https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/09644016.2024.2330296

The Dao of Civilization: A Letter to China: by Freya Mathews, London, New York, Anthem Press, 2023, 1 + 101 pp., index, Amazon UK, £19.94 (Kindle), £20.99 (Paperback), ISBN: 9781839984853.

Yue Zhou Lin

University of Bristol

At the UN’s COP26–28, path dependency prevails. China, as the largest carbon emitter, is an easy target. Yet, lashing out at China risks violating the solidarity (COP27) principle and weaponising climate change. A more candid critique is found in Freya Mathews’ work, The Dao of Civilization: A Letter to China (2023), which consists of Part I, Mathews’ letter to President Xi Jinping, Part II, a series of lectures delivered in July 2019 for the Sino-British Summer School of Philosophy, and an epilogue. Mathews dovetails the First Nations (Australia) Law of the Living Cosmos (Aboriginal Law) with indigenous Daoism in China, drawing on Yi Jing, Dao De Jing, and Zhuangzi, the three mother texts of Daoism, as well as her experience in interlocution amongst Chinese locals, international colleagues, and fellow Australians.

Mathews problematises the dualism between humans (mind) and nature (matter). Anthropocentrism found in Descartes’ famous expression cogito ergo sum creates the image of a ‘scientific’, ‘detached’ observer, removing cognitive ability from nature and placing humans above nature. It also renders a dissective tendency found prominent in Greek philosophers (theorists), who seek the truth but end up mistaking atomist worldviews as truths of the actual ecological-relational worldview. In contrast, the Chinese sages (strategists) seek congruence with nature’s tendencies already at work (Jullien and Lloyd 2002). Indeed, knowledge (rationality) and emotions/feelings are inseparable in the teachings of Daoism and the Aboriginal Law. Therefore, Mathews argues for a holistic view of nature, drawing upon Spinoza’s notion of conativity. That relies on communicativity – differentiated (non-)beings within the living cosmos mutually engaging and engaging with the cosmos itself by the least resistance principle (p. 34–37). All this resonates with Dao or Way, which is energy, Qi (rather than a God-like creator) that conforms to Li, the universe’s inherent order. Only through the self-feeling of Qi or Liyan in Kimberley’s Aboriginal Law can we cultivate intimacy with nature and acquire knowledge. Qi follows yin and yang, the two symbiotic polarities whose respective conativity grows through their synergy (p. 54–60). Qi fuels all evolutionary lives in the Daoist principle of One and Many, expressed in Chapter 42 of Dao De Jing: ‘Out of Dao, One is born; Out of One, Two; Out of Two, Three; Out of Three, the created universe’ (Lin 2012, p. 577). Realising Dao involves practising Wuwei, which seemingly suggests ‘actionless’ because Wu denotes non-, and Wei is ‘action’. However, as Chapter 37 of Dao De Jing states, ‘Dao always remains inactive, yet it acts upon everything in the world’ (Gu 2008). Practising Wuwei does not mean laissez-faire but going with nature’s flow, neither ‘prescriptive’ nor ‘carefree’. As Bruce Lee said, ‘Running water never grows stale’. Likewise, Wuwei appears in the symbiotic relationship between ecological landscapers like bettongs (Rat Kangaroos) and the woodland ecosystem (p. 53).

Daoists offer few specific solutions to real-life issues. Yet, Mathews translates Daoists’ reclusive practices into mass strategic orientations conducive to seven billion people, joining ‘new Daoists’ in interpreting ‘old Daoists’ ideas within our hermeneutical contexts (Nelson 2020, p. 6). For instance, regenerative approaches in agriculture devolve the global network of politically centralised and extractive mass production economies into small, low-impact economies embedded in bioregionalcommunities (p. 67–68), build intimate relationships with local ecosystems, and restore Indigenous consciousness. Besides, Mathews calls for large-scale alternatives that synergise with local geological settings, including ecosystem engineering (biosynergy) that rehydrates desiccated soils, boosts revegetation, sequesters carbon to increase soil fertility, and restores the hydrological cycle of the globe (p. 72). In 256 BC, Li Bing, the Daoist governor, built the Dujiangyan irrigation system on the Min River in Sichuan, China, which was very effective in protecting the local people from flooding. The two-thousand-year-old Dujiangyan, unlike the modern Three Gorges Dam, never destroyed the river’s eco-life because it used stone-filled bamboo baskets to hold channels in place, distributing water across the plain that became China’s richest agricultural area. Our manufacturing economy can somewhat consider biosynergic approaches to enrich and enlarge ecosystems that realise conativities and energies already at play and foster Wuwei (psychophysical) sensibilities (p. 80–82). To rejuvenate China as a civilisation then, Mathews envisions an eco-Daoist path to self-actualisation, rejecting either ‘wolfish posture’ or ‘calculative soft power’ as viable orientations.

Nevertheless, Mathews may also be seen as dichotomising the Daoist Way/Aboriginal Law and Western Science based on Jullien’s binary between the Greek theorists and the Chinese strategists. Yet without theorisation, China’s hundred schools of thought (zhuzi baijia) would not have flourished. The word jia means house or family, and on this occasion, school or philosophy. Furthermore, the dissective tendency is not exclusively Western. Daoists observed the human body from within, especially Qicirculation, veins, pressure points, and organs. Some Daoists of later generations missed the forest for the trees as they became obsessed with alchemy and the ‘potion for longevity’, wrestling with the lifespan nature had assigned to them. To Mathew, reflexive awareness can confer a capacity to deviate from instinctual patterns of synergy (p. 36). However, we need not abandon reflexivity if it can help internalise the feeling of synergy and realise Dao. In sum, Daoists may read many writings as one book; typical grammarians may dissect writings into clauses, words, and punctuation marks. Great minds think alike and unlike.

Mathews challenges scientism, capitalism, and colonialism by bringing us to the over 50,000-year-old wisdom of Australia’s aboriginal peoples, labelled ‘savages’ by European colonisers 200 years ago. Mathews encourages environmental politics scholars, students, and ‘decolonisers’ to elevate aboriginality and Daoism as prescriptions (p. 43). Facing a global socio-ecological crisis, Mathews offers us food for thought of building global solidarity through her articulation of the interconnections between Australia’s Aboriginal Law and China’s Indigenous Daoism.