Make Us Good Wolves

Towards a balanced ecology of soul via Taoist views of good and evil

A great gnarled oak near Stonehenge

Many thanks to

Peco

who last week wrote to me with an interesting question regarding the Taoist view on evil. Peco’s writing was some of the first I discovered on here, and, as I have written before, it often moves and educates me in equal measure, as does the writing of his wife

Ruth Gaskovski

.

In answer, I cannot write for all Taoists, and especially not for ‘Taoism’. These thoughts below are personal and partial, and based on practice of T’ai Chi and meditation as much as anything else.

But Tao is dear to me, as I fell into it at a young age and have practiced and studied for about 30 of the 40 intervening years. I find great wisdom in the teaching stories of The Taoist Classics, which I love as much as the parables of the New Testament. Later in the year I will return to today’s topic when I have had time to find all the references from the Chuang Tzu, Lieh Tzu, Wen Tzu, Tao Te Ching and other Classics which would round-out the piece. I hope to find room for it in the book I have begun to write about standing your ground using softness.¹ But until then, here are notes towards such a chapter. I hope they are of interest, as for me, the nature of evil, wise versus unwise behaviour, and the role of intent, are frequent topics for thought.

I hope this is of at least some interest in the meantime, with a few possibly useful footnotes and book recommendations for now, until I can do Peco’s question more justice. I starts out on a far horizon, but I do make it back to the centre by the end.

Love is the Apex Predator

²

Without love, the misplaced raccoon dogs of chaos, the escaped, voracious mink of greed and the shipping-crate freighted black rats of consumerism run amok. The bindweed of conformity to every new orthodoxy smothers rarer growths of less valued virtues, which always take locally specific shapes. The uncountable herds of sheep called misuse of power are brought in to graze upon a neighbouring country - or whole continent’s - native grasslands, and within a few years the cloven feet have turned the whole place to barren dust.

But it is not their fault, these animals and plants are only exhibiting their natural behaviours and tendencies. Sheep, kudzu, raccoon dogs, mink, rats: they are not evil. Neither are the natural human urges, such as hope for change behind chaos, the desire for some comfort behind greed and consumerism, the wish for community within conformity, the sense of wanting to do what is right behind much misuse of power. It’s just, they have no limits to growth, as their natural predators are not present in the new context.

When there are no limits to something’s growth, what looks a lot like ‘evil’ appears.

Indeed, in this metaphor, as in real life ecology, new, seemingly invasive, organisms may be better suited to the soil-depleted conditions of Modernity than the original native species of the psyche, which were place-based and vernacular. Over-prescription of the antibiotics of late-stage capitalism have often wiped out local resistance to infection by despair and strife. The once-touted panacea of the market turned out to poison anyone not also wishing to swallow exploitation. (In fact, many people have thrived on this drug as they somehow found a way to force someone else to take the bitter exploitation pill).

It is hard to muster community spirit when there are not enough people at church to organise the annual fair, or when fear of offending some nebulous entity, means we do not engage in the often physically robust annual celebrations and events that characterise almost any place in the world that is neither under a fundamentalist boot nor complete institutional capture.

I am definitely not saying that we must root out all these evil things. That thought itself is the strongest of all the pathogens which one can carelessly import, upon the sole of one’s well-travelled boot.

No. None of these life forms could thrive when that which naturally eats them, or grazes them to the ground regularly, is present. We just no longer have our full range of inner apex species which have evolved over millennia to feast upon over-abundances of illness-causing tendencies. We have lost many species of faith, customs, holy days and holidays, communal celebrations, harvest festivals, congregations, commons, festivals of inversion of high and low, trust, transhumance, subsistence, fools and jesters, food cultures, folk song, social dances, local flavours, above all, belonging. All these beautiful birds and beasts, and countless more which you may have spotted on your travels, once ate their body-weight daily from the occasional infestations of parasitic ticks like Fascism, the mitten crabs of corruption, or the Varroa mite of petty tyranny.

So, we will have to train our hearts to eat what it is that grows round here lately. Just as we can train our hands to make baskets of kudzu vine or tree of heaven, and desserts from shoots of Japanese knotweed, we can use our ingenuity and perseverance to turn into food and useful things what is currently unbalancing our inner, local, national and global psychic ecology.

I suggest that we become like good wolves and learn to prey upon what is too abundant, and transform it into nourishment. I think we need our loving actions to have big teeth as well as soft bushy tails. I think our strong, roving, grieving packs of love sometimes need to howl together in the landscape.

I know, of course, that there are no ‘bad wolves’.³ But we must counter the myth with some words as well as love. Because the ‘big bad wolf’ of yore dies hard.⁴

A Matter of Character

A thriving living culture is the natural predator of oil-seed-greed (which provides the grease which allows the gears of the Machine to turn). Greed was the original lubricant of the steamroller iteration of the machine, of the early Industrial Revolution. Now it has the slick silicone spray of a billion atomised consciousness swiping at once to keep it whirring, and it barely takes up a square mile of humming server farm.

When greed was culturally frowned-upon, and it was once frowned-upon everywhere, there was no spare oil for a machine.⁵

A living culture absolutely can and should include religion,⁶ as well as many philosophies,⁷ Panentheism, and the many open-minded variants of non-theism⁸, which are as old, variegated and venerable as religion.

Traditional communally held values grazed upon and kept down selfishness, like those somewhat fierce farmyard geese keep down the slugs in the vegetable plot. Sure, my dodgy shenanigans could land me in the stocks, covered with rotting veg, but still, I may well have deserved it.

The pursuit of money, and the successful stripping away of responsibility to others, ethics, and ongoing place-based reciprocity, meant capitalism has proliferated like mould in a Petri dish. Real earth is not like aseptic agar. Soulful soil has a thriving biome full of tiny little predators who would eat up such a germ. But that soil has often been missing, washed away by years of extractive practice. Now we are sold international regulation in place of locally mutually agreed ethical behaviour. A wind-scoured dust bowl now passes for public life.

Many Traditional and Indigenous lifeways successfully defend against all the harms I have listed, when not interfered with, persecuted or destroyed by outside interests. But chances are, if you are reading this, that you, like me, are in a town or a city, and that our daily patterns are strikingly alike despite the thousands of miles between us and the very different soils our double-glazed homes obliterate.

We can begin to reclaim the greatest immunity against what could be called ‘evil’ by practising radical responsibility for ourselves. This starts with composting our own shit.⁹ I am talking about an old-fashioned idea: building character by engaging with and transforming difficult things.

Depth of character is to a human being what a thriving living culture is to a community. It is like an aged cheese, made from an ancient recipe, stored with care and shared with love, good bread and the best crisp apples. Importantly, it varies greatly place to place, but is in keeping with, and arises from, the place where it is made. Some years, it stinks a bit.

It will not be to everyone’s taste.

Evil as the Banishment of Doubt

Personally, I am still unsure exactly what ‘evil’ is, even though I lived in a house with it for 8 years. But I will try to speak a little of it.

I do know that evil acts are committed by people who do not doubt for one minute what they are going to do. They are justified, they are right, they deserve it, God wishes it so, history points to it, it is manifest destiny, they want it, or they want it back... They do not doubt that the victim was asking for it, drew it upon themself, is less than human, is a liar, is not important enough to consider, was always going to be a problem.

Along with at least 4 of my close relatives, we have so far spent about 45 years consciously doing the painstaking composting and unpicking work that prevents certain strains of future evil from growing. Of rebuilding a living soil capable of nurturing an abundance of life with the compost we’ve made. It is work we will do until our last breaths. So, if I seem wary of people who declare just how certain they are about who or what is good or evil, who is worthy or not of our love, care or forgiveness, who is going to heaven or hell, and what can or cannot be transformed; you’d be right.

Evil as Wave Not Particle

I see evil as sickly energy in motion, as in a wave, not a ‘particle’ that you can pin down and label, once and for all. It is often a ‘way’ rather than a ‘what’. The same knife, making the same incision, can kill or cure, depending on context, timing and intent. Just looking on, judging, we could not always know. So many good intentions cause calamity, a theme in Taoist teaching stories, such as ‘Hundun’¹⁰ (the faceless primordial being whose friends accidentally kill it, by boring holes into it, to ‘humanise’ its face). Just as many bad intentions have unintended beneficial effects. This does not let us off any hooks. This just shows us the hubris of narrow views without appraisal of historical and ongoing contexts.

Some actions, (or abstentions from action, as by the UK government right now) cause vast suffering. My conscience and classic Taoist teaching agree here, some courses of behaviour are demonstrably bad. However, so far in the Taoist texts I have read, ‘evil’, specifically, is rarely mentioned. There is certainly regular mention of unwise action, going against Tao, forcing of things, going contrary to nature, and so on. There are dire consequences for cruel rulers and those who despoil nature, as shown in Chuang Tzu chapter 4 and elsewhere¹¹.

[Post-publishing note:

The Subtle Seamstress

in her comment below has noted the word ‘evil’ many times in her e-book translation of Tao Te Ching, which I look forward to reading. I stand by Moeller’s interpretation of Taoism as primarily an effect-based teaching, rather than explicitly moralising, as contrasting with Confucianism, for instance. More broadly, delineating ‘good and evil’ does not seem to be the main thrust of the Classics, rather, wise and unwise behaviour.]

If Tao is the Divine Way and in perfect harmony with God, as recently assured to me by an Orthodox Christian friend, then by seeking to align ourselves with the Natural Process, we avoid doing evil. ‘Becoming one with the Tao’ is the aim of Taoism. We attempt to follow the path evident in nature. As in the original definition of ‘sin’, ‘to miss the mark’, in Taoism as in Christianity, a small misjudgement of aim can lead to missing the target by a long way. In Taoism, we see our failure, and adjust our practice accordingly.

Wu wei wu, (doing without doing) is the subtlest form of alignment with Tao, yet does not speak to good and evil, other than in implying that forcing things is wrong. Tyranny, authoritarianism, cruelty and war are seen as aberrant and manifestly unwise, due to their terrible consequences, and are ‘against the Way of Heaven’. (This does not refer to a Heaven as opposed to a Hell, instead it means ‘celestial’.)

If you have an aversion to paradox then Taoism is always going to be off-limits as a wisdom tradition. Tao itself is described as being the progenitor of polarity, as exemplified by yin and yang, and the texts are full of stories of reversal. An old man’s eldest son breaks his leg. Oh what evil fortune! The warlord rides through and takes all the eldest sons off to war except the old man’s. Oh what good fortune! And so on, ad infinitum. A King gives a boastful toast at a palace supper declaring all the creatures in his kingdom were made for him to eat, thus proving his royal right. He is answered by a young boy, (clearly speaking for the more than human world), who reminds him that the lice who live in his hair are, by this reckoning, his rulers.

Not Only Humanity

Taoism never developed the purely human-centric views or a specifically human ‘soul’ as did the Platonic-Christian tradition and its ‘humanism’.¹² Thus, it is sometimes disconcerting to those who are used to a more rigid definition of good and evil to see how Taoist texts ‘zoom out’ and seem to see things from the point of view of the happiness of fishes, the tranquillity of an uncarved block, the perfect imperfection of a huge old, gnarled, misshapen oak tree, or the boundless sky itself. It does not mean that a Taoist cannot recognise evil, does not attempt to alleviate suffering, or won’t abstain from bad behaviour. If that were so, then long periods of strong cultural Taoism in Chinese history would have been comparatively barbaric. They were not.

Yet in all the Classics there is indeed a profound scepticism of the call to indignant judgement that labels someone else’s actions as ‘evil’ and yet somehow never our own.¹³ In Taoist tradition there is no ‘Adversary’, no direct personification of evil as found in Christianity. Ill deeds are instead recognised in life by their ill effects and as a deviation from the Natural Way or Tao.

‘Heaven and earth are not humane;

they regard all beings as straw dogs.

To the western ear this quote from chapter 5 of Tao Te Ching may seem at best ambivalent, at worst, deeply upsetting. But one cannot go far into Tao only by comparing the Tao Te Ching with The Bible, whether the Old Testament featuring an often wrathful Yahweh, or the New Testament concentrating on the Good News. The ground, culture and history from which these two traditions sprouted were completely different. The constant calls to return to nature are what drew me into studying Tao. Perhaps they resonated deeply because I saw the rivers, mountains and forests of the texts in my experience of my own homeland. I felt at last a space to breathe where the lessons were real, and often hard, in the texts, martial arts and the inner alchemical work. Yet there was a spaciousness around them, not tied to ideas of hell, damnation or other everlasting states, (which I never once saw reflected in nature); only cycles of change and transformation.

Now, as I am older, at last I begin to see the similarities and deeper correspondences between my chosen path and the one I was born into. This pleases my heart greatly.¹⁴ I will speak more about this in a piece later this year.

Ancient chestnut, Ochils.

Surely Goodness and Truth Shall Follow You

If Tao speaks little of evil, then, to close, I can at least write confidently that it speaks often of good, and most often in these terms:

‘The highest good is like water:

the good in water benefits all,’ ¹⁵

Water, in its non-contention, its support for all life, and its flow, is the archetypal Taoist image of good. Not a ‘good’ as opposed to an ‘evil’, but another quality completely; a living image of that which gives life to all beings equally, without needing to ‘do’ anything. (This may remind you, as it does me, of Matthew 5:45).¹⁶

Where Tao and the parables come together for me is in the exhortation they both give to stop striving and overthinking, but instead to pay attention to nature as an unending source of wisdom and instruction. For this, we cannot beat -

²⁸ And why take ye thought for raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

²⁹ And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. ¹⁷

In its subtle ribbing of a king, even, this cannot be beaten as a perfect parable for a Taoist or a Christian.¹⁸

This week’s good thing: A wonderful poem from

Andrew

of Bog Down and Aster. I am glad to have discovered his Substack recently, I recommend it. I have also included a recording of me reading it aloud.

the goddess of mice under a talon moon


Your boots at the door
mudded by rite
your skirt on the floor
sodden with night
fresh from the mist
with bramble-writ thigh
nightingale piss
and the owl-dripped cry
of some kin riding claw
to the lintel of nether
defiantly cursing it
feather by feather.

Come whisper her words,
come sing in her stead
come bring the dark here,
unwashed to its bed.

Brush from your hair
websilk and leaf
and loose from your grip
the petals you keep
of the found-by-the-way
and broke-open-wide,
empty your chest
of the stores that you hide
under rib's silent curve
in the hold of your breath.

Spill it all here
as we sway over death
raising a spark
by the beg of our press
a makeshift asylum
where the hunted are blest.

---

1. Covering some of the themes from the last year on Subsatck, including this one.

2. …’the greatest of these is love.’ I Corinithians 13:13.

3. Just as there are no ‘Alpha males’ leading packs. Sorry 1990s PUAs.

4. If you’d rather be a metaphorical leopard, falcon, pike or orca, be my guest.

5. I am currently reading a ‘new’ translation of the New Testament from the earliest Greek sources. Every other verse is an exhortation against greed and wealth. There are many Taoist stories lampooning the unwise rich and powerful, too.

6. Although obviously not the popular-in-Hollywood ‘Chant for a car’ flavours of Buddhism, nor ‘Prosperity Gospel’, to name a couple.

See also the entry ‘Liturgy’ in Lean Logic online by David Fleming.

7. Although not Materialism.

8. Such as Taoism, Stoicism, Zen, and behaving-excellently-but-just-not-concerning-oneself-with-those-things-thankyou, for example.

9. No one writes about this better than Vanessa Oliveira De Machado in Hospicing Modernity.

10. An interesting collection of references to Hundun can be found here. And the story of Hundun can be found by scrolling down to the Taoist texts section on this Wikipedia page.

11. The Book of Chuang Tzu p27 Addendum to this paragraph -

The Subtle Seamstress

does indeed find the word ‘evil’ many times in her e-book translation, which I have not yet read. I would stand by Moeller’s interpretation of Taoism as mainly about the effects of our behaviour, rather than as a path requiring adherence to rules or commandments unequivocally pronouncing the truth of what is good or evil.

12. Daoism Explained Hans-Georg Moeller, p156. This is an excellent book, though not for the complete beginner. It is well worth reading if you are familiar with Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu. It is excellent in comparing the mindsets of Christianity and The Enlightenment with Taoist thought. For instance it describes Taoism as being ‘effect-centred’ rather than ‘truth-centred’, unlike Western thought.

13. See almost every story in Chuang Tzu featuring ‘Confucius’.

14. My Great Grand Master Dr Chi Chiang-Tao was both a Taoist and a Christian.

15. Tao Te Ching chapter 8

16. Matthew 5 ⁴⁵ That ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

17. Matthew 6:28-29 King James Version

18. Or indeed, someone like me, who does not need to label exactly what they are to know how they want to behave.