Muddy Water Is Best Cleared by Leaving It Alone

In the spring of 2020, when India's national lockdown stopped most factories and boats along the Ganga, pollution monitors at several stations recorded the river's quality improving markedly within weeks. At Haridwar the water was judged fit for drinking after simple treatment, and in Delhi residents posted photographs of a Yamuna that looked blue. Nobody had cleaned anything. The river had simply been left alone for a while, and mud, which had been stirred by a thousand activities, settled. The topic expresses this experience in an old image, that muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone.

The image comes from Taoist thought. The Tao Te Ching asks who can make muddy water clear and answers that if it is left still it will clear of itself. The idea is bound up with wu wei, often translated as non action, which does not mean idleness but a way of acting that does not force. A farmer who plants in the right season and waits is acting in accord with the grain of things, while a farmer who pulls at his seedlings to make them grow faster ruins his crop. The sage governs best, in this view, when the people say that they did it themselves.

Western thought has parallel ideas. Adam Smith argued in 1776 that a market left free would coordinate the plans of millions of people without any commander, as though guided by an invisible hand. Medicine has rediscovered the same patience under the name of watchful waiting. Most colds, many back pains and a large share of sore throats resolve without treatment, and doctors who prescribe antibiotics for viral infections do harm, since the drugs do nothing against viruses and breed resistance in bacteria. A good physician knows when the right prescription is rest.

Ecology provides some of the most striking cases. For most of the twentieth century American forest services put out every fire, and the campaign was so successful that dead wood and undergrowth built up across the western forests until a single spark could produce a catastrophe. When fires were allowed to burn under supervision in Yellowstone in 1988, the park suffered huge blazes but recovered, and ecologists came to see fire as a part of the forest's health. In the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which humans abandoned after the disaster of 1986, wolves, lynx and other animals have returned in numbers that astonish observers. Leaving nature alone has sometimes done more than any programme of repair.

Leaving nature alone has sometimes done more than any programme of repair.

Yet the image has a dangerous weakness, which is that it assumes the mud has no continuing source. If the river is clouded by a single storm, then stillness will clear it. If a drain is emptying into it every hour, then waiting will only deepen the problem. The Thames did not clear itself in the summer of 1858, when it stank so badly that Parliament contemplated leaving London. It cleared only after Joseph Bazalgette built a system of sewers that ended the flow of waste. In Flint, Michigan, the water that residents drank in 2014 and 2015 was contaminated with lead because the city had changed its source without proper treatment, and the problem would not have cleared by itself. Years of official reassurance that nothing was wrong did great harm.

The Ganga confirms the point. The improvement in 2020 reversed within months as industry and the pilgrim traffic returned, and the river's pollution has continued to demand a sustained effort, including the large Namami Gange programme and the building of treatment plants. The lockdown showed what the river could do when the load was lifted, and it also showed that the load, and not the river, was the problem. Leaving the water alone worked only because the polluters had been made to leave it alone.

Agriculture knows this wisdom in the practice of fallow. Farmers across India and the world have long rested a field for a season so that its soil can recover its fertility, and the continuous cropping that followed the Green Revolution, for all its gains in grain, left parts of Punjab with falling water tables and tired soils. A field that is never left alone is exhausted, and a mind that is never left alone is exhausted in the same way. Rest, in this sense, is a working part of the process, and the proverb is partly a defence of it.

This suggests a more careful reading of the proverb. The advice is not to do nothing, but to find the point at which doing more would make matters worse and to stop there. Taoist writers never recommended neglect. The same texts that praise wu wei are full of detailed advice on how a ruler should behave, and the non action they have in mind is skilled restraint, the kind that a gardener or a sailor shows when he waits for the wind. A person who leaves the water alone after shutting off the source is practising wu wei. A person who leaves it alone while the source flows is merely avoiding the work.

Social problems pose the same test. Some disputes, quarrels in a family or a village for instance, subside when the parties are given time and space, and officials who rush in with orders can harden positions. Other wrongs, such as discrimination or exploitation, do not subside because they are continually refreshed by a system that benefits from them, and the advice to wait has long been the favourite of those who profit from the arrangement. Martin Luther King, writing from a Birmingham jail in 1963, said that the word wait had almost always meant never. Leaving a muddy water alone is wisdom in one case and complicity in the other.

How can one tell which case one is in? The sage in the Tao Te Ching does not say, and the answer cannot be found in the water, which looks equally cloudy in both. It depends on knowing the cause, and knowing the cause often requires the very activity of investigation that the proverb seems to discourage. It remains unclear whether the patience the image praises is a form of understanding or a way of postponing it, and the water, which will clear or not clear in its own time, will offer no hint to the person watching it.