A Call For Reversion
Daoism and the case for a return to nature
I wonder… are all the ladies who got yin and yang tramp stamps in the 90s farmers now? It warms my heart knowing that, for at least one decade, young American women had the wisdom to appreciate Daoist teaching and the foresight to symbolize it in a way to force anyone behind them at the local pool to contemplate the balance in their own life.
The initial ember for the thesis of this essay came to me in an unlikely fashion. I was reading the preface to Niall Ferguson’s The Square and the Tower where he discusses the power dynamic between hierarchies and social networks. This, somehow, snowballed into the thought that if I asked most people I grew up around what they would choose if they could be granted anything, probably all would say money. Now obviously, what good would some rectangular pieces of paper or bytes of data actually do for them? After prying some more, they would say that it isn’t really money that they want, it is what the money gets them. And that is freedom. I think, more than anything, people want the freedom to spend their time as they wish and to not be beholden to an employer.
This then snowballed further to me thinking: “Wait, weren’t we born into this condition?” Nature doesn’t have employers and work weeks and sanctioned holidays. We were born free. Somewhere along the way we traded that freedom for Viagra and Twitter without ever really recognizing we did it. If we zoom out, we can see that most people say they want the freedom to do what they wish with their time, but we once had that at birth. This hyper-novel world has shifted that to our 60s for the lucky among us. What happened???
There was a time when humans were born into tribal communities. These humans spent their days working together to run down their next meal or roaming with their neighbors to gather the day’s fruits and vegetables. Anatomically, these humans are the same as us, but damn, could our lives look anymore different than theirs?
Humans are subject to evolution by natural selection just like every other species. Our environment back then favored those who were motivated to live the hunter-gatherer lifestyle and eventually the agricultural one. They had reward systems deep in their minds for this stuff. These are our ancestors. Humans evolved to move; humans evolved to farm; humans evolved to connect and cooperate. We still have that in us, and yet, most Americans work in cubicles with service-related roles. I wonder if this is manifesting itself in any negative ways…
It seems so obvious: Americans are sad, stressed, and empty because we aren’t satisfying the reward systems that got us here, the systems that encourage a connection to our food, our community, and our land.
This is a fairly new realization of mine. But now that I have thought it, I can’t not see it in everything. Why is this idea something I had to come to on my own? Am I the only one who has thought such a thing? … actually … not at all. This happens to be one of those cyclic revelations we see pop up throughout written human history. It seems that in troubled times there is a faction of philosophers who look to the past for answers and conclude a reversion to a more natural state is needed. I’m sure I will discover many more instances of this as I continue, but a very note-worthy example I stumbled upon recently is the birth of Daoism in the Waring States Period of Chinese history.
The Daodejing
I grew up in America. Because of this, I was not so influenced by or made aware of classical Eastern philosophy. There are three central figures that come from this: Siddhartha Gautama (“The Buddha”), Laozi (sometimes written as Lao-Tzu), and Confucius. These three are said to have lived around the 6th and 5th centuries B.C. More than the others, there is mystery surrounding who Laozi was and if he even was a single person, but Laozi authored the Daodejing (sometimes written as Tao Te Ching).
Laozi lived in an era of turmoil in China known as the Warring States Period. The name speaks for itself, real Game of Thrones vibes at this time. Laozi looked to the past for insight and eventually decided to set off into nature to live the hermit life. At the outskirts of China just as he was about to reach the wilderness, he was encouraged by a border guard to write his thoughts before never to be heard from again. Hence, the Daodejing! That’s the story at least.
This has become known as the foundational text of Daoism. It is also the second most translated to English books in history, only behind the Bible. From what I hear, it is particularly hard to translate from Chinese to English. There must be some ideas lost in the process, but I read one of these translations and talk about hard to follow! Laozi wrote this in an intentionally vague manner with a poetic rhythm to it in its original form. You can imagine this does not lend itself to easy translation. My main takeaways from the reading are that the man had a water fetish and was willing to work hard at doing nothing.
My understanding of Daoist teaching actually leans more heavily on other’s interpretations of the text closer to the time it was written. I feel that this is more accurate than me, a 21st century Westerner, drawing conclusions from a translated book. I must admit that researching how people understood this text and how it influenced the way they lived turned out to be a pretty spiritual experience for me. I have seemingly no connection to this philosophy, and yet, I have (again, seemingly) independently come to very similar conclusions. Here are a handful of those insights that I was surprised to find so much overlap with:
A return to a more natural state is needed. Humans have tricked themselves into believing they are somehow operating parallel to nature. In fact, we are a part of it and are worse off for deluding ourselves otherwise.
There is a cosmic order to things. This is the Cosmic Dao in the Daoist’s eyes; I would simply refer to it as “the universe” or “nature”. Confucianists might refer to this as Li. For most of my life I have said stuff along the lines of, “None of this matters, ultimately. The universe doesn’t care that we are here, so just enjoy the time you have.” The Daoist would say something like, “A life well-lived is one without resistance to the Cosmic Dao. Aspire to be like water. Sway and morph to how nature wants you to be. Relax and go with the flow.”
Physical exercise is profound. Giving our body what it needs makes us happier, more capable people. Achieving breathlessness in a day deeply connects you to the world. The Daoist might not seek out the breathlessness that I speak of, but there is a particular emphasis on movement and breath. There are the concepts of breath-energy and chi. Through breathing and movement, the Daoist takes in good energy from his environment.
Balance. This is what people most know of ancient Eastern philosophy: yin and yang. A balanced life is a good one. The essence of something relies on its opposite. There wouldn’t be light if there was no dark. Remember that wise man, 50 Cent, from my previous essay?!
The good ole f-you to the government (I didn’t see this exact wording in the translation that I read, but I’m sure it was there in the original.). The Daoist believes that the best governance is no governance. The concept of wu wei is foundational in Daoism. It is the belief in non-action. Not in a lazy sense, though. This is very active, intentional non-action. A government that seeks to be heavily involved with people’s lives is not a good one.
So yeah… I found it fascinating that in my period of life evaluation and sense that we are collectively headed in the wrong direction I landed on such similar concepts, the very same concepts that Laozi pushed for 2500 years ago. That is 500 years before Jesus was a thing! What would Laozi think of the world today?! (To be clear, the whole wu wei thing only applies to the government for me. I begin to sweat and tick at the idea of non-action in my personal life.)
Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein
Once I recognized this need for a reversion to nature, I sought out more like me and found some friendly voices in Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein. These two are a married couple of evolutionary biologists. They came to prominence in 2017 when they left their professorships at Evergreen State College with controversy over them opposing hardline woke thought on campus. This turned out to be a gift for the rest of us because they have since written a book and started a podcast.
Their recent book is called A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century. The premise is largely aligned with what I discuss here, so much so that I have adopted some of their elegant language when talking about it. One chapter is called, “Ancient Bodies, Modern World”. In it they discuss this idea that both biology and culture are products of evolution. Human culture is an incredible evolutionary tool. Essentially, it is a non-biological means of passing information along. With culture, we do not have to wait for genes to favor a particular trait that makes us more prone to survival and reproduction. But culture, unfortunately, sort of ran away from us. Culture has evolved so quickly that our biology couldn’t keep up, resulting in the tension we moderns feel in our daily lives.
Bret and Heather speak of the fact that we evolved to be a part of nature and to cultivate connection with our neighbors, and yet, our lives are so apart from this now. This is a quote from the book’s website:
“For evolutionary biologists Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, the cause of our woes is clear: the modern world is out of sync with our ancient brains and bodies. We evolved to live in clans, but today most people don't even know their neighbors' names. Survival in our earliest societies depended on leveraging the advantages of our sex differences, but today even the concept of biological sex is increasingly dismissed as offensive. The cognitive dissonance spawned by trying to live in a society we're not built for is killing us.”
So… what to do with all of this?
I joke that we traded our freedom for Viagra and Twitter. There are incredible technologies that have come from this industrialized world. I could have said penicillin and airplanes to invoke the flip-side of the argument. I think we would collectively be better off, though, if we took a societal step back to really piece apart what bins to put certain technologies in. This hyper-novel world has made us drones marching in the direction of more and more technology without stopping to recognize what we have given up in the process.
To get wide-spread cultural attention on this would take so much, but we must start somewhere. We have to think locally about this. I can control what I do, and I can somewhat influence the people in my network. For that, I have decided that a short to medium term goal of mine is to establish a regenerative farm-ranch. My goal is to build one that has enough output to provide me and my family enough clean, natural food to live off of and, hopefully, a little extra to share with my community. This checks so many boxes in one swoop. It allows me to connect with nature and my food; it gives my family something we can invest in and cultivate together; it makes me more than just a consumer in this world; and above all, it gives us freedom. A self-sustaining farm-ranch is freedom. If our basic needs are met on our own, what can any corporation or government use as leverage against us?
There was a tension in gravity science prior to 1915. Isaac Newton’s gravitational force equation worked very well in many applications, but it seemed to fall apart in the case of Mercury (the closest planet to the Sun). It wasn’t until Albert Einstein published his equations of general relativity that Mercury’s orbit was accounted for. After that, the astrophysics community applied this broadly and a whole slew of things sort of just fell into place. There are many instances like this in science where a paradigm exists, anomalies are observed, a revolutionary idea comes, and a new model takes precedent and encompasses much more than the previous.
Is this perspective on a need for a reversion to nature my general relativity? The science example above applied to an entire field, but certainly, this must apply to the minds of individuals as well. The more I consider the future of me with a self-sustaining farm the more it feels like a “yes, this is that thread that I’ve been missing” kind of thing. There is still that part of me that was drawn to our mission to expand out into our solar system. Can you think of a bigger contradiction to Daoist thought than this? The search continues for the grand-slam idea that allows for all of this to fall under one clean perspective, but for now, we farm!
TLDR: I call for a reversion back to a more natural state. Americans need to understand and participate in the process that gets our food to the table. In this we can cultivate bonded families and communities while also making us more free individuals. And it’s time we live up to those yin and yang 90s tramp stamps!
Further on all this…
Daodejing by Laozi (I read the John Minford translation.)
A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century by Heathery Heying and Bret Weinstein
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn