Labor Day, 2017

It's Labor Day, a holiday. Let's loaf around. Be idle.

Chuang Tzu – translated by Burton Watson (0231105959); by Martin Palmer and Elizabeth Breuilly (014045537X); and by Lin Yutang

The world has looked sick, sad, and falling down a rabbit hole from time immemorial. In traditional China, Confucius advised people who were into examining life to adapt ways to achieve morality in private and public relationships. In his practical and utilitarian philosophy, he recommended developing one’s sense of righteousness and benevolence by performing rites and ceremonies in the correct manner.

Lao-tse founded Taoism. He granted the importance of righteousness but derided Confucian rites and ceremonies as useless wastes of time. Some assert that it was a Taoist monk who coined the maxim popularized by Reinhold Niebuhr "Strive to develop the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Another Taoist, Chuang Tzu, seconded the idea that we have to accept people, places, events and situations that have no remedy. The ideal life revolves around simple pleasures, whatever we take them to be, but pursued in such a way that they don’t shorten our allotted span of years. Writing for scholars who were either fed up with running petty fiefs or drummed out of their administrative jobs in disgrace, Chuang Tzu advocated keeping a low profile in order to avoid trouble with fame, the vexations of office, and arbitrary superiors , since all of these (and more, endlessly) tend to upset self-control and level-headedness.

Anticipating Carl Rogers’ idea of unconditional positive self-regard and Albert Ellis’ concept of unconditional self-acceptance, Chuang Tzu suggests that we go easy on ourselves and quit demanding that life be anything other than what it is or that other people be smarter or more ethical than they can possibly be. If there were such a thing as ethics between human beings, said mystery writer Craig Rice, there would be no need for lawyers. Chuang Tzu has such cynical expectations about human behavior that he feels profound compassion for us people that can’t help being what we are, especially in terms of greed, lust, and anger. Not so much "Forgive them for they know not what they do," but "Bless their little hearts for they know not what they do."

It’s fun to read Chuang Tzu. He’s got a sense of humor, which makes him a rarity like Epictetus, i.e, a funny philosopher. He is irreverent about the limitations of logic and language, and power and the nitwit bullies attracted to ruling and leadership. He deflates the pompousness of the Confucians. He feels a merry derision for conventional wisdom and received opinions. He also bluntly advises us outsiders, misfits, floaters, nonconformists, seekers, malcontents, beatniks, and grouches to be slackers: "Only those who take leisurely what the people of the world are busy about can be busy about what the people of the world take leisurely."  One of his translators into English, Lin Yutang, said:

Culture . . . is essentially a product of leisure. The art of culture is therefore essentially the art of loafing.  From the Chinese point of view, the man who is wisely idle is the most cultured man. For there seems to be a philosophic contradiction between being busy and being wise. Those who are wise won't be busy, and those who are too busy can't be wise.  The wisest man is therefore he who loafs most gracefully.

Sure, so-called realists could argue, “Yeah, well, who the hell are you, you taker, to hold our makers and leaders in such low esteem? What if everybody just shrugged and said, ‘How the hell does all this work do me good? Who cares and what’s it to me?’” I too wonder who will do the dishes when the party’s over. But somehow I think in the US at least the driven, the obsessed, and the ambitious are hardly on the endangered species list.

Anglo-American Catholic writer and mystic, Thomas Merton says: “I simply like Chuang Tzu because he is what he is and I feel no need to justify this liking to myself or anyone else.”