Today the summer program I have been overseeing for the month of July ended.  My students have scattered to the four corners of the country, to return in about a month better prepared, I believe, to begin their four years of liberal arts education.  They are a great group and we had a great month.

     The curriculum we developed for this program centered on four classes: political science, history, comparative literature and ancient Chinese philosophy (guess which one I taught).  To lend some coherence, we faculty all generally engaged a common theme: power, authority and order.  And, then, to make sure students were thinking about how the various disciplines were speaking to the general theme, we had them, in their final assignment, make oral presentations comparing a concept or text or narrative from one class to something from another class and demonstrate how that comparison shed new light on their understanding of power and/or authority and/or order.  All of this got me thinking in abstract terms about the interrelationships of these ideas.

     What seemed to emerge from several of the presentations was an assumption – perhaps more than an assumption, a belief – that order requires power.  That is, to achieve some sense of social stability or prosperity or harmony, a certain kind of power – conventionally a form of government or legitimate coercive force – is necessary.  Now they may be right but, in my role as a teacher I pushed back against them and found myself asking:

     Does order require power?

     Put that starkly, I think many people would answer “yes.”  My students had read the Tao Te Ching, so they has at least one reference that could lead to a “no” answer, but they still tended in the direction of “yes:” order requires power. 

        In turning the question over in my head, I appreciated once again just how radical (in the sense of challenging conventional wisdom) the Tao Te Ching can be.  It really does ask us to abandon power and accept the “natural” order that would ensue.  “Natural” is, of course, a fraught term.  How we can know what is “natural” is far from clear.  Yet even with that uncertainty, the Tao Te Ching pushes in an anarchic direction.  (I also found myself asking my students why we reflexively place a negative value on “anarchy.”  I guess no one reads Kropotkin any more.)  “Let nations grow smaller and smaller, and people fewer and fewer,” passage 80 begins.  This is not a call for Malthusian thinning of the population but an aspiration for the dismantling of the territorial state.  We do not need large bureaucracies and extensive boundaries to live a good life.  The Tao Te Ching does not promise perfection and harmony everlasting.  The good life invariably continues to include much of what we would understand as “bad.”  Indeed, it is impossible, for Taoists, to have one without the other.  But there is a sense that contentment can follow from the relinquishment of power and government.  The people in an idealistic, decentralized, naturalistic Taoist community would, according to passage 80: ” …find pleasure in their food and beauty in their clothes, peace in their homes and joy in their ancestral ways.”  That sounds pretty good.

       The radicalness of the Tao Te Ching on the question of order without power stands in contrast to classical economic liberalism.  I found myself describing for my students Adam Smith’s vision of an organic society, where each individual with his or her unique collection of talents and orientations finds a niche by specializing in what he or she does best and relying on a division of labor for the rest.   Yet even that image requires a measure of power, a “night watchman” of sorts to ensure that contracts are enforced and certain basic laws maintained.  Liberals and libertarians say “yes,” order does require power, but not so much of the latter.

      Taoists are willing to press further.  They go furthest in their faith that, left to their own devices, people will find ways to manage their own affairs without descending into a Hobbesian “state of nature,” where the life of man is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.”   There will, in a Taoist world, be some of all of those things.  But so, too, will there be sufficient amounts of their complements – collective, prosperous, friendly, civilized and long – to make for a good life. 

       We just have to yield to Way to get there…..