Meditation on the Yuzui
The Yuzui (Fish Mouth) is the beginning of Chengdu's famous Dujiangyan irrigation system. The system, I believe, is the oldest operating built device in world history. At nearly 2,300 years of age, system has an incredible (supposedly perfect) record of preventing regional floods, and even today is still in use for delivering water to the city's 18 million residents. If you ever want to hear the sound of 18 million thirsts quenched, stand at the bridges that go over the main path of the water.
The Yuzui itself is very difficult to photograph, you have to make the hike up the island that forms the leading edge of the Dujiangyan, until you reach the Yuzui and stand and look around. As you approach, you will see water flowing over an array of wedges and ramps, and at one point going around a small circular lake with a dam on one side, the lake acting as a "settling tank" for dirt and small rocks to settle. The lake's dam is, historically, the only moving part. The principle of the system is simple: the Yuzui wedge sits on a bend in the river, and changing levels changes the relative distribution of water on either side of the wedge. The ramps and channels downstream act as level controls, and with occasional dredging the behavior of the water is extremely predictable.
When I reached that point I started thinking about the system and what I had learned about its history. What makes the system legendary is not only the fact that it is the oldest operating device ever, or its multi-millenium track record of preventing floods. It was first the fact that people who lived 2300 years ago, long before the invention of algebra or calculus or modern engineering, were able to think of and build a system that has proven useful, maintainable, and utterly necessary such that it has lasted through more than a dozen political systems. Further, that they had such an understanding of the local geography.
A thought about history
We are so often taught in schools that, in so many words, everyone who lived before 1968 was a superstitious moron who was barely able to survive. But in the 1800s the Great Darwin descended to create the Progressive movement, which would go on to beat the stupid peasants into a Great Society. Or something like that. The main message you got was that you shouldn't listen to your parents, grandparents, and definitely not read history - there was only superstition and racism back then.
But standing on the Yuzui, and indeed reading history, tells us a much different story. In the East and West, our ancient forefathers were building great physical, mechanical, and human systems, many of which are still in use today. We should pause and consider why, even though some of these systems continue to stand, all of the political systems that built and used them so quickly fall?
Indeed, it makes me think about my faith, and about how Christianity started, historically speaking, as a cult among some construction workers, fishermen, and petty tax collectors. And yet, with a couple of key institutions (the monastery and missions being two such institutions), the faith has lasted two millennia, spread to all inhabited continents, and founded the university system that much of the world relies on centuries after its inception.
The social stability brought about by the one husband/one wife family is something we're coming to appreciate now that it has been under attack for two centuries, and the cultural cost becomes unsustainably high. The Dujiangyan is built around the principle of "let water express its nature as water," in a way that has benefited all of Chengdu for millenia. The family, property, and religion may all work in a similar way, in which we recognize and accept people as people, and try to create an environment where humanity expresses itself in a way that does the most good possible.
Let Water Be Water
I was talking about the guide about the location of the system, and he motioned downriver. "Even if you built the system over there, the dam you would need would have to be so large that even today we would have trouble building it." then he started explaining to me about Daoist philosophy and how the Dujiangyan is built around the principle of recognizing that water is water, and that you must give the water the ability to express its nature as water. A conventional dam "fights" the nature of water, and like an army is difficult to build and maintain. But understanding the nature of water, and building around that nature, allows the water to do great things with very little cost or effort by those using it.
This led me to think about American history, and in particular the militant culture that worships the Civil War and WW2 as our shining moments in history. The culture permeates into many other areas of our thinking:
> All sickness is an "invasion" by disease, and you fight the disease with medicine.
> Insects and weeds "invade" your property, and so you fight them with chemical agents.
> Undesirable behaviors come from people who are a literal enemy, and as such we need a figurative or literal war that puts them in prison or in the grave.
> Environmental issues view all human beings as an enemy, and as such human activity must be restricted or eliminated.
In all of these, the idea is that every problem is to identify an enemy, which you then destroy or control with some kind of intervention. The idea is not completely bad (in rare cases you really do need something gone, now), but it is readily overused, and we cause collateral damage, or decivilization when we start looking at people or natural institutions as a kind of enemy.
The origin of this overuse, aside from the militant culture, is the excessive exuberance toward modern science. We can, for example, create a pill that makes you feel less sad, but using this to fight depression can also be a matter of attacking the symptom instead of the real issues. We can study advertising and behavior, but this does not mean that its a good idea for Facebook to use its algorithms to dictate reality (and we're seeing the "collateral damage" from Zuckerberg's War on Reality even now). In the same way that a dam can fail should it meet with too much water, I think that some of the present-day interventions into human behavior is creating the "dam break" of violence and division we're seeing at this time.
The Ecosystem View
If the "war" view is prone to over-intervention and unintended consequences, what do we do instead? How do we look at the world? Here, I think "let the water express itself as water" is a good idea:
> Some disease is coming from an unhealthy life, and therefore fixing the body's ability to heal itself, or removing the stress/mild-toxic food/environmental factor so that the body heals itself, will prove cheaper and more effective than medicating the immediate problem
> A house with an all-grass yard may be out of sync with the local environment, and dealing with any "problems" starts with studying the local environment and how to work within its behavior.
> Instead of trying to turn all people into the equivalent of the all-grass yard, we should accept that people will create cultures and institutions to meet particular needs. Further, instead of interventionism, we should study institutional development and change, so as to create peaceful institutional change
> Instead of seeing people and the larger environment as enemies, we should ask how we can be collaborators.
These are ideas I want to develop and flesh out in the Debt-Free Society group. In one essay these ideas have to be vague, but one thing the group is starting to look at already is the idea of human-environmental collaboration. Perhaps in 50 years we will not be talking about an environmental "crisis," but about the discovery of many more ways to replicate the idea of the Dujiangyan in many more place. And maybe in 50 generations someone's going to look back at what you discovered, and have his own Meditation on the Yuzui.