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:
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?
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