Post #116: The Edge of Chaos

12 June 2024

“Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; chaos its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way. And that’s much better than happiness.”

—Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life (Overture)

     In the yin-yang the white and black halves mirror each other in an image of perfect balance and harmony. In real life the picture is murkier and more complicated. Our striving for order in a world tending forever towards entropy is nothing less than the struggle for survival itself; the relations of the sexes can get so fraught, at times, that they have been likened to a battle; and there is a reason why black is associated in the collective human imagination with menace and destruction. When night falls, you never know what evils might be lurking in the darkness. It is the vivifying rays of the sun that make things grow and thrive; the night touches us with the shadow of death.

     Black is not only the color of metropolitan decadence (there will never be “a new black”), it is the color of sorcery, of death-head uniforms, of the devil himself. But things are not so simple. Monks and priests go robed in black too, and shamanic healers, and judges. The night is a time of menace, but it is the bosom of the passions also, the natural time for dreams, for creative work, and for prayer and meditation. (The Buddha became enlightened between nightfall and daybreak, not at high noon.) So rich in power and grace are the hours of the night that to some it is they, not the daylight hours, that make life worth living.

     The dark things we all carry in our hearts, the emanations of the Shadow, must be checked and supervised, not allowed to run free and unguarded; but as Plato observed of the hydra (#73, #80), it is no use to chop off heads, or they will only grow back fiercer still (Republic IX, 589). Rather than trying to root out what threatens us from within, it is best to tame it with a friendly hand. As the theorists of the Shadow taught, it contains much that makes us human; it acts as a deeper spring of our vital energies, and we could not do without it (#108). In an earlier text (#38), I used an analogy from photography: the loveliest, most harmonious images too, not just scenes of mayhem and despond, require a well-set black-point. Its purpose is not to flood everything with darkness and choke off the lighter, brighter dimensions, but to bring the beauty to life by just the right touch of contrast. And this requires enough of that black which, left to stand alone and unopposed, would swallow up everything else. Even acknowledged poison, in the right doses, can be medicine, and vice versa.

     I can’t imagine that anyone who has followed my Odyssey here so far, or any representative portion of it, could be in any doubt as to where I stand in the perennial showdown between light and darkness, or order and anarchy. So far as I can remember, I was never tempted, either as a kid or even as an adolescence, by the mercenary heroics of Han Solo or the dark fascination of Darth Vader. (Granted, I may not, in my innocence, have understood them well enough to be intrigued. Obi-Wan Kenobi and Yoda too went straight over my head.) However narrow and inadequate my reasons, I knew where I stood, and what’s more, I could see little room for disagreement: Luke Skywalker was the good guy—what else was there to be said? It would have appalled me then to know that he might be considered something of a milksop—had I even known what that was. (I speak in strictly original Star Wars terms, from the perspective of 1980, The Empire Strikes Back. That was still real mythology, and deeply impressive for a child barely in school; the rest had none of the magic, at least not for me.)

     That I have not, in all-too many intervening years, fundamentally changed my position is perhaps most evident in #56 (Heaven and Hell), though I would hope that my orientation is equally visible elsewhere. What I will allow today, however, to the other side—not that of Evil, but of Chaos—is that there is, contrary to what I believed before, quite a bit more to be said. I am no closer to changing sides, or any more inclined to waver in my allegiances, but I am willing to make a concession that I would not have dreamt of before, namely that beside the necessary dominion of order, rules, salutary discipline, and reason, there is something else (at the edge of chaos, yet complementary to order) that does not negate or devalue these human conceptions and contrivances, but puts them in perspective. Certainly we must do what we can to keep Chaos at bay, and I still admire Golo Mann’s tribute to Schiller, in which writing with reason and beauty is described in terms of “banishing the dragon of chaos for a while” (see #20, #80, and the original preface to the print edition of my early texts, My Beggar’s Buddhism). At the same time, just as a good game requires a good opponent, and a good battle a good enemy, so Chaos has a vital role to play even in a human realm that must remain committed to upholding order if it does not wish to perish.

     Readers to whom this turn comes as a surprise might discover some earlier clues in my reflections on the Gambler, the Joker, and the Fool (#87 and #88), and in my recoiling in horror from Switzerland, of all places (a locale more in my mind than on the map, perhaps). As I did not flirt with the dark side in my Star Wars days, so I was never partial to playing with matches or throwing batteries into fire—but the land of the Emmenthal, I must admit, brings out the sophomoric delinquent in me, though I would add by way of mitigation that I am very fond of their meltable cheeses, of Bircher muesli, and of the celebrated Emmi yogurt. (Nor would I decline a donation or surprise legacy just because it happened to be denominated in Swiss francs, for all my reservations about the idolatrous devotions inspired by this magnetic rock of a currency.)

     There is something fascinating me, lately, about the Taoists. I couldn’t put it into words very adequately, and they would not want me to, presumably; but so far as my limited understanding goes, I would say that it has something to do with the unforced but profound sense of balance and natural harmony that seems so characteristic of their Way. Not that I would draw a very firm line between the outlook of the Taoists and that of the Buddhists. I read with interest Alan Watts’ argument that Zen is really not Buddhism alone, but a fusion of the two traditions; whether that is quite right or not, I would intuitively expect many seasoned followers of the Path to make no less natural practitioners of the Tao. That said, and with all due respect and affection for my brothers and sisters on the Path, I would hesitate to say that a particularly fine sense of balance is always the most conspicuous feature of their practice insofar as it communicates itself to others.

     Perhaps what is so impressive to me, even as an idea, is just what Peterson describes in the epigraph, the deep sense of harmony between opposites, the comfort in the discomfort, the sure-footed line the Taoist is able to trace right at the edge of Chaos. I am not thinking of any one Taoist in particular, and I couldn’t say whether Peterson himself qualifies, but I certainly see him as an accomplished walker on the high wire, ever so close to the abyss, much of the time, and yet holding up and holding on, missteps or not. One would be foolish to presume, from the outside, that one could judge just how close someone is getting to his own unique edge; but by my own intuitions about what Peterson is doing when he climbs up on his wire yet again, he does not seem to be giving himself much of a safety margin. Not that I would expect him to fall; he is too expert an acrobat. Still I find myself holding my breath, almost, when I watch him, because he seems to be keeping things together only so very barely, though no less surely for it. (“You made danger your calling,” says Nietzsche’s Zarathustra to the fallen tightrope walker: “For that I will bury you with my own hands.” He did not say: all hail the chief of the wire-walkers, for he has been gawked at by millions.)*

     The Tao, they say, can be talked about, but only in a circumspect way, like a finger pointing at the moon. The true Tao is beyond words, and those who understand it will not speak, or they would cast doubt on their own words. I need not be so coy, as I would never claim to understand the Tao except, perhaps, insofar as it is about being able to see things effortlessly in their true proportions and their natural relations, and to calibrate one’s thoughts and actions accordingly, with a relaxed ease even under pressure and in the face of adverse circumstance. An extraordinary quality to possess, I would say, and no less so for appearing ordinary at the same time. All this is captured beautifully by the Taoists, even if it marks universal territory that surely cannot be reserved to any one human tradition exclusively.

     How to become more like these admirable human beings is less clear to me. The classic accounts, such as the Tao Te Ching first and foremost, read like inspirational poems to me, edifying celebrations of an ideal, not nitty-gritty road maps for finding one’s way there. For my day-to-day guidance on the journey, I find Epictetus’s manual of more practical use, and the vast library of detailed maps and canonical guide books in which the Buddhists lay out the topography of the Path nearly step by step. As a stumbling pilgrim, I trust to the handiness and reliability of my Buddhist compass, and I have full faith in the team of engineers who devised it. But oh, to be a Taoist master—that would really be something!

     I guess we cannot all hope to be Jedis. Sigh. Not Yodas (I hear you now, Master, though I’m still not sure I understand you!), nor Luke Skywalkers who make the grade at last—but destined, most of us, to remain milksops all our lives. The hero may have a thousand faces, but few of us will find our own among them, sad to say. It is not what I see in the mirror, that’s for sure. Such is life. So be it.

     (For Vieslav.)

*How a daredevil like Philippe Petit could have so much as contemplated undertaking his famous stunt is a mystery to me. The mere thought of stepping out into the void as he did, with nothing but sky above and below, overwhelms me with vertigo and primordial terror. But step out he did, into the very clouds, with evident relish, and not only lived to tell the tale, but survived the dragon whose back he had ridden.