Straw Dogs: You're Not Special

In a recent Reddit discussion, I came across someone who claimed that East Asians perceive the gods as cruel, and therefore East Asians don't pray to them. Most of the people in the thread were understandably perplexed at this person's assertion. But having studied Taoism, I think he may have been referring to Chapter 5 of the Tao Te Ching, which opens by telling us that heaven and earth treat all things as "straw dogs" — which is to say sacrificial objects. In ancient China, dogs made of straw were built for a specific ritual purpose, lit on fire, and cast aside when the ritual was complete.

I guess you could take that to mean that the gods are cruel. Certain interpretations of the Tao Te Ching certainly don't help: "Heaven and earth are not benevolent," reads one translation. "Heaven and earth are ruthless," reads another. 

The problem here is that it's hard to narrow in on the specific meaning of ancient Chinese, especially in a poetic text like the Tao Te Ching that's ripe with mystical overtones. But my gut tells me that we're not supposed to think that the universe is hostile, any more than we're supposed to think that it's benevolent. The universe just is. Nature just is. When a tornado rips through a community and uproots trees, levels homes, and leaves death and destruction in its wake, nature isn't being mean. It's just doing what nature does. Some will be quick to attribute the storm to some kind of karmic response, others to God's wrath. But what if it's just a storm? Likewise when a child develops a terminal illness: We can twist ourselves in knots wondering why a loving God would allow an innocent person to suffer, or we might surmise that the gods — if they even exist — just don't care.

I think that's what Taoism attempts to teach us. If "shit happens" ever summed up a religious/spiritual philosophy, it's Taoism. Maybe gods exist; maybe they don't. Either way, if we take our emotions and desires out of it, we can find no tangible evidence that, if deities do exist, they don't really seem to care about us one way or another. We're straw dogs. We're born, we live, we die. That's our only discernible purpose. It's only our egos that persuade us to think that we humans hold some special, privileged place in the universe. That we're made in the image of God, and that God is love. Nice sentiment, but entirely unprovable outside of philosophical abstractions.       

Nor should we have any reason to think we could ever bend the gods to our will. Prayers and offerings to the gods are ultimately for us, to bring us closer through reverent ritual actions to the ideals that the gods represent. We can imitate their characteristics as recorded in scripture and lore, but they can't be bribed to get us the job, or let us win the lottery, or heal little Jimmy. The gods aren't that weak, and we're not that powerful. They don't need us. And, again, this is assuming they even exist.

I'm not trying to make an argument for atheism, if that's what it sounds like. I happen to think there is some kind of creative force out there, and I think quantum mechanics might hint at what it looks like, if we entertain the admittedly far-out idea that consciousness is a building block of the universe — which points toward concepts of divinity that look more like Brahman, or Neoplatonism's One, or, indeed, the Tao itself, than anything that has to do with an old man on a cloud judging us by an arbitrary book of rules. 

I also believe a spirit world exists, even if I can't pretend to know much about it. And I admit that the idea of karma and rebirth makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of things, at least as a belief in my mind. But that's all it is: an unsubstantiated belief.

The point I'm trying to make is a very simple one: We're not special. 

Being humans, we have the capacity to fill our lives with meaning and purpose, build relationships with other people, pursue our hobbies and interests, and try to leave behind a positive influence. But we can easily confuse these things with the idea that our existence holds any inherent purpose beyond simply existing for 70 or 80 years. We're sentient beings on one tiny little planet in the vast ocean of space. That's it. Yet we devote an incredible amount of time and energy on this little speck of dust — this pale blue dot, as Carl Sagan so wonderfully put it — trying so desperately to be noticed and acclaimed, as if we're actually something more than the insignificant and transitory blobs of flesh and bone that we are. These days we go so far as to create false identities for ourselves, complete with their own accompanying garish little flags, in the hopes that by remaking ourselves in our own image, someone will notice and applaud our fragile egos for a few fleeting seconds. 

But none of that changes the reality that the overwhelming majority of us will be forgotten within a few short generations, a name on a headstone that a stranger might momentarily ponder while passing by in the cemetery, maybe wondering what the person lying in the ground under his feet was like, and then never thinking about it again. Even many of the once great and powerful will eventually be reduced to a footnote, like Shelley's Ozymandias. "Look on my works and despair," indeed.

There's a spoken-word poem on Chicago's third album whose second stanza goes as follows:

When all the great galactic systems
Sigh to a frozen halt in space,
Do you think there will be some remnant
Of the beauty of the human race?
Do you think there will be a vestige,
Or a sniffle, or a cosmic tear?
Do you think a greater thinking thing
Will give a damn that man was here?

That's us. The straw dogs. 

But that doesn't mean you should just roll over and give up. Do you have to be made in the image of God for your existence to mean something? Do you need to believe you go to heaven when you die for your earthly existence to have any value? Can you not provide your own meaning and value, independent of what else may or may not go on in the universe? 

Be the best straw dog you can be. And let that be enough.