I begin with such straightforward urgency because our floating home, zooming through the galaxy at high velocity inside the wildly spiraling solar system that contains it, has become a watery blue purgatory. More slaughterhouse than paradise, more frenzied, violent battlefield than garden of enlightenment, more cesspool of fractiousness than temple to unity, our beautiful planet is dying and we are its murderers. Wonders remain, but the effects of global industrialization, executed upon a foundation of Western values, guarantee such wonders won’t last long. The values I refer to are mostly about what it means to be human, but also our greed, material excesses, species-centrism, the religiously-based notion of human hegemony over the natural world, and, of course, overpopulation.
The last item on that list may be obvious to those suffering traffic jams, polluted parks, and the disappearance of peace and quiet, but its global consequences are actually complex, underestimated, and inaccurately predicted. Wars over land, air, and water have already begun. The macro-organism we call Planet Earth, desperate to survive in its current, diverse glory, uses various methods to fight its way out from beneath the meaty weight of the human herd. These weapons include diseases, wars, automobile accidents, gender variances, and religious fundamentalism—anything and everything that pares down our numbers. Even so, there are still those who believe that their god encourages them to have ten children or more.
And then there is climate change, another feature of our greed, lack of sensitivity, and the religiously fundamentalist notion that the planet is our playground. Regardless of how many political leaders label it a hoax, weather patterns are changing at human, not geological, speed. It’s tough to wrap our minds around the size of the changes and how soon they will be here. I write this as a displaced victim of one of the largest Atlantic hurricanes on record, having just watched the state of Texas suffer a thousand-year flood, and now seeing the state of California battling the largest and most deadly wildfire outbreak in recorded history. Tropical cyclones are growing more violent and frequent, ice caps are melting, glaciers and permafrost are disappearing, island nations are in existential peril. Tens of thousands of miles of coastline will soon be lost to oceans which are acidifying so rapidly that jellyfish will be the only “seafood” they can soon support. Vast continental plains are becoming deserts while deserts are becoming dustbowls, putting our food supply in jeopardy. Deforestation and marine algae die-offs suggest that the oxygen we breathe will eventually vanish. If all these challenges appeared in an apocalyptic Hollywood thriller, the screenwriter would be told to tone things down so as to make them believable.
Consider, too, the Sixth Great Extinction. The history of the earth—billions of years long, not the mere thousands of biblical fantasies—has seen five previous events of this type, variously caused by bursts of gamma-ray radiation from space, erupting volcanoes, and even the impact of asteroids. This latest extinction, though, is on us—the direct result of our activities and unchecked propagation. Who would have thought that humans could be so catastrophically destructive? Perhaps our atomic atrocities might have offered a clue. Any way you look at it, Earth is a bad place to be a non-human animal these days, be it an insect (whose indispensable group is severely affected), salamander, rhino, butterfly, tiger, turtle, or shark. The level of loss, thanks to our pesticides, condos, golf courses, cities, ocean trawling, and oh-so-much-more, is so staggering that scientists can’t even fully assess it. Bottom line? We will never regain the natural world of our parents, and if our kids manage to survive over the long term, we wouldn’t recognize the world they will inherit from us.
Thanks to the metastatic spread of certain Western values across the world, the nightmare we are facing is not just environmental, though without a habitable planet all other problems are obviously moot. Such foibles include violence, cruelty, greed, religious fundamentalism, and materialism, the last of which exists in inverse proportion to morality. It is time to educate against indulging bad behavior. It is time to see the sometimes-luscious literature of Abrahamic faiths within their original context and to bring their instructions and exhortations into the modern world. It is time to move beyond for-profit education offered on the basis of racially biased tests, the outrage of billionaires and yachts existing alongside homelessness and starvation, and the pernicious fiction that healthcare is a privilege and not as basic a right as any other afforded by civilized society. Failure to do so means the litany of human moral transitions will continue to poison the Western world and the Eastern world, too.
Despite our truly marvelous potential and episodic bursts of transcendent creativity, selflessness, heroism, and redemption, the violent ape known as Homo sapiens has proven thus far to be neither knowing nor wise. A fully fleshed-out catalog of our transgressions could fill the rest of this book and a hundred more, but, especially at this late hour in human history, I am more interested in a prescription than I am in a post-mortem. The prescription I offer involves a paradigm shift. We must abandon the Abrahamic faiths in their literal form. We must abandon the pernicious cycle that produces more technology, which in term creates apocalyptic problems, then create new technology to solve those problems, and on and on. This fruitless recipe, promulgated by material greed, does nothing but misdirect our attention away from the real problem, which is not so much what we do as who we are. We must stop relying on technology and catalyze our own spiritual evolution.
The first step in such a paradigm shift is gaining an understanding of how life really works. Life, as it turns out, is based not on the guiding hand of a white-robed god floating in the clouds with a stick in his hand, but rather on mathematics, physics, and biology. Life is a fractal. This means it retains its design elements, its core characteristics, at every level of scale. Every living thing, from bacterium and oak tree to elephant, woman, and nation-state, transforms energy. Every living thing reproduces. Every living thing contains DNA. Every living thing moves, every living thing must maintain its harmony and balance, and every living thing evolves.
Long before there were Western academic disciplines, the ancient Chinese philosophy known as Daoism was in possession of these deep truths about life. In the chapters that follow, I will explore how Daoism leverages life’s fractal nature, and outline how work at the level of the individual resonates and repeats at the level of the whole world. Specifically, I will detail straightforward personal changes, then changes in attitude, action, and policy, which, when enacted by the billions of individuals planet-wide, could become a single, coherent, magnified force powerful enough to solve famine, drought, abuse, slavery, intolerance, injustice, poverty, violence, environmental devastation, greed, crime, and the scourge of religious fundamentalism.
A nature-based philosophy historically associated with China’s intellectual and power elite, yet also popular with artists, merchants, and hermits, Daoism gained coherence during the Axial Age (800 to 200 BC) and reached its apex during China’s two most successful and enlightened dynasties, the Han and the Tang. This was the time when China was the world’s dominant power and culture, as it is on its way to becoming once again. Unlike ancient traditions that have remained fixed inside static, primitive societies, Daoism grew and deepened over time, gaining sophistication and texture alongside the culture that spawned it. That is because it is fundamentally permeable, having adopted many of the evolving ideas that arose from the long series of invasions, natural disasters, rebellions, and revolutions found in Chinese history.
Among the smorgasbord of the world’s great religions, Daoism sits somewhere between the anthropocentric Abrahamic traditions, with their beliefs in a personal god and the importance of sainted interlocutors, and Buddhism, which stresses self-annihilation, the better to free us of ego, attachments, and the suffering they bring. Refined over millennia, Daoism is a philosophy, in relatively recent expansions, a religion, and in its inquiry into nature, a science. Like Western biology, it offers practical directions for living based on how nature works; like sociology it provides guidelines for getting along with others; like psychology, it helps us understand ourselves. Unlike those Western sciences, it combines the various disciplines within a single all-encompassing view.
The word Dao means “path” or “way.” It is not a road in the physical sense of something