ASEBL Journal – Volume 10 Issue 1, January 2014
Accompanying this desire for profit is the third aspect of the modern mindset, namely
an emphasis on law; “the erection of artificial systems of rules” (CN: 71). In the
Daodejing, Cooper notes, “the laws of nature were contrasted with the humanly
constructed laws by which people govern their actions” (CN: 47), with the latter – the
Way – having educative priority.
Finally, modernity is characterized by an excess of what could be summed up as
integration. This is manifested in an “imperative” to travel but primarily in
urbanization; in the increasing numbers of people who live in “’the dust-filled trap’ of
a busy, febrile city” (CN: 96). “In urban existence” and in “other contexts dominated
by human business, by a relentless pursuit of goals, profit and pleasure,” Cooper
writes, “not only are people estranged from nature but are without space in which to
exercise certain virtues” (CN: 53).
In contrast to this modern approach, Cooper sketches the Daoist alternative:
The Daodejing . . . looks back, with some nostalgia, to a time when . . .
convergence was greater than it has since become: to an age when the human
population was smaller, technology more simple, travel less of an imperative,
desires more modest, and men did not take up arms against one another.
Hardly leaving their own villages, people’s lives were contented. (CN: 24)
This was, Cooper reports, a “Golden Age, before human beings embarked on
insensitive, earth-gouging construction projects, when people and other living beings
lived in a state of simple and harmonious naturalness” (CN: 48), when economic life
was limited to a “simple agrarian society where people plough, raise livestock and live
in villages” (CN: 119), and when industry was restricted to the activities of “craftsmen
who work on materials they have themselves extracted” or “cooks, fishermen,
ferrymen” (CN: 73) – “skilled practical people . . . whose knowledge is, as it were, in
the hands” (CN: 107-108). These “genuine human beings of old . . . did not plan their
affairs in advance,” as the Daodejing puts it (cited in CN: 35), and when they did
travel they made their way, Cooper explains, “like a free-spirited back-packer,” one
who is “unconcerned with profit, destinations, goals, obligations or commitments, and
eschews analytical enquiry which chops things into pieces” (CN: 90).
5. Objections to nostalgia.
Such eulogies for a bygone era surely go too far, as no doubt they did in the original
Daoist texts (the tendency to romanticise the past is clearly not a new invention). For
while modernity with its scientism, enterprise, laws and integration is not without its
problems, a return to the scenes Cooper conveys would be incomparably more
problematic. As Steven Pinker (2011), Matt Ridley (2010), Jared Diamond (1998) and
Robert Wright (2000) have extensively documented, modernization has brought with
it huge and increasing benefits. Above all, violence and bigotry have plummeted and
edification has advanced as governance and trade have spread, while human lives
have become longer and healthier as science and technology – including, notably,
developments in agricultural intensification – have progressed. Matt Ridley offers his
own contrast between modernity and autarky, and merits quoting at length:
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