Taoist Climate Change on Halloween

In the midst of the intensification of the very polarized and thus divisive U.S. presidential campaign “season” (i.e., year) during its last week, Halloween of 2024 occurred in Boston, Massachusetts not only without the need of trick-or-treaters and their parents to wear winter coats, but also with the option of wearing shorts and short-sleeve shirts without even having to wear a light jacket. That this was so as late as 8pm was nothing short of surreal not only to New Englanders, but also to any transplants from the northern-tier Midwestern and Plains states.  It being around 70F degrees well into the dark hours was nothing short of unprecedented, and so much so that the negative impact of the cold climate in detracting from the holiday in prior years could finally be grasped. I had realized this more than a decade earlier when I was in Miami during Halloween. There is indeed a silver lining to global warming for people living in places that are cold during the late fall, winter, and early spring seasons, even as contrary to political correctness it is to admit this even to friends. The proclivity of the human mind/brain to divide up the world in terms of dichotomies of mutually-exclusive, antagonistic poles does not necessarily fit with empirically with the real world. Taoism speaks to this.

  A man wearing shorts and a woman with bare shoulders (left); costumes not covered by coats (right)

Themes in The Dao De Jing include appearance versus reality, and order versus disorder. Maya, which means illusion, is in appearances but not reality. Both order and disorder are in appearance, and perhaps in reality as well. At the very least, Newtonian physics and quantum physics taken together provide good evidence that instances of both order and disorder exist in nature. This is without doubt in human society too. A political system can be stable for a period of time then suddenly, in the midst of revolutionary fervor, become disordered. Times of peace are more orderly than are times of war. Nevertheless, it is important not to overdo the starkness of these dichotomies. There is order even during war, and instability even in times of peace. In terms of the American political polarity being projected onto the member-states, President Obama reminded Americans that people drive pick-up trucks in “blue” (i.e., liberal) states and there are gays in the “red” (i.e, conservative) states.  There is some red in the blue and some blue in the red. Not that both colors mix or “bleed” into each other; rather, some of the other color can be drawn in as an island of sorts in a state colored red or blue. This has been visualized as the Ying and Yang of Taoism.

The Ying and Yang were originally meant a theoretical constructs used to explain change in nature. Literally, shade on the northern side of a hill can become directly lit by the Sun, and the sun-lit southern side can turn to shade—both as the Sun moves with respect to the hill. In Boston, that might be Bunker Hill. Dong Zhongshu (179-104 BCE) in China misinterpreted Ying and Yang to apply mostly to humans, as for example in terms of gender and hierarchy. The point of Ying and Yang was originally that difference forces in nature interact and can change into each other, whereas Confucianism has emphasized hierarchy and human control over other humans. We distinguish weak and strong, but in actuality things are always changing, and here we can see the imprint of Buddhism on Taoism. It is a trap, according to Taoist teachings, to divide things into polar opposites and value one pole over the other. Going to extremes doesn’t work in the long run. A weapon that is too hard will break; a tree that is too strong will crack; the strong and mighty may reside down below and the soft and supple may reside on top. The moral power, or De, of the way of nature (or the natural way), Dao, is not in favor of the artificial, absolutist dichotomies that we construct in making distinctions in the world.

Our assumption that the good and bad cannot touch falls prey to the point that some aspects of a good thing may be bad, and that some aspects of a bad thing, such as climate change, may be good. A Taoist would tell us that we should not feel morally ashamed in admitting this to ourselves and others. It is ok to celebrate being out on a warm night on Halloween in Boston or Chicago, for instance. In the case of Boston in 2024, at an informal street festival, a woman wore a cape as part of her costume. She was part of an informal marching band. Written on her cape was “Climate Mom.” I submit that “Climate Grandmother” might have been more fitting, as, at the very least, it would have suggested that record carbon emissions from human sources in the prior year would be “paid for” especially by the kids at the festival. Even in their case, the prospect that more of their Halloweens will likely not be hindered by having to wear a winter coat over a costume, and cut short, or compromised, by the physiological urgency of getting back inside somewhere to warm up, can be admitted to be a plus. Every Halloween of my youth in the northern Midwest meant that a winter coat had to cover whatever costume I wanted to show off while “trick-or-treating” outside.

That the Climate Mom was allowing herself to dance even as kids were too during a street-fest in Boston in 2024 suggests that even the dichotomy between the concerned grandmother and the care-free kids who would not have to wait many decades before they feel more of the bad effects of climate change can be relativized in a common spirit of enjoying the experience of being alive. The musicians playing in the crowd of revelers were caught up in the surreal experience of playing and dancing on a warm Halloween night in Massachusetts, which is north of New York City and just south of Maine.

Similarly, as the U.S. presidential campaign was really getting heated in the rhetoric being tossed around that week, a Trump supporter could admit to agreeing with something that Harris said, and a Harris supporter could admit to agreeing with one of Trump’s policy-suggestions. This bit of blue amid red and bit of red amid blue was almost unheard of in 2024, as partisans perhaps more than in any other presidential campaign season since World War II painted the opposing candidate as the incarnation of evil itself. In actuality, both Harris and Trump, like the rest of us, were still human beings and thus imperfect, again, like the rest of us. None of us are saviors or Satan, so it is important to distinguish ourselves and the world in which we live from the mythic language used in religion. Imagine if you will, people so glad that Halloween was on such a nice evening that a spirit of joyful dancing in a street could even include Harris and Trump, with everyone even at close contact, without thieves or police, simply relishing the experience of the senses in being alive without personal sorrows, politics, climate change, or foreign wars obstructing, for however briefly. Even the Climate Mom was dancing on a night in which it was clear to everyone that climate change was part of the cause of the comfortable temperature.

Inconvenient Truths

When I was a student, I sat in on a course on German films during World War II. The instructor was an 80 year-old German man whose parents had been forced into sending him to a Hitler Youth camp. I asked him once whether he had seen Hitler in person, and, if so, did he look like how the documentaries have him pictured. Having the respect for knowledge that should be expected from a scholar, he told me that he had indeed seen Hitler in person. The brutal Nazi dictator was authentically smiling during his visit to the Hitler youth.  I was surprised, as I had been brought up with the image of the grizzled grins and terse glares.  To be sure, the victor’s history fits the horrendous crimes committed, but at the cost of objectivity, which any historian should value. The subjective historical portrayal and the German professor’s honest answer led me to wonder what Hitler was really like as a person. Given the atrocities committed by the Nazis, we can expect that history being written by the victors proffers a corresponding warping rather than objective historical reporting. What we in the twenty-first century glimpse of Nazi Germany has undoubtedly been warped akin to how the fabric of space-time is bent by the gravity of an object having a large mass in space. 

About a decade after my conversations with the German professor, I met a 92 year-old American veteran of World War II.  Did the American people know of the holocaust? I asked. Only after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, he answered. Before the U.S. went to war, the European war was something far away. When the U.S. was at war in Europe and Asia, Jewish leaders in Europe asked President Roosevelt to bomb the train tracks that were carrying the cattle-cars to the ovens. Roosevelt, the veteran said, told the Jews that he didn’t have time for that. “Wow, that’s a story!” I said in astonishment. One of the veteran’s daughters asked him how he knew this. “It was common knowledge at the time,” he replied. I had not even known that the American public knew of the gas chambers before the liberation of the camps. Even if Roosevelt wanted to be focused on military objectives because achieving them would mean winning the war, that he felt he didn’t have time to thwart the Nazis from transporting human beings to ovens astonishes me. I asked the veteran if the very language, cattle-cars to ovens applied to human beings shocked Americans during the war. He replied that “surprised” is not the right word for it. He did not characterize how he and other Americans had taken the news, which I found interesting.

Clearly, history leaves important things out, and perhaps even covers them up. Those pesky inconvenient truths are all too easily relegated to see the light of day; someone who happens upon them may display the jewels, but by that time, the knit story is so engrained that the little gems may hardly register. So what if Hitler was happy at times; what he did to his own people was much more important for us to know. So what if Roosevelt didn’t want to get involved in Germany’s internal affairs; he won the war. I think history is generally gray rather than black and white.

A day before I spoke with the veteran, I met a retired librarian who was still working on gay history. Could such a history be written and viewed objectively? I wondered.  He told me of the huge police presence in the weekend’s Phoenix Gay Pride festival and remarked that police in Tucson had physically attacked protesters outside a Trump rally during the campaign. I replied that I had been in the venue, where I saw Donald Trump looking on as a muscular military man was stomping on a protester being led up the aisle by one of Trump’s hired security men. I had wondered why people at the rally were so emotionally angry at “the protesters,” as if they all stood for one thing. Anger at people without any personal contact (the protesters were outside) had stunned me at the time. I leaned over to two undecided women seated to my right, and observed, “This feels like what a Nazi rally must have been like, with people angry at the Jews.” The two women agreed. Then we witnessed the stomping and Trump saying to the protester, “You’re disgusting” over and over as she was being stomped. Then it really felt like a Nazi rally. To the gay historian, I said, “The Germans had been mad at the Jews for a reason; Trump’s supporters at the rally had shotgun anger at an amorphous group of protesters. The Germans were annoyed because the Jews did not consider themselves Germans and thus many rich Jews held back in giving to German causes during the hard times when Germany was paying war reparations from World War I.” The gay “historian” quickly looked at his phone and discovered he had somewhere else to be. So much for objective history. I did stress that the Nazis took the resentment way too far, and that I had no idea whether the wealth Jews in Germany in the 1920's really did constrict giving out of a belief that they were not Germans and therefore had no obligation to help them in hard economic times, but the “damage” was apparently done. I should add that I have no reason to doubt the veracity of the German professor. Unlike the historian of famous gay men, the professor was open to inconvenient truths, for he acknowledged a friendly Hitler many decades after having been forced to go to Hitler Youth. I doubt either the protesters or the Trump supporters at the Tucson rally would tolerate inconvenient truths.

Perhaps as the West has secularized, the belief that truth can be (or is) partial has gained credibility. By implication, inconvenient truth can be regarded as heretical and thus rightly intolerable. To be sure, Christian sects in the West have historically gone to war over contending partisan (i.e., partial) truths even though such things can be regarded as inherently oxymoronic. In this essay, I have probably written something for everyone in the sense that everyone can probably find some statement to be offensive or even provocative. In a world that has outlawed inconvenient truths, I would expect no less. Am I for Hitler just because I report here that he could be happy and even friendly? Am I anti-Semitic because I report that they may have limited their charitable giving to other Jews living in Germany during hard times? Am I a gay-basher because I am critical of the gay historian’s lack of tolerance for the inconvenient truth? Am I against Democrats because I include the veteran’s report of Franklin Roosevelt’s refusal to help the European Jews under German control? Am I against Trump and all his policies because I report having witnessed his enabling of violence at a rally? Such assumptions evince a lack of education, given the over-use of reason involved in taking the assumptions to be facts. Just because someone reports something does not in itself mean he or she ideologically believes in the content. For instance, that Hitler was happy visiting the kids in Hitler Youth does not mean I believe in him, his conduct, or his ideology. 

Rather, I believe that history is inadequate where inconvenient facts are omitted for ideological purposes. Admitting inconvenient truths into the history may be assumed to stem exclusively from valuing knowledge, but I think toleration must also be valued. Indeed, that truth goes beyond partiality and convenience must be held as an assumption. I am for inconvenient truths as a matter of principle as well as scholarship.