny, keep [the ruler's] perspicaciousness and intelligence hidden, eliminate recommendations and promotions, prune away decorative praise, cast aside clever contraptions [that make life easier], and denigrate precious goods. Everything depends on arranging things so covetousness and desire will not arise among the common folk; it does not depend on keeping their practice of depravity under control. Thus it is that the ruler repudiates sagehood and intelligence by the display of pristine simplicity and gets rid of cleverness and sharpness by minimizing his own personal desires. All this is what is meant by encouraging growth at the branch tips by enhancing the roots. However, if the Dao of pristine simplicity does not prevail and an endorsement for liking and desire is not suppressed, although one might exhaust one's sagely brightness in scrutiny of it and dry up one's intelligence and power of inference [lü] in how to control it, ever more refined will be the thought behind cleverness and ever more varied the shapes treachery will take. The more severe the attempts to control it, the more assiduous attempts at evasion will be. Then the intelligent and the stupid will try to hoodwink one another, and those involved in the six human relations will treat each other with suspicion. Once the uncarved block fragments and authenticity is lost, all human affairs become permeated by villainy. If one neglects the roots and attacks the branch tips, although one might have the ultimate degree of sagehood and intelligence, the more he attacks them, the more he will invite such disaster to arrive. And how much more likely this will be if it is a ruler of merely inferior skills and devices! If one presses down on the people with pristine simplicity, they will regulate themselves without any conscious action taken against them, but if one attacks them with sagehood and intelligence, the common folk will grow rich in cleverness as they become ever more impoverished. Therefore pristine simplicity may be embraced, but sagehood and intelligence may be discarded. As scrutiny is curtailed, attempts to evade it will also be curtailed, but as the brightness of one's intelligence dries up, ways to evade it will become ever more perceptive. Curtailment here results in minimizing harm to the uncarved block, but intensifying it results in ever more serious cleverness and treachery. Well, those who employ skills and devices that extend discernment and discover secrets, they can only be the sage and the wise, can they not? Yet the harm that they have done, can one ever account for all of it? - Wang Bi, "Outline Introduction to the Laozi" "Nothing" or "nothingness" ('wu', sometimes given as a compound word, 'wuwu' or 'wuyou', meaning "that which has no physical or specific existence, no 'somethingness'"), is a key concept in the thought of Wang Bi. By it, he seems to mean the perfect absence of conscious design, deliberate effort, prejudice, or predilection. The presence, on the other hand, of conscious design, deliberate effort, prejudice, or predilection is signified by 'you', which literally means "something" but also can mean "being," in the abstact use of the word, as well as the phenomenal existence of creatures, including humankind, everything in the plant world, physical phenomena in general, and events both natural and human. Wang identifies nothingness with the action or function (yong) of the Dao or the Natural (ziran). The Dao always "acts out of nothing" (wu yi wei) and thus never functions deliberately or with conscious design; that is, it never "acts out of something" (you yi wei). As the true sage embodies nothingness and is one with the Dao, he never makes a false or wrong move. In the thought of Wang Bi, 'wuwei' never means "no action" or the "absence of action" - inertia, quietude, and the like - but always "no conscious/deliberate action." Wang reads all the sections of the 'Laozi' in terms of this basic truth: Nothingness is the principle attribute of all that is natural. To act out of nothing and thus in accord with the Dao inevitably results in success, safety, contentment, and happiness. Somethingness always involves differentiation (fen). In nature, the differentiation of all the myriad phenomena occurs spontaneously and without conscious design. "Being" is an appropriate translation of 'you' in this context. However, somethingness is also the principle attribute of all that is artificial. When creatures, including humans, act out of something and thus in violation of the Dao, failure, danger, dissatisfaction, and misery inevitably result. - Richard John Lynn Above Taoist quotes and quotes about Taoism and Taoists are from the book, "The Classic of the Way and Virtue: A New Translation of the Tao-te ching of Laozi as interpreted by Wang Bi and translated by Richard John Lynn."