Frugality
Daoists are not opposed to nice things, but they would argue that most come with some sort of cost. And it is important to be aware of that cost in advance to avoid paying too high a price. What this means is that the frugal man has fewer entanglements that limit his freedom. For example, someone who is living pay-cheque to pay-cheque is less likely to quit his job when his boss starts to pressure him to do something immoral. Similarly, he will have less money to offer to charity or a friend in need. Being “wide reaching” means thinking about more than the day-to-day grind. Being over-committed narrows that focus.
And being “frugal” isn't just about money. Time can also be something that we “over commit”. The conflict between family time and career has become such a commonly recognized problem that there is a bureaucratic title for the issue: “work/life balance”. Books have been written and consultants are hired to give seminars. The person who has developed a career that is too time intensive will find that she no longer has the freedom to love her partner, be a parent, or, have any real friends.
Just as importantly, she will also find that she no longer has time to be open to new ideas and spontaneous in her actions. Over-committed women do not read books on subjects they know nothing about. Nor do they meet people who live totally outside her class, family, or professional orbit. This means that she effectively stops learning. Again, there is a bureaucratic name for this phenomenon: living in a “silo”.
Think about the problem from the viewpoint of computer science. The power of a computer resides in its “RAM”. This is an acronym that stands for “Randomly Accessible Memory”. A computer with a lot of RAM is able to access and connect bits of information from a lot of different sources at the same time. In the same way, a person who has “wide ranging” interests and knowledge about society can make connections and see patterns that do not appear to people who specialize on what is important to their profession to the exclusion of all else. This is why “silo” thinking is a problem for large institutions. To give one example, if all the senior executives at your telephone company are focused on improving the ability of the existing system to provide long distance phone calls, they might not realize that there are new start up companies that are developing Voice Over Internet Phone (VOIP) technology (e.g. Skype) that completely bypasses the phone company's long distance billing system. They may also not notice an entire emerging generation of people who would rather type out chat messages than make voice-based phone calls.
Beyond the issue of money and time, there is another one: “loyalty”. People build their lives around allegiances to specific notions or ideals. These can include various concepts like “the Law”, “Free Enterprise”, “a Good Job”, “the Church”, “the Party”, and so on. There's the stock image of the failed party official or general who “takes the easy way out” by blowing his brains out with a revolver. We also have an iconic image of failed investors jumping to their death after a stock market plunge has “wiped them out”. Below the level of suicide, we have individuals who are so emotionally invested in an institution that they progressively find themselves committing greater and greater moral outrages in order to prop it up. One example of this is the Catholic Church's desperate attempts to protect pedophile clergy.
People who have signed-up to institutions that require this depth of commitment often pay a steep price for being “wide ranging” in their viewpoint. Chelsea Manning was sent to prison because she felt that people needed to see what sort of horrible outrages were being committed by the US military in Iraq. Edward Snowden is an exile in Russia because he felt that the citizens of the world needed to know how comprehensively intelligence agencies were spying on them. And, Julian Assange spent years as a prisoner in the Ecuadorian embassy because he created the institution, Wikileaks, that allowed both Manning and Snowden to expose their information to the wider world. Whistle blowers are prime examples of people who have not been frugal in swearing personal allegiance and paid a big price for being “wide ranging”. (It might be, however, that they pay less of a price than those who simply “go along” with the institutions they serve and as a result destroy their innate sense of right and wrong. There are worse places to be than prison.)
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Beyond these obvious issues, Ellen Chen's commentary on this section of the Tao Te Ching talks of resonances in the original ancient Chinese of the word that we translate as “frugality”: “Chien is organically connected with p'u, the original state of nature as the uncarved wood. Chien stands for the economy of nature that does not waste anything.”
This is somewhat similar to the relationship between the words “economy” and “ecology”. They are joined together by the “eco” which comes from the Greek word “oikos”, or “household”. “Eco” about where we live. And the “logy” comes from “logos”, or the various ways we try to articulate or understand a specific aspect of life. In this sense “oikos” plus “logos” means “understanding where we live”. The “nomy” of “economy” comes from the word “nemein”, or “to distribute”. So “oikos” plus “nemein” means “distributing what our home has”. For the Daoist what we call “frugality” doesn't just entail the money we save in our bank account, but also how lightly we walk upon the earth. And this doesn't mean “doing without”, so much as being integrated into the economy of nature where nothing is wasted and everything is recycled.
Because the Daoist has worked his way into the warp and weave of his surroundings, he is able to do things that would be impossible if he were wasting resources battling with his environs. The joke that says “When you are up to ass in alligators it is hard to remember that you are here to drain a swamp” makes no sense to a Daoist. This is because in most cases he wouldn't see why the swamp should be drained in the first place. And if he did have to do something about it, he probably would find some way of doing so that wouldn't entail causing problems for the large reptiles.
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Yet another way to think about this is to consider frugality in terms of “economy of design”. Consider the 19th century American sect called the “Shakers”. They had an aesthetic that was based on the simplicity and frugality that is very much in keeping with Daoist principles. Aaron Copeland made one of their hymns famous by putting it in his score for Martha Graham's ballet “Appalachian Spring”. The lyrics could have come from a Daoist text:
'Tis the gift to be simple, 'tis the gift to be free
'Tis the gift to come down where we ought to be,
And when we find ourselves in the place just right,
'Twill be in the valley of love and delight.
When true simplicity is gained,
To bow and to bend we shan't be ashamed,
To turn, turn will be our delight,
Till by turning, turning we come 'round right.
The Shakers were also famous for their furniture, which was based on a lack of ornamentation plus utilitarian design. One of their ideas, for example, was to design chairs that could easily be hung on the wall when not in use, which allowed a room to be “re-purposed” for another task, such as dancing. (The Shakers were big into dancing, hence the “turn, turn” and “turning, turning”---which are dance instructions in the above lyrics.)
I'm belabouring the issue of frugality because our society seems to have lost the ability to incorporate economy into design. Instead of cooling our homes by having windows that open and catch a breeze or using shade to avoid the hot sun, we build expensive air conditioning systems that eat huge amounts of electricity. And instead of designing cities in ways that encourage people to use transit, bicycle, or walk to work---planners create sprawling subdivisions where every adult has to own their own automobile. We also create needlessly complex systems of governance that necessitate the creation of armies of non-productive “experts” who consume society's resources---lawyers, managers, prison guards, social workers, tax accountants, bureaucrats, etc. Economists have a phrase to identify this sort of “anti-frugal” design: “enforced scarcity”. That is, the creation of an environment so profoundly inefficient that people are forced to make an artificially high income in order to simply survive. This is why even though we are the richest society the world has ever seen yet, we still have beggars on the street and the government says it cannot afford to deal with them or any other major social problem.
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