Chapter 38

Chapter 38

A man of the highest virtue does not keep to virtue and that is why he has virtue.
A man of the lowest virtue never strays from virtue and that is why he is without virtue.
The former never acts yet leaves nothing undone.
The latter acts but there are things left undone.
A man of the highest benevolence acts, but from no ulterior motive.
A man of the highest rectitude acts, but from ulterior motive.
A man most conversant in the rites acts, but when no one responds rolls up his sleeves and resorts to persuasion by force.

Hence when the way was lost there was virtue;
When virtue was lost there was benevolence;
When benevolence was lost there was rectitude;
When rectitude was lost there were the rites.

The rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith
And the beginning of disorder;
Foreknowledge is the flowery embellishment of the way
And the beginning of folly.

Hence the man of large mind abides in the thick not in the thin, in the fruit not in the flower.

Therefore he discards the one and takes the other.

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You cannot take a formulaic approach to acquiring virtue.

You cannot suddenly become overnight somebody that you are not by pretending to be that somebody. Although people say “fake it until you make it,” this requires enormous time, practice, and patience. Most of all, the hardest part is the “time.” Why is the “time” an essential component in transforming somebody to someone that the “somebody” is not? Remember the first founding enunciation of the tao te ching? That is, “the tao that can be described is not the eternal tao.”

The tao changes. The person that you are now will change in a subtle way ten years from now. Although we will be able to make a narrative of a consistent character in the self of yours even after a decade, several things will have changed about you – not only physically, but emotionally and mentally. The tao is no longer the tao that you defined because the original tao has already become fossilized after the time point of your definition. This has to do with the passage of time. There is a temporal difference between the original tao that you define and the tao that has elapsed in the meantime while you were enunciating the definition of the original tao. To put it briefly, there is a temporal difference between the first tao and the second tao.

Therefore, the element of “time” is essential in changing your character for good.

Definition of a Pervert

Other translations of the chapter show that a virtuous person is not aware/conscious of his virtue. I am not sure which translation I will have to rely on, but what matters here is that it is possible that a truly virtuous person’s action is so natural and spontaneous that the person can be genuinely unaware that he is practicing good. In one way, this coincides with the case where bad people do lots of bad things with no scruples. The striking point about the latter breed of people is that they can fall asleep quite easily in bed. They truly do not know and, even if they do know, cannot feel that they committed evil. In normal cases, if one had done something terribly bad to an innocent person that had nothing to do with him, he would be unable to fall asleep at night.

Therefore, in the eyes of a pure soul, a wicked man’s crimes are horrible and perverted. This pure soul is not able to comprehend exactly what mind mechanism induces the evil-door to commit such horrible crimes. On the other hand, in the eyes of a wicked person, a pure soul or virtuous person is a pervert. How can this be so? A person that is not able to think from the viewpoint of a bad person and does not know that his actions are virtuous appears to live in a different world than where non-virtuous people do.

While a pretender of virtue will presumably understand both sides – that is, the virtuous and non-virtuous – a truly virtuous person would have a hard time trying to understand how non-virtuous actions are possible.

In short, it is the “otherness” that inspires uneasy feelings in people. Thus, rather than thinking in their shoes or taking a look at themselves from a distance, they easily denigrate the other people as being perverted. Or think about the so-called asexuals. An asexual cannot, by definition, do anything perverted in terms of sex. They won’t probably have even normal sex. Even if they do, they may not enjoy it. Is this asexual not a biological pervert or mutant from the viewpoint of either a heterosexual or homosexual? In fact, you may even feel like you are a pervert (or alien) to yourself. Dig up your old diaries or letters, for example. Do they not remind you how different a person you were than now? You may question yourself, “how was I able to even think that and actually write it?” I may be asking myself this question when I am reading these blog writings ten years from now if I am luckily alive then.

Or think about religion. If only a single person saw Jesus Christ crucified on the stake and decided to cherish the stake used for his execution as a symbol for worshipping and believed that this way of worshipping him would take him to heaven, this guy would have been… you know what I would say?

Or think about Peter Singer type vegetarians. They consider non-vegetarians to be unethical because they violate Singer’s version of utilitarianism. It is notable that Singer expands the conventional concept of utilitarianism to beasts as well. In his view, while there is nothing wrong with a human having sex with a chicken or horse if the animal seems to enjoy it or it can be verified that the animal does enjoy it, it is morally wrong to slaughter them and eat them. To Singer, it is unthinkable to kill a living creature causing it immense physical pain and then eat its dead body by disintegrating it into parts. Having sex with animals, on the other hand, is a mutually enjoyable play between both parties if the sex can be reasonably seen as “consensual.” Homo sapiens might have also had sex with Neanderthals, after all.

On the other hand, from normal, healthy citizens’ point of view, nothing could be more repulsive than to think about having sex with an animal. Even normal, consensual sex between a man and a woman can look disgusting to some moralists. But having sex with animals? Oh, come on. I once asked my brother if he went to jail which person he would have chosen as his cell mate between a man living his sentence for having “consensual” sex with an animal and a rapist. I think he said that he would rather choose to be with the rapist. The thing is, however, the animal lover can be as reasonable and moral a person as my brother is. But the rapist? What could be more abhorrent than to force a woman to have sex with him against her will?

It looks that both Singerian vegetarians and ordinary non-vegetarians find each other to be perverted in some way.

Back to Lao Tzu’s virtuous person

I understand that my descriptions of the virtuous can seem contradictory in comparison with my new version of a Laozian sage. Did I not emphasize after all that all humans have elements of evil deep within their minds? One partial answer to this question may be that humans have seeds of evil deep in their unconscious rather than in their conscious minds. A virtuous person’s unconscious world still has elements of badness but they remain inactive because of the full harmony achieved between them and the virtuous traits (maybe this is simply a verbal way of resolving the question because we cannot know how our unconscious exactly works).

If the truly virtuous cannot understand the non-virtuous, what’s the point of becoming virtuous? According to a conventional reading of Lao Tzu, a Taoist sage is willing to mingle with lowly people because a sage is fluid and inclusive like water. A virtuous person practices virtue even to the non-virtuous, Lao Tzu says. However, if that virtuous person is at the level of practicing virtue so naturally that virtue is almost ingrained in his body, how is he going to understand as a sage what drives the non-virtuous to commit evil, for example? When choosing to mingle with lowly, non-virtuous people, wouldn’t the virtuous Laozian sage in some way have to be able to understand what it is like to be one of them rather than looking down on them from a superior point of view? A self-righteous Confucian sage will most likely be banished from or even murdered in the community of lowly people. What did Apostle Paul say? He tried to be like a Scythian to Scythians to transform them. He was able to think in other people’s shoes to preach the Gospel to them.

Let us tackle this issue with a different example.

All of us – whether we are doctors, lawyers, scientists, technicians, educators, philosophers, plumbers, fighters, professors, mathematicians, fashion models, singers, artists, curators, professional writers, translators, prostitutes, civil servants, astronauts, janitors, or others – were beginners at some point in our respective fields. However, once we achieve a level of “mastery,” as Robert Greene terms it, we no longer rely on elementary formulas or manuals. Our brain does the work independently and naturally; we no longer need any help from our predecessors. However, one of the common problems that educators face is that because they achieved a certain level of mastery, they confront a barrier between themselves and their pupils in regard to approaching a particular subject matter – like a school subject like science or mathematics. It is almost as if the educator in this case should “unlearn” the things he had learned and absorbed, by learning to think and feel like his students when solving, for example, a math problem in a textbook. The weird part is that even though the educator himself was once like many of the kids that he is teaching now, he should learn again to see things from their perspectives.

Likewise, a Confucian sage that refuses to look from the viewpoint of a non-sage cannot effectively transform the non-sage. A true virtuous Laozian sage would be able to maintain his virtue while at the same time effectively convincing – through wu-wei, perhaps – a non-virtuous person to become naturally virtuous like him. Even if he does not change, the sage would have no regrets.