Explanations

The Hand Of The Potter

I’d like to explain how and why I spent four decades writing this little book.

I grew up without a religion - not even atheism. I first learned this is unusual on my first day of school when, at morning tea, the teachers commanded silence and began speaking to someone I couldn’t see.

When I asked why they did that, they said invisible people take care of us if and only if we believe they do. Because, they said, a book the invisible people had written said so. And they showed me a copy of this book which was, reassuringly, visible.

I was disappointed at that part because, from what they’d said, I’d been thinking the clouds would part, skies darken, and stars would spell out the words of the book.

When I asked my father what he thought about this, he said a great many people agreed with my teachers and that they might be right. But that a great many other people think they’re fooling themselves. And that, in any case, questions are more important to bear in mind than answers.

My grandfather Max is thirteen, the youngest child of an Austrian noble house, on a train headed to a boarding school in Austria. He doesn’t know a war has broken out until the train arrives in Poland, where he’s shanghaied into the army.

A year passes. Max steals a cured sausage as tall as he is and heads out at night, staying off the roads. He comes to a bombed-out farmhouse and sleeps under straw with shells thudding in the distance.

He stays there several weeks, nibbling the sausage and drinking well water. When the snows come, however, wind blows through holes in the barn and Max has no warm clothes. Shivering, decides to head down the road, wherever it leads.

He comes to a border. Two guards in heavy coats sit by a fire. The boy in a Polish uniform makes a welcome diversion, and they play dice to see who gets the fun of shooting him.

Max presents the remaining three feet of cured sausage and, in perfect Hochdeutsch, explains he’s from the Geheime Feldpolizei - the German secret police - and has been sent to resupply them.

Slices of sausage sizzle in a pan as Max continues down the road. He feels a twinge between his shoulder blades fearing the border guards might still waste a bullet on him.

Max begs on the streets of Berlin until a grocer takes him in and lets him work for bed and board. One day the grocer’s daughter Cecile tips Max a wink, and he studies her religion until, a few years after, the two marry.

Germany prospers and the couple have a boy and a girl, but Max sees a second war coming. An old school friend introduces him to Von Ribbentrop, soon to become the Nazi Foreign Minister, from whom Max requests visas for his young family.

At this time Ribbentrop has jews clipping his lawns with their teeth, but the visas turn up in the mail along with a cordial note.

Max and his family board the first steamer they can find, which is bound for Australia, and learn English on the way. Being German refugees in a British colony presents its own hardships, and Cecile writes their German family about their struggles. Letters return assuring them it’s safe to bring the children back, and offering to pay their fares.

Then the return letters stop. There’s no one left to send them.

Max’s son Larry is ten. Outside their home, the bus-stop is a waist-high wooden obelisk painted a jaunty yellow and green, as they all are in Sydney then.

Larry teaches himself the trick of climbing and balancing on top of it. One morning, as he stands on top of it waiting for a bus to school, his three year old brother tries to climb up too. They both laugh as the little boy loses his footing and tumbles into the street. But then a taxi runs him over and kills him.

Max sees this through the front window of their home and chases Larry from room to room with an axe. Larry hides in storm water drains until he’s found by the police and sent to live in a rural foster home. He spends the next year in silence, with only books for company.

I’m twelve, sitting with my father in his library. Floor to ceiling shelves brace rows of leather-bound books. It’s framed by an ornate fireplace, mirrored mantle, Persian rugs, and Louis Quinze chairs. It’s raining softly outside, a winter afternoon, no one visiting, and I’m just old enough to understand Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat.

Inspired by the horrific death of his younger lover, Fitzgerald wrote the poem as a loose translation of an 11th century work of the same name by Omar Khayyam, the great Persian polymath. The light fades as Larry reads. Burning logs in the fireplace crack and pop, and his eyes tear and his voice catches in his throat. You can only read the Rubaiyat to your son for the first time once.

… but after Silence spake
A Vessel of a more ungainly Make:
“They sneer at me for leaning all awry;
What! did the Hand then of the Potter shake?”

I’m twenty one and it’s a warm spring morning. I pad softly down the hall in bare feet taking care not to wake my sleeping brother. It’s spring and Larry is laying in his bedroom dressed as if for a morning run. The glass medicine bottles next to the bed are empty. I want to believe he’s asleep, but when I touch his hand it’s cold.

People are questions with legs. Some of the questions may originate with you, while others have been making walking copies of themselves for millenia. I wrote this book to answer my father’s question. Fitzgerald’s question. Khayyam’s question. And Weber’s question.

Omar Khayyam revolutionized the philosophy, science and mathematics of the 11th century. His calendar was the most accurate on Earth for nine centuries. His mathematics weren’t rediscovered until Pascal, Descartes, Gauss, and Riemann. If it weren’t for the murder of his patrons by his classmate, Hasan I Sabbah, founder of the order of Assassins, the Enlightenment might have occurred five hundred years before it did, and the history of our civilzation would be very different.

Khayyam is best remembered for his book of poetic epigrams called the Rubaiyat. We don’t exactly know what he said in it because in later generations a cottage industry grew up around discovering “secret” versions with more and more verses. Some editions have thousands of them, though modern Persian scholars regard fewer than forty as reliably authentic. Among them stands the question Fitzgerald translated and my father asked.

We have all the technology and resources we need to make our world a garden, and have done since before Max got on his train. Whether you think of Khayyam’s potter as a god or a man doesn’t matter; we have harnessed the atom, landed on the moon, interconnected all global knowledge and commerce, and built machines that, appear to be becoming smarter than ourselves. We have all we need to live in peace, plenty and harmony with nature, but our civilization is strangled by the same poverty, war, and corruption that stopped the enlightenment of Khayyam’s Persia.

What, then - did the hand of the potter shake? On my father’s death I determined to answer that.

A Theory Of Bureaucracy

Every revolution evaporates to leave behind only the slime of a new bureaucracy. – Kafka per Janouch

Every organization contains those who care about its purpose, and those who don’t. And each evolves until it’s controlled by those who don’t. – Jerry Pournelle, The Iron Law Of Bureaucracy

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. –Goodhart per Strathern

The original theory of bureaucracy came from Fredrick Winslow Taylor’s “Scientific Management” and Max Weber’s “Economy and Society”. Taylor standardized industrial workflows while Weber idealized a hierarchy of roles and responsibilities. Weber, however, also recognized the Kafka/Pournelle/Goodhart aspects of the bureaucratic way of life. Fearing it matures into a “steel-hard shell” that cages its participants, he asked:

What can oppose this machinery to keep some portion of mankind free of it? – Max Weber, Verein für Sozialpolitik, 1909

Taylor and Weber were the architects of the machines that pursued Max Merel from war to war, country to country, and family to family. It is conventional to say that war, politics, and corruption are illnesses generated from innate human foibles, or that they’re born in the hearts of opportunistic sociopaths preying on these foibles. But Weber’s question suggests another possibility - that they come from the design of our organizations, and may be remedied by changing that design.

The defining trait of sociopathy is lack of empathy. About one in twenty humans test positively as sociopaths but fully two thirds of humans, per Stanley Milgram’s infamous experiment on obedience, are willing to implement the commands of a sociopath.

Milgram recruited ordinary students and commuters, offering them a small payment to assist in a “memory experiment” where a man in a white coat with a clipboard instructed them give “harmless electrical shocks” to an “experimental subject” in another room - who was actually a tape recording. The real subject of the experiment was the assistant.

The man in the white coat required a shock to be given whenever the “subject” failed to repeat a list of numbers the assistant read to them. Each shock would be slightly higher than the one before, with the shock machine graduated in 15 volt increments from “slight shock” to “Danger:Severe Shock” and “XXX”. Althought they complained bitterly, fully two thirds of the assistants continued to give shocks all the way to “XXX”, even as the series of tape recordings demanded to be released, begged them to stop, feigned a heart attack, and then went silent.

All that was necessary to make this happen was that the man in the white coat repeat variations of the mantra, “I am responsible. The experiment requires that you continue.”

It’s natural then to think, per Pournelle, that organizations inevitably promote the most sociopathic participants, then amplify their power. John Nash’s game theory, however, shows that the problem is harder than that. Bureaucracy evolves even when doesn’t serve anyone’s interests, sociopathic or not.

XXX

The defining trait of the sociopath is lack of empathy. They can make warm and gentle parents, partners and neighbors and treat their pets and friends kindly. When motivated to behave otherwise, however, they turn on a dime.

Bureaucracy is the sociopathy of organizations. While human sociopaths tend to rise to the leadership of organizations as per Pournelle’s law, they’re not actually necessary for bureaucracy to gel. John Nash showed that the behaviors of organizations depend only on the rules of their games.

[Von Neumann, Nash and Goodhart]

Embrace Change

Listening, testing, coding and refactoring. That’s all there is to software. Anyone who says different is selling something. – Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Explained, 1st Ed., 2000

Listening as if crossing thin ice, testing as a boat on dark water, adapting as a stranger to a far shore, simplifying as a melting snowflake … – Lao Tzu, 3,000 years before.

“XP” was a frontal assault on the 20th century Waterfall method - in which hierarchies of committees planned, budgeted, and designed software by writing paper specs. Code was written in a phase afterwards by a different group of people, and then a third group checked that the code did what the first group had specified. No user feedback, no learning loops, no prioritization of constraints.

The results were hugely expensive, unfit for market, and unprepared for change. Embarrassed bureaucrats demanded urgent fixes with arbitrary deadlines, each more costly than the last as technical debt grew exponentially. Until fixes became so expensive the bureaucrats started the next Waterfall project to replace the current one, leaving layers of unmaintainable legacy one on top of the other like Schliemann’s Troy.

XP turned the waterfall upside down. It started with running code - a walking skeleton. Like tuning a guitar before playing a song. Then it added features one at a time, highest priority first. Each began as test code that reliably failed - so you knew the tests worked. Work proceeded on a feature until its tests passed. The growing library of tests kept executing continuously so that technical debt was paid off immediately, before it earned its exponential interest.

No phases and minimal work in progress. Design worked continuously as a discipline of simplification of the system as a whole - “refactoring”. Continuous user feedback continuously reprioritized work to continuously improve ROI. Business continuously collaborating with developers in small teams face to face. No specs, handoffs, deadlines … a brave new world.

As a developer in the Waterfall trenches I was up for that. I coached the first enterprise transformation, keynoted the first XP conference, invented the first agile training game, wrote the first project wiki, and led change programs at organizations of all kinds on two continents. And watched it all crash and burn.

First came the “Agile Manifesto”, which replaced Beck’s XP practices with platitudes. “Scrum” turned the platitudes into certificates. “Scaling” turned certificates into committees. Consultancies made fortunes telling the business that this was Agile. The slime of the new bureaucracy rose to the top, and then AI delivered the coup de grace.

In a world where software develops itself faster, cheaper, and better than humans, biological teams are horseshoes on a Tesla. The trouble is what AI couldn’t be trained to do.

There was plentiful training data in public open source repositories for AI to learn how to code, but not how to listen, test, or simplify. There are tests there, but nothing to explain how or why they’re needed. Polished features, but nothing to show how their design evolved. None of the conversations that led the humans to make the choices remain on the record.

So, when change comes, as it always must, all the AI coders can do is start again from scratch over and over, taking a random walk in the space of systems just like the old Waterfall projects. As businesses lose the humans in the learning loop or, worse, can’t tell which humans they need in there, they break their ability to benefit from their mistakes. If those who forget the past are doomed to repeat it, AI forgets it quicker, cheaper, and better than ever.

Recalling the Past

Circa 500 BCE, when software was grain and development was domestication, in the then Chinese capital of Chou, the imperial philosopher Confucius summoned the upstart Lao Tzu for a dressing down.

Confucius promoted social perfection through hierarchies that fit the moral order of the universe, as revealed by the mandate of heaven, as interpreted by the ancient masters, as encoded in the sacred precepts and analects. Neglect of ritual, disrespect of authority, leaders performing ceremonies the wrong way at the wrong time - lead to chaos, said Confucius.

As with most religious figures, there was almost certainly no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. Kung Fu Tze - Confucius - most likely didn’t exist either. If people by these names did happen to exist, separation in time and space means they couldn’t possibly have met.

Nevertheless, Han dynasty historian Ssu Ma Chi’en tells us Confucius confronted Lao in the offices of the vast imperial library, bringing a ream of critiques and challenges compiled by his disciples. Lao Tzu heard them out patiently, and then replied that ceremony is empty, that people benefit only by meeting opportunity, that anyone calling themselves master is a fool, and that Confucius would do better to forget heaven and study nature instead.

Ssu Ma Chi’en reports a subdued Confucius returned to his disciples who were keen to hear his report of the confrontation. Confucius drew himself up to his full height and said, “I know how to catch fish, shoot birds, and trap rabbits. But what am I to do with a dragon of mist and wind?”

Killing the Dude

Silk tears, string rots, and each new dynasty burns the libraries of the old. The first known editions of Lao Tzu pre-date the first Chinese dictionaries by three centuries and explain terms of trade, not abstruse philosophy. So the meaning of Lao Tzu’s book morphed invisibly for centuries while latter day priests shuffled its words to fit the numerology sacred to them.

Nine was the ideal number to the Han dynasty numerologists, and its square the ideal number of chapters. The handful of editions surviving from earlier times have 77 chapters (Beida), 72 chapters (Yan Zun), or no chapters at all (Guodian, Mawangdui). Medieval editions refactored these into 68 chapters (Wu Cheng) and 64 chapters (Zhu Dezhi).

So Lao Tzu is called “the book of riddles” in China today because no one can say with any authority what it originally meant, nor cleanly separate one interpretation from others it acquired from century to century. As a result, modern translations wildly disagree; it’s an irresistible puzzle-box, the most translated book in history.

As an Australian with no Chinese heritage, I stumbled upon it in 1989 when I got mixed up with a community of sinology professors on the Australian National University’s taoism-studies-l mailing list. At the dawn of the Internet, I proposed a “GNL” translation - named after Stallman’s GNU acronym - to short circuit the Gordian knot by translating English to English. Distilling the most authoritative modern English translations into a consensus that an amateur like me could understand but the academics couldn’t refute.

My professors were broadly skeptical, but entertained enough by the project to take time to school me as I struggled with it. Eternal gratitude to Prof. Dan Lusthaus for his patience. Over the next three years the GNL succeeded at least to the extent that chinapage.org, then the highest ranking English-language Chinese website, adopted it as their official translation.

So then the going got weird. In 1998 the Coen brothers produced their masterpiece The Big Lebowski, fusing Bogart’s noir thriller The Big Sleep with a Hunter Thompson take on a 4th century Japanese Zen koan, The Vinegar Tasters.

In the koan, the avatars of Confucius, Lao Tzu, and Buddha meet over a jar of spoiled wine.

“The wine is spoiled.” says Confucius, “We should tip it out.”

“It is bitter,” agrees Buddha, “but life is suffering. We should drink it.”

Lao Tzu laughs, saying “this stuff would work great on a salad. Or with dumplings!”

The bitter beverage in the Coens’ movie was coffee, but the avatars - Walter as Confucius, Donnie as Buddha, The Dude as Lao Tzu - represent similar sentiments. Most fans don’t notice. But I should have done when a Californian uber-slacker Oliver Benjamin reached out in 2004 asking me if he could use the GNL as the bible of Dudeism in his inspired “Church of he Latter Day Dude”.

I pointed out the open content license but Ollie happily agreed to give the book away free. Meanwhile selling a half million “Dudeist Priest” certificates authorizing their bearers to perform weddings and funerals. At ten dollars each, High Dudely Lama Benjamin could live like a king in Chiang Mai.

I dug the Dude’s story and admired the enterprise of the Lama, but Dudeism wasn’t what this book really meant to me. I have nothing against bowling, bathrobes and white russians, but it wasn’t about “take it easy” so much as “make it easy to take it easy”. Not slacking, engineering.

There’s a zen koan attributed to Linji Yixuan, “when you meet Buddha on the road, kill him.” Zen Buddhists don’t worship the name, story or likeness of Buddha. When those turn up they become an obstacle to overcome. Likewise the Coens and the Lama weren’t wrong; the Sage in the GNL and almost all English translations sure sounds like the Dude. If I was going up against them, I needed to translate the original Chinese to English from scratch.

The Translation Game

Except I couldn’t. My expertise was architecting software, coaching development, and focusing corporations on throughput. I could bring nothing to a Chinese translation that thousands of years of scholars and native speakers hadn’t already. I’d be silly to try. But then two new Chinese to English translations changed the game.

The first was by Sanskrit Professor Victor Mair. He’s best known for his archaeology of the cryptid mummies of China’s Tarim basin, red-haired caucasian giants wearing tartan and witches’ hats who might to have introduced domesticated horses to China around 2000 BCE.

In 1990, Mair published an English translation of the then newly discovered silk-scroll edition of Lao Tzu from Ma Wang Dui. I liked the translation fine but what grabbed my attention was Mair’s discovery of deep philological connections between Lao Tzu and the Bhagavad Gita, a root text of culture at the other end of the ancient silk road. Reading the two side by side, Mair found that either the one was a bad translation of the other, or both derived from some lost common ancestor, perhaps dating from before the invention of writing.

Just as Mair’s translation was published, however, an even earlier edition of Lao Tzu was discovered at Guo Dian. Pre-dating the invention of paper and silk, it was carved into bamboo slips tied together with string. Guo Dian lacked half the length of Ma Wang Dui and came with unrelated fragments, perhaps a list of popular sayings some noble had had a scribe jot down.

Was this abbreviation just the work of some ancient grave-robber? Or was it all there was to Lao Tzu back then - with the rest coming from other times and places? Maybe the Tao rode into China with Mair’s giant witches. Maybe it was a song inspired by the Gita. Maybe some common ancestor ping-ponged between India and China more than we’ll ever know. In any case, it became clear to me that I’d been barking up the wrong tree. Or a tree that wasn’t there.

I had thought I’d been leveraging the insights of the world’s experts on the ancient Chinese in this ancient Chinese book to reveal the intents of its ancient Chinese author. I’d worried that my work, much less the Dudely Lama’s take on it, had perverted that original meaning. If this book wasn’t originally Chinese, however, then those experts knew no more than I did. If it didn’t begin with just one author, there was no original to pervert. So I hadn’t taken too many liberties with it. I’d taken too few.

We translators, east and west, collaborate on a great big jigsaw puzzle. We know the book’s a jumble, but we reverently pick up piece after piece and polish them by choosing words we intuitively believe best reveal their true meaning to modern readers in an ancient context. And then we carefully replace each piece right back in the pile where we got it. Over and over for thousands of years, like trying to solve a jigsaw without ever assembling the pieces into a picture.

Nevertheless, becoming an expert in Chinese, much less in its lost etymology, was more than I could hope to achieve before dying of old age. I was stuck. Until, in 2009, Bradford Hatcher published the book’s first complete English transliteration, Laozi Word by Word.

Hatcher built a translation of his own on top of the transliteration. I frankly don’t much care for his choices there. But the great benefit of his work for me was its lists of all the traditional dictionary meanings for every Chinese pictogram across all ancient editions of the book - including Ma Wang Dui and Guo Dian. In English. I was back in the translating English to English business.

Even better, I finally saw that I was not the least likely person to translate this book. Because “the sage” and “the superior man” - the two most conventional English translations of sheng ren - are as much Western orientalism as yellow-face pantomime villains. Ren means person or people or polity, and sheng is perceptive, responsive, or, in a rhyme from the second chapter of the Chinese, harmonious and lively. Perceptive, responsive, harmonious, lively … agile. Of all this book’s thousands of years of translators, I’m the only one with multiple decades experience coaching agile people. So … “Who you gonna call?”

The Tea-Master and the Samurai

As with most religious figures, there was no historical person named Lao Tzu. The name means only “old philosopher” or “old philosophy”. But there are countless stories about him. In 500 BCE, Han dynasty Grand Historian Ssu-Ma Chi’en wrote of him as a Chou dynasty librarian riding to the West on a buffalo to escape civil war. He met a border guard on the trail, Yin Hsi, who wouldn’t let him ride to the West until he recorded his wisdom for posterity.

The journey to the West took took a while. Maybe a thousand years later, glossed by Bodhidharma, another likely fictional religious figure, Lao Tzu combined with Buddhism to form Ch’an, better known by its Japanese name, Zen. Japanese struggles in translating Lao Tzu likely inspired the Zen practice of insoluble riddles called koans, whose frustrated contemplation yields a path to enlightenment.

And then Zen turned into Tea.

In the fifteenth Century, Sen No Rikyu’s used Lao Tzu’s ideas to end two centuries of civil war.

He invented the Japanese Teahouse with its principle of Mu Hin Shu - Japanese for “no host, no guest”. A century later, a forged book, Namporoku, replaced Mu Hin Shu with Shu Ha Ri, a bureaucratic certification system that spread through the martial arts and eventually infected the agile software development community too.

It took millennia for the him to actually arrive. The earliest Western edition of Lao Tzu is The Monadology by 18th century polymath Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Inspired by translations sent by the Jesuit mission to China and seldom recognized as Lao Tzu by modern scholars, The Monadology was the basis for Leibniz’s inventions from calculus to the binary numbers and the first mechanical computer.

Leibniz’s work found its way to Russia in the curriculum of the Academy of Vienna, which Peter The Great salvaged after Newton’s accusation of plagiarism ended Leibniz’s career. This curriculum underpinned the famous cold-war Russian facility with mathematics, and, according to logician Kurt Goedel, a Russian conspiracy to keep Leibniz’s “Characteristica Universalis” a state secret to this day.

Leibniz’s work led to Babbage and Lovelace’s stored-program computer, then to Turing and Von Neumann’s 20th century electroni computers, the information revolution, the Internet, and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development too.

The Seven Samurai

Taoism, Zenism, Teaism and martial systems rendered through the lens of Japanese auteur Akira Kurosawa made their way to the West again in Randall’s Doctor Lao, Lucas’s Force, the Wachowskis’ Matrix, the dream space of Nolans’ Inception, and the Coens’ Dude. And in Beatles lyrics and Jobs’ design philosophy at Apple … and on and on. Lao Tzu arrived eventually.