This morning I followed a link posted by Andrew Sullivan that led me to an article by Matt Ridley in The Spectator entitled, "The Natural Order of Things."  Of course you know what I was thinking.  And while I found some Taoist suggestions, alas nowhere was there a direct consideration of the idea of Way.

Ridley is thinking about Darwin, and he writes: 

Living beings are eddies in the stream of entropy. That is to say,
while the universe gradually becomes more homogeneous and disordered,
little parts of it can reverse the trend and become briefly more
ordered and complex by capturing packets of energy. It happens each
time a baby is conceived. Built by 20,000 genes that turn each other on
and off in a symphony of great precision, and equipped with a brain of
ten trillion synapses, each refined and remodelled by early and
continuing experience, you are a thing of exquisite neatness, powered
by glucose. Says Darwin, this came about by bottom-up emergence, not
top-down dirigisme. Faithful reproduction, occasional random variation
and selective survival can be a surprisingly progressive and cumulative
force: it can gradually build things of immense complexity. Indeed, it
can make something far more complex than a conscious, deliberate
designer ever could: with apologies to William Paley and Richard
Dawkins, it can make a watchmaker.

Order in complexity, isn't that what Way is?  Of course, a Taoist understanding would be more humble about our capacity to discern the order of Way.  We can certainly perceive patterns of experience and behavior and natural occurrence, but there will always be variations that defy our expectations and predictions.  

Ridley is doing something interesting here: arguing that Darwin, so often championed by the political left, was very much influenced by Adam Smith, the hero of the right.  Both put forth ideas of "undesigned systems," large-scale processed driven by myriad individual acts or decisions that bring forth broader patterns, even structures, of species or markets or whatever.  Ultimately, this is an argument against a singular creator-God. 

And that is a Taoist idea as well.  Way is self-generating and has no identifiable beginning (and no end!).  Being and non-being ebb and flow into each other.   Actually, it is more than a Taoist idea, it likely circulated more widely in the intellectual world of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States period.   Here's Frederick Mote:

The basic point which outsiders
have found so hard to detect is that the Chinese, among all peoples
ancient and recent, primitive and modern, are apparently unique in
having no creation myth, that is, they have regarded the world and
humans as uncreated, as constituting the central features of a
spontaneously self-generating cosmos having no creator, god, ultimate
cause or will external to itself.
(13)

Spontaneously self-generating cosmos having no creator, etc.  Darwin would agree with that, no?

Sam Crane Avatar

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5 responses to “The Natural Order of Things”

  1. Paul Yarbles Avatar
    Paul Yarbles

    Reading the excerpt from Ridley the first things I noticed were the mentioning of the wonders of ‘bottom up’ as opposed to ‘top-down’ and the strange — in this context — use of the word ‘dirigisme’. This set off alarm bells. So I googled this Matt Ridley. Sure enough the alarm bells were signaling my worst fears. Ridley’s no Taoist. Ridley is a Market Fundamentalist.
    As much as some M-Fers (pardon the pun) want to believe, these two philosophical outlooks are not the same.

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  2. Sam Crane Avatar

    Paul,
    Thanks for the comment.
    I agree that Daoism and Market Fundamentalism are different outlooks. Daoism would eschew any sort of fundamentalism. But there are certain resonances, I believe, between Daoism and markets, insofar as Daoism embraces something like a “laissez-faire” orientation. I have discussed this here and here.

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  3. Paul Yarbles Avatar
    Paul Yarbles

    Thank you for the post and links in your comment. Your post and the comments in the links were very interesting. I’ll add that the resonances only exist if one assumes laissez-faire Capitalism needs no intrusive social and political systems so that laws of ownership can be enforced. This, of course, is not how Capitalism works. As someone else pointed out (you?) having no social and political systems to enforce ownership laws is more like Anarchy, not laissez-faire Capitalism.
    This enforcement power is an easy tool that can be used by the currently rich and powerful to manipulate the system in their favor. Laissez-faire means there are no (or very weak) countervailing forces that influence the economic system. This leads me to believe that laissez-faire Capitalism would not mean a less intrusive government in general as Taoist thought recommends. In practice, it would lead to a system where the government — meaning those who really have power and can exercise control — consists of a small group consisting of the upper echelons of corporate management, wealthy rentiers, and big finance. Examining corporate structures and the corporate work environment one can see that these people will not govern like a cook should cook a small fish.
    A simple question — from ideas stolen from other posters — that may shed light. Would a world where Capitalist virtues are primary really be similar to a world where Taoist virtues are primary?

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  4. ff Avatar
    ff

    We do have creation myths…盘古,伏羲,女娲,etc.

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  5. Sam Crane Avatar

    ff,
    Yes, these stories are cosmogonic. But, the argument goes, they do not play a role in Chinese cosmology as determinative as the creation myths of, say, Christianity and Judaism play in Western culture. This is, Mote and Ames and other argue, something that is quite distinctive about Chinese philosophy.

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