Looking for peace in troubled times
(from a conversation) –
‘I saw Bon Voyage tonight, a comedy set in 1940 when France fell to Germany. It was very well constructed, one of those scripts where there are a dozen characters all bouncing off one another like pachinko balls. The construction is what’s nice. But it took the side of the resistance, and was against the collaborators. I’m not sure that’s the Tao way.’
‘Why does Tao way matter here? One of the characters is into Taoism? Or are you talking about something else?’
‘Well, there are a couple of famous metaphors in Taoism, I think from Tao Te Ching, but maybe from Chuang-tze. In general Taoists were contrasted to Confucius and his followers. Confucius stressed that every intelligent man should seek to influence the state and join the ruler as advisor, be a local mayor or whatever they called them, join the general administration. Lao-tze, in a famous, and probably apocryphal, story, met with Confucius and derided this approach: The Taoist way was to retreat from the turmoil of the world, tend your own garden and let everyone else tend his.
‘The two famous metaphors are:
- ‘Be the willow, not the oak tree.’ In winter when heavy snows fall, the willow bends low, and when the snows melt, the willow springs back up. But the oak tree, which seems so much stronger than the soft willow, will crack and break under the heavy snow, and in spring when the snow melts the oak branches will still be broken.
- ‘Water vs. Stone’ Stone of course is harder than water. But over time a tiny stream will cut a channel in the hardest stone. Water is yielding, and stone unyielding, but water still manages to erode and overcome stone.’
These two metaphors exemplify the Taoist social and political courses of action. If your country is conquered, as France was, then the ‘oak tree’ and ‘stone’ types would advocate continued battle, underground resistance, blowing things up, assassinating German officials and French collaborators. The ‘willow’ and ‘water’ types would simply ignore the conquerors as much as possible, as they had ignored their own French leaders. In time, the German Empire would crumble, and the peasants and farmer-philosophers would go on as they always had.
So nothing in the movie mentioned Taoism, but it was holding up the French politicians who formed the Pétain collaborationist government as weak, traitors, double-dealing, spineless and unprincipled; and de gaulle and the French resistance fighters were seen as moral, heroic, doing the right thing, in fighting back.
And I was looking at this from my pacifist Taoist point of view, and questioning both the film’s conventional ideology and my own point of view.
Those French Taoists (if there were any such) would have been standing by as French jews were sent off to be killed. By not fighting, are they not helping the evil?
I don’t know, in other words, just trying to sort out my own philosophy.
I think there is a smart, philosophical Taoist way to withdraw, and a more venal, corrupt politician way of collaborating. The French minister (‘Beaufort’) who stands for the collaborationists is compared to a movie actress, with whom he is sleeping, both spinning all sorts of self-serving lies just to get a piece of the pie and hold onto it, whether it’s from a leftist French government or the German imperialists. Such an approach is very different from, say, the French version of the Taoist, a country priest who advocates non-violence, but who will help any jews hide out from being captured whenever he can.
There is in Chuang-tze a constant note of mockery and laughter at those earnest Confucians who try to change the world. It’s a little cynical, but it might be the wisest course. After all, if everybody just tended his garden, there wouldn’t be any wars.
The problems arise when not everybody tends his gardens, and war does come. What then?
(Composed on keyboard Thursday, September 25, 2008)
