You are what you hate
Ursula K. LeGuin, Taoism, and the troubling way our enemies end up defining us.
In her classic gender-bending sci-fi book The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin makes a point about how our enemies can end up defining us:
“To oppose something is to maintain it… To be sure, if you turn your back on Mishnory and walk away from it, you are still on the Mishnory road. To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar. You must go somewhere else; you must have another goal; then you walk a different road.”
This idea has been rattling around my brain since 2015, when it felt like everyone I knew was engaged in fighting the brutalities of the Trump campaign and later his administration — fighting his anti-immigrant policies, fighting his appointments, fighting his racism, fighting his homophobia, fighting his neo-Nazi footsoldiers.
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Centrist liberals in the town I was living in at the time were somewhat in thrall to the old Michelle Obama credo, “When they go low, we go high,” and attempted to define themselves as “civil” in comparison to the “crass” MAGA chuds. At first, they took the low blows in stride, believing that it was decorum that would win them the day. But, as the old Scottish song goes, they took the high road, Trump took the low road, and he got into the White House before them.
Eventually, the high road became the road less traveled by. Because if you’re punched in the dick over and over again, you’re just not gonna keep your chill. After a few years of Trump, our local Democratic Party had begun to look very Trumpy. Our town’s Democratic Chair started spreading rumors about his opponents within the party, and no blow was too low: he slut-shamed, he body-shamed, he invented controversies out of whole cloth. The whole party fell into infighting and name calling and schisms. Lifelong friendships ended, jobs were lost, and a previously tight-knit community was rent asunder.
Defining what we are not
In their book The Dawn of Everything by Davids Wengrow and Graeber, the authors point out that most societies define themselves not only by what they believe they are, but what they believe they aren’t. Athenians prided themselves on reason and debate, their rivals in Sparta prided themselves on brute strength and proficiency in battle. The Victorian British prided themselves on sensibility and restraint, their rivals in France prided themselves on epicurean delights and sexual license. Capitalist America defined itself by its free commerce and its individualism, Soviet Russia defined itself with collectivism and unity under the party.
This practice extends back to tribal times, when you could often find rigidly hierarchical, patriarchal tribes living right next to egalitarian, communistic tribes. The tribes would be in direct competition with each other, and would define themselves as the opposite of the other tribe. Knowing who you are, it turns out, often means first understanding what you are not.
And it’s not just societies that do this — people do, too. Siblings often define themselves against each other (I am the rule-follower, she is the rebel), workers define themself in opposition to a coworker or a boss, “cool” students define themselves against “nerds,” “hipsters” define themselves against “poseurs,” etc. In his memoir Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen explains how he became best friends with his lifelong accompanying guitarist, “Little Stevie” Van Zandt, through bonding over what music was good and what music they both hated. Knowing what you aren’t can be a unifying and clarifying experience. It’s a good way to build out an identity, and it’s a good way to make friends.
It’s also incredibly useful as a weapon: American Republicans, for example, are excellent at defining the fights they want to have. They would rather engage with culture war bullshit (like is the Barbie movie too woke, is there a War on Christmas, etc.) than in the much harder-to-win fights of “should we let the entire planet burn,” “is it ethical for US bombs to be dropped on children,” “do the poors deserve affordable healthcare,” and so on. By having frivolous arguments about “wokeness” and “cancel culture,” they are able to keep the spotlight on their chosen fights rather than on the stuff they’d prefer the public not see.
Liberals, on the other hand, with their belief in the power of reasoned debate, are often fucking terrible at defining the terms of a fight, because they will write spirited theses on why the Barbie movie is actually a good thing instead of screaming “STOP TRYING TO DISTRACT FROM THE FACT THAT THE THREE HOTTEST DAYS IN HISTORY HAPPENED IN RAPID SUCCESSION IN EARLY JULY.”1
Know your enemy
Le Guin was a student of Taoism, and she infused the philosophy into many of her works, and her “to oppose something is to maintain it” is a very Taoist quote. The second chapter of the Tao Te Ching reads:
Under heaven all can see beauty as beauty only because there is ugliness.
All can know good as good only because there is evil.
Therefore having and not having arise together.
Difficult and easy complement each other.
Long and short contrast each other: High and low rest upon each other; Voice and sound harmonize each other; Front and back follow one another.
The symbol most affiliated with Taoism is the yin and the yang. The symbol — which at the very least you remember from your childhood Pog collection — shows two sides that complement and contain each other.
The implication is simple — you cannot have a conception of light without having the dark. Either concept would be meaningless without the other.
Now — what this does not mean is that you shouldn’t take sides in conflicts. It does not mean that good and evil are equivalent, and therefore everything is meaningless. It just means that you should know — the things you fight, the things you hate, these become a part of you. So you better be sure you’re fighting for the right things.
Alan Moore is another writer who plays around with Taoism, specifically in his classic comic The Saga of the Swamp Thing. My favorite panel in that book is when the main character, who is a giant vegetable, consults with the elder spirits of the world’s forests on how to defeat an evil force that threatens to consume the world. The forest spirits are unconcerned.
Note that this does not stop the aphid from eating the leaf, or the ladybug from eating the aphid. They still know who they are, they still hold their place in nature. It would be silly for the aphid to not try to protect itself. Like it or not, you are a part of nature, and there are things that would like to hurt you, and it is perfectly natural for you to fight against those things.
The question then, when you fight your battles, is: What are you? Are you spending a lot of time and energy fighting things which, in the large scale, are not things you want to fight? What is it you really think is worth fighting for, struggling against? Are you fighting Republicans, Capitalists, Misogynists, Homophobes?
All of these are forces worth fighting against, but be aware: a good chunk of who you are will be defined by who they are. And you don’t want your life to end up being defined by fights that just weren’t worth having.
I’m not letting myself off the hook, I totally use to engage in this stuff all the time until I realized my shouting at conservatives on Facebook didn’t stop Donald Trump from getting elected. The Left (radicals like the communists, socialists, and anarchists, as opposed to liberals) is much better at defining the terms of the debate, but because of the diversity of that coalition, it is often prone to devolving into internal bickering and schisms.