Green Planets

by Gerry Canavan

  The ten thousand things arise together

  and I watch their return.

  They return each to its root.

  Returning to one’s roots is known as stillness.

  Returning to one’s destiny is known as the constant.

  Knowledge of the constant is known as discernment.

  To ignore the constant

  is to go wrong, and end in disorder.32

  Le Guin didn’t cite any translator for this rendering of the passage; presumably it is her own, derived from comparison of prominent translations.33 Fifteen years later, in her own published translation of Laozi, Le Guin titled this passage “Returning to the Root” and rendered it in more natural and ecological language:

  The ten thousand things arise together;

  in their arising is their return.

  Now they flower,

  and flowering

  sink homeward,

  returning to the root.

  The return to the root

  is peace.

  Peace: to accept what must be,

  to know what endures.

  In that knowledge is wisdom.

  Without it, ruin, disorder.34

  Here the confident subjectivity and intellectual abstractions of the earlier translation (“destiny,” “discernment,” “the constant”) are almost completely replaced by analogies to impersonal natural processes, a hallmark of Daoist thought. The result is a series of fundamental ecological insights: recognizing the enduring relationships between all things, recognizing their endless impermanence, recognizing their fundamental properties, and recognizing the “wisdom” of this “knowledge” as opposed to anthropocentric and egoistic constructions of order. Using these insights, Le Guin’s yin utopianism seeks to challenge ego-logical frameworks by appealing to ecological ones.

  As it was for Daoists in the Warring States period of Chinese history, it is the “ruin” and “disorder” of existing social institutions that leads Le Guin to her strategy of envisioned simplification and “return.” She argues for the need to compensate in the opposite direction from our “intensely yang” culture, and to undo the confident egoism that moves us farther and farther from “what endures.” Paradoxically, then, Le Guin’s yin utopia imagines not a “no place,” but precisely a radical version of the here and now: “If utopia is a place that does not exist, then surely (as Lao Tzu would say) the way to get there is by the way that is not a way. And in that same vein, the nature of the utopia I am trying to describe is such that if it is to come, it must exist already.”35 In suggesting this paradoxical utopian strategy, Le Guin asserts that her intent “is not reactionary, nor even conservative, but simply subversive. It seems that the utopian imagination is trapped, like capitalism and industrialism and the human population, in a one-way future consisting only of growth. All I’m trying to do is figure out how to put a pig on the tracks.”36 Le Guin lumps capitalism, progressivism, utopianism, and Marxism together as manifestations of the prevailing egoistic orientation toward endless growth. Instead, she wants to emphasize a radical knowledge of place, of here and now. Both ecology and Daoism represent critical frameworks for this approach.

  Such cognitive world reduction, or “return to the root,” has become an increasingly significant aspect of our historical moment since 1975. No doubt, as Jameson suggests, it primarily reveals a desire to imagine away capitalism. However, it also represents the recognition of real limits and the real reductions that must eventually occur, one way or the other. In Ecology as Politics, published at the same time as the Le Guin issue of SFS, André Gorz notes that capitalism—specifically, what we would now call industrial capitalism—was confronting numerous concrete ecological limits. In the 1970s, oil shortages and pollution were the most evident examples of ecological limits. Kovel, writing at the turn of the twenty-first century, could point to a laundry list of devastating ecological statistics, including the encompassing crisis of global climate change. Now we can add physiological phenomena like the diabetes and obesity epidemics, which are essentially physiological limits on growth and consumption—points at which industrial “satisfaction” of appetites destroys the organism itself. Even the fictions and abstractions of postindustrial capitalism are reaching real limits, such as financial institutions that are “too big to fail” or digital “addictions” that unfit us for survival in the real world. In all these ways, assumptions of endless growth and ever-increasing consumption are, as Gorz said, encountering physical contradictions or “counterproductivities.”37 These are ecological limits of ego-logic, experienced from squarely within consumer culture (to say nothing of globalization’s relentless effects on nonindustrialized peoples and cultures). To practice “ecological realism,” Gorz insists, the point “is not to refrain from consuming more and more, but to consume less and less—there is no other way of conserving the available reserves for future generations.”38 Cognitively, “to understand and overcome such ‘counterproductivities,’ one has to break with economic rationality.”39 Le Guin, then, is expressing a basic ecological strategy of our times: trying to counteract the way of the ego.40

  DAOISM AS ECOLOGICAL STRATEGY

  Le Guin’s Daoism functions as a critical framework for this cognitive reframing away from ego-logic and toward eco-logic in ways that go well beyond the familiar distinction of yin and yang and the ideal “way” of Dao. The Daoism of Laozi and Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) is a philosophical worldview—not a set of canonical beliefs or scriptural revelations like the typical Western understanding of religions. Therefore, Daoism contributes to Le Guin’s work not as beliefs to be affirmed, but as strategies to be pursued. Daoism’s most important ecological strategies are challenging conventional knowledge and recognizing the intrinsic characteristics of things, both of which serve to reframe the way of the ego.

  Daoism as a critical framework is fiercely critical of conventional knowledge, scholasticism, and intellectual “truths” that derive from confident imposition of anthropocentric values. Laozi’s “wise soul”41 is marked by humility, not as an ethical duty, but out of respect for the complexity of natural processes and in opposition to the dominant society, whose confident imposition of conventional “knowledge” creates injustices and imbalances. Like Gorz’s ecology, Laozi explains the epistemological limits of “rationality” in terms of evident physical limits: “Brim-fill the bowl, / it’ll spill over. / Keep sharpening the blade, / you’ll soon blunt it.”42 In explaining her yin utopianism, Le Guin quotes Zhuangzi’s insistence that “the best understanding … ‘rests in what it cannot understand. If you do not understand this, then Heaven the Equalizer will destroy you.’”43 To a large extent, ecological reframing means unlearning conventional perceptions that seem so fixed from the perspective of the way of the ego.

  The Daoist framework of natural processes and fundamental qualities also reveals the enduring strength of what is apparently weak and how it can function as a corrective to existing social and political power. Le Guin has this aspect of Daoism in mind when she describes a yin utopia as “dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold.”44 Daoism teaches that what appear to be “weak” characteristics such as yielding can actually be powerful strategies, just as soft water wears away hard rock, or a useless tree survives the carpenter’s ax, or the low valley is fertile. Again, this valorization of the “weak” is not simply an ethical or moral principle, but (like critical theory) an observation that claims to result from the fundamental qualities and relationships of things.

  Indeed, in studying intrinsic characteristics, Daoism constitutes a theory of power. The book attributed to Laozi is known as the Daodejing, meaning the classic work (jing; Wade-Giles: ching) about dao and de (te). Critics who are unfamiliar with Daoism tend to focus on Dao as the encompassing mystical ideal and on yin and yang as primary categories. However, Le Guin understands the importance of de, meaning the fundamental properties and powers
of a thing, its “virtues” in the old sense of “characteristic qualities,” as when we talk about the virtues of (say) a particular herb or type of wood. Unfortunately, de is often translated simply as “virtue” and thus garbled by the modern moralistic implications of that word.45 Le Guin’s published version of the Daodejing translates the title as “A Book about the Way and the Power of the Way,” so she effectively renders de as “power” of a specific kind. Le Guin’s decision to translate it as “power” shows how she turns to Daoism as a strategy, not (as Jameson asserts) simply as abstract ethics. Another key aspect of Daoist challenges to the ego, then, is recognizing de and understanding “what must be” and “what endures,” especially as counterweights to less enduring social and political forms of power.

  Le Guin’s fictions—and particularly her utopian fictions—employ these Daoist ecological frameworks in a variety of ways, all of which challenge the root issue of egoistic assumptions. Sometimes the Daoist frameworks go unnoticed because they mirror familiar SF techniques, such as when she uses satire to highlight egoism. Suvin notes the satire of self-deluded consumer hyperbole in “The New Atlantis,” for example, where an authoritarian and commercial culture that is literally sinking under the weight of its environmental devastation consoles itself with preposterous advertising. The portrayal of Captain Davidson in The Word for World Is Forest is also a dark satire of monstrous male egoism, especially when compared to the mystical invocation of Selver and the dreamtime of the forest culture. A similar satire is evident in the portrayal of Dr. Haber in The Lathe of Heaven, with George Orr’s oppositional humility rendered in explicitly Daoist terms. The Dispossessed satirizes the confident knowledge of Urrasti scientists through their equally confident pronouncements of “logical” sexism. Always Coming Home satirizes both the extinct “backwards-head” inhabitants of California and the monological culture of the Condor as counterpoints to the ecological ways of the Kesh. In The Telling, the governments of Earth and Aka are satires of fundamentalism and industrialism, respectively, and again serve to emphasize the reasonable “unreason” of the old ways. In all of these cases, satirical portrayals of egoism are contrasted with more humble cultural beliefs as a means of challenging the centrality of “logical” power.

  While such satires are insightful, however, their heavy-handedness is likely to lead to defensive push-back and thus to fall short of the radical cognitive reframing envisioned by ecology and Daoism. One thinks, for example, of Thomas Disch’s indignant reaction to the feminist SF of Le Guin and others; Always Coming Home, Disch argued, “requires nothing less … than the abolition of Western civilization as we know it.”46 Similarly, the grossly pathological egoism of Captain Davidson or the ridiculous sexism of the Urrasti scientists could easily make a reader feel that she was not egoistic by comparison. Satire externalizes egoism in the form of an identifiable opposition, making it easy to dismiss as something that other people should stop doing. As Suvin observed, “unfortunately alienation within the all-pervading psychical eco-system of modern capitalism is not always so conveniently embodied in a malevolent Other.”47

  Another familiar technique that Le Guin uses to challenge egoism and conventional knowledge is the crisis. As Zhuangzi’s admonition about “Heaven the Equalizer” indicates, ecological crisis and compensatory reversal are major indications of using overly egoistic “knowledge.” “Heaven the Equalizer” is the same phrase that another translator rendered as “the Lathe of Heaven.”48 In both cases, the English word “heaven” gives it a theistic feel that obscures its essentially ecological significance: systemic relationships are a physical characteristic of any ecosystem, and thoughts and actions find physical limits there. Ecology emerged as an important framework in the ’60s and ’70s in response to the crises of pollution and natural resource depletion. Ecology, like healthy egoism or Dao, is not directly perceptible; only when things go wrong and a crisis arises do most people understand that they have lost the way.

  Often Le Guin’s crises focus on psychological or epistemological approaches to problems. In City of Illusions, Falk/Ramarren’s crisis over his identity occurs on the epistemological level, for example, with the Daoist “Old Canon” and the Thoreauvian “New Canon” as his guides. The drought crisis in The Dispossessed serves to compare the de of collective cooperation for survival to the de of dog-eat-dog survival, thereby exploring the concrete borders between essential self-interest and collective cooperation. At other times, however, crisis serves to externalize the enemy in ways similar to satire. In The Telling, efforts to preserve the library at Silong involve combating an enemy that represents several contemporary spheres of power—state, corporation, media propaganda, economics—all combined into a single enemy. Like satire, then, invoking crisis risks implying that egoism is an external enemy, as opposed to confronting the everyday complexity of “normal” egoism.

  Along with overt techniques such as satire and crises, Le Guin also challenges egoism and anthropocentric rationality in more subtle ways. One example of systematic challenge to ego is Le Guin’s disciplinary reframing. As numerous critics have pointed out, Le Guin’s protagonists are often anthropologists or ethnologists. As such, they struggle to understand unfamiliar cultures while also finding their own beliefs and assumptions estranged. A large part of the typical “development” of her anthropological characters is therefore unlearning or reframing of fundamental assumptions. Sometimes, as with the Handdara in The Left Hand of Darkness, an exotic belief in unlearning or unreason is described in mystical terms that echo Laozi. At other times—notably in The Dispossessed and The Telling—processes of unlearning are overtly political and realistically explored. In both cases, the substitution of anthropological frames for more familiar historical and political frames serves to model processes of unlearning and subtly emphasizes the transitory nature of human cultures and institutions.

  Le Guin’s attention to the “unreasonable” is another characteristic way in which her fictions work toward unlearning conventional knowledge. In Always Coming Home, for example, the Valley people don’t distinguish between subjective time and “real” time. In the section “Time and the City,” the narrator describes how the People of the Valley are baffled by “historical” questions. To Pandora’s questions, the puzzled “Archivist” replies, “You talk all beginnings and ends, spring and ocean but no river.” By comparison, we are told, the Valley “is all middle.”49 This lack of desire to impose rational narratives is contrasted with the hyper-rationalization of the Condor people, who “because [they] said that everything belonged to One [God], they forced themselves to think in twos: either this, or that.” As a result, “They could not be among the Many.”50 Rigid monological or binary structures of thought, Le Guin suggests, are forms of fundamentalist thinking that interfere with properly ecological perception and healthy situation in the lived world.

  The Telling also dramatizes healthy forms of unreason. Le Guin has indicated that “what happened to the practice and teaching of Taoism under Mao” served as inspiration for the novel.51 Sutty, the novel’s ethnographic heroine and utopian visitor, studies the Daoist-like traditional culture of Aka, which she labels “an ancient popular cosmology-philosophy-spiritual discipline.”52 She dismisses some of its beliefs and practices as “hocus pocus”—including such things as superstitious sign reading, numerology, bold claims of “supernal powers,” and so forth. Sutty also dismisses “literal readings” or “fundamentalism … reducing thought to formula, replacing choice by obedience, these preachers turned the living word into dead law.”53 But along with the rational rejection of hocus pocus and fundamentalism, she finds that the humble traditional culture includes genuine and valuable forms of unreason. As one of the storytellers says, “What we do is unreasonable.” The narrator explains, “[she] used that word often, unreasonable, in a literal sense: what cannot be understood by thinking.”54 Compared with this obscure but naturalistic and life-affirming unreason, the ostensibly rational frameworks en
forced by the Corporate State are brutal and pathetic and unreasonable in a bad sense: using bad reasoning, literalizing metaphors, creating fundamentalism. Here again, Le Guin’s Daoist ecology produces utopianism that aspires to be a very reasonable form of unreasoning, as a challenge to economic rationalism and the way of the ego.

  At its most radical, Le Guin’s challenge to egoism involves challenging the uses of encompassing narratives in general. Most conspicuously, the structure of Always Coming Home demonstrates the refusal of encompassing narrative, undermining rational categories of identity and even the notion of individual human significance. The book has no central human protagonist; the closest thing is Stone Telling, whose story is largely about the transformations of her “identity” in relation to her surroundings and the course of time. The apparent subject of the book is the Valley culture, but the real subject is our process of trying to find a way “into” the Valley mind frame. Le Guin models this process in a very ecological and Daoist way in the chapter titled “Pandora, Worrying about What She Is Doing, Finds a Way into the Valley through the Scrub Oak,” where she meditates on a scrub oak as a living representation of wilderness and on the mind’s illusory desire to explain it. “Look how messy this wilderness is,” Pandora thinks. The scrub oak in front of her “right here now” has “no overall shape,” “isn’t good for anything,” and has “no center and no symmetry.” The leaves seem “to obey some laws,” but only “poorly.” To consider it accurately is to realize that “the civilized mind’s relation to it is imprecise, fortuitous, and full of risk,” because “all the analogies run one direction, our direction.”55 This echoes a famous passage from Zhuangzi about an ugly old tree that endures because it is “useless.”56 Le Guin uses Pandora’s meditation to illustrate both the difficulty of “understanding” the Valley and the illusory egoism of applying fixed rational frameworks to the lived complexity of nature. This is world reduction that forces the reader to feel an ecological framework by stripping away basic narrative and conceptual “analogies.”