Knowing Contentment (Tao Te Ching 46)
46.
When nations surf the Tao
resources are used for human flourishing.
When nations lose touch with the Tao
resources are built up and set aside for war.
No vice is more vicious than covetousness.
No misery is worse than discontent.
No desire is more disastrous than greed.
Therefore, knowing contentment
is the key to everlasting fulfillment.
Written Reflection
In my Enlightenment History class [Jeff writing here], we’ve been addressing a poignant and important question: Did slavery in American lead to racism or did racism lead to slavery? The question comes up because some of the most celebrated European philosophes wrote down some of the most unenlightened, vile nonsense about race that has ever been written. It’s rather demoralizing to read dudes like David Hume or Immanuel Kant (the great “ethicist” of all things) explaining the natural inferiority of black people and why they aren’t entitled to the wondrous liberties of Enlightenment political philosophy.
There are no easy answers to this question, and of course slavery and racism (of a sort) go back to a time in human culture before history started getting written down. Yet if we consider racism as an ideology, there are good reasons to believe the institution of slavery led to modern racist theories about race itself, and this is especially wicked.
Why is it especially wicked? Because it means that racism wasn’t a scientific or anthropological mistake, but rather an inauthentic attempt to justify the human cruelty that European powers already had their hearts set on perpetrating. As historian Robert Bernesconi noted, the root of the whole thing was evil addiction to the profit motive. Men like Immanuel Kant merely provided sophisticated ways for greedy men to explain away their sins, and ways for the public at large to soothe their consciences as human beings were captured and taken across the Atlantic to a life of perpetual hell and degradation.
Faced with this painful aspect of Western history, I brought Tao Te Ching 46 to class to discuss what went wrong, and how so many popular public intellectuals of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries could be so inconsistent.
“No vice,” explains Lao Tzu, “is more vicious than covetousness.” That is, as men want what they can’t have and set out to exploit people and lands for their own lust, their initial evil (covetousness) leads to myriad other evils.
“No desire” says the old master, “is more disastrous than greed.” Again, think of all the human misery—from the indentured servants of Europe, to the Irish political prisoners forced to work cane fields in Barbados, to the displaced Mali families—all of this flowed from the poisonous root of greed in the bosoms of European exploiters.
Lao Tzu doesn’t just scold the immorality of such toxic vices, he points out their ultimate end—doom. Greed is disastrous and discontent is miserable. Resources are wasted on war rather than human flourishing. The sin of unchecked capitalism and Western greed need not be avenged by some literal smiting of an almighty deity; it results in hell on earth for the perpetrators of such injustice themselves.
What’s the remedy: contentment. Contentment leads to everlasting fulfillment. When one has everything in the deepest sense, he or she need not set about plundering anything. This is not about being content with the raw deal oppressed people get, this is about the average person not being so rapacious that they need to create a world that needs people to get crushed beneath the massive economic machine. If we can learn contentment we can cultivate peace, joy, and happiness in our lives. With such blessings, we can limit the harm we do to others. A society surfing the Tao together can flourish.
One last note is worthy of mention. In the original Chinese, two contrasting images are presented regarding horses (which we connect for our day to “resources”). There is a beautiful picture, in which a community is surfing the Tao. In such a community horses are kept close to home, which means their manure can cultivate the local fields for the nourishment of the people. In times of war, however, an ugly picture arises. Horses are taken away from the nearby farm and end up pooping on their march of death. The people miss out on extra nutrition, and nuisance plants arise.
Elsewhere, Lao Tzu alludes to this idea that the scars on the land will become overgrown with invasive weeds, which the reader would have understood were being fertilized by the mislaid manure. What’s more, mares have to give birth on the battlefield. That pitiable image is a startling but apt depiction of what life is like under the insatiable regimes blighting our global landscapes these days.
Therefore, may we cultivate contentment rather than greed in our hearts and in the hearts of the next generation, before we consume ourselves to extinction.