VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 10
Culture Is Not Soft
The first nine chapters were about torment, the crooked sprout of a soil gone wrong. From here the volume turns the other way, to look at a culture when it goes hard, and it starts by pulling a badly used word back straight. Culture is not soft. It is the hardest bedrock there is.
The first section takes on the word itself. At the end of the 1980s Joseph Nye put forward soft power, splitting a nation's strength into the hard, army and money, and the soft, culture and values and the pull of a way of life. The idea has its uses in international relations, but the word soft planted a misunderstanding, that culture is the secondary, icing-on-the-cake thing while army and money are the matter of life and death. The truth runs backwards. An army can be wiped out in a night, wealth can vanish in a crash, technology can be overtaken, and all of these hard things are fragile, while a culture, a people's language and books and ways, can outlast the loss of the army and the land themselves. The Jewish people, scattered for nearly two thousand years with no land of their own, persecuted and at times slaughtered, survived by holding their faith and language and books, and on that foundation of culture built a nation again. So the seemingly softest thing is the hardest bedrock. What Nye called soft is only culture's way of working, drawing people near rather than forcing them, and an army makes people submit while a culture makes them belong. Soft in its way, hard in its bone.
The second section brings in Guanzi and reads a famous line against the grain. When the granaries are full, the people then know propriety, is quoted to prove the economy comes first, but the word is then, and full granaries are only the condition for propriety, never the guarantee, since the rich who grow only more arrogant are everywhere. The gap between the full granary and the knowing of propriety is filled by culture. The economy is water and culture is the vat that holds it, and the same water is a blessing in a whole vat and a flood in a cracked one, and the vat is far harder to change than the water. And Guanzi himself, with if the four bonds are not upheld the nation perishes, propriety and righteousness and integrity and shame, lifts culture to the height of a nation's survival, so that reading only the half about full granaries misses his true weight.
The third section takes up the bedrock's strangest trait. The harder and deeper-rooted a culture is, the more invisible it becomes, because it is not a thing you do but the thing you are, your instinct and your self-evident and your born-this-way. It is the water a fish cannot see, felt only when you leave it, which is why so many see their own culture for the first time only abroad. And the danger is that what cannot be seen is easily neglected and ruined without notice, torment itself being this bedrock cracking and showing through when the do not torment and the respect everyone get worn quietly thin. So the more invisible it is, the more it must be tended on purpose, and seeing this water you soak in is the whole landing point of the first semester.
That is the tenth stake. Culture is not soft but the hardest bedrock, hard to the point of invisibility, so easily neglected and all the more to be tended. What this chapter has not yet said is where, in concrete terms, the bedrock is hard. The next chapter takes it apart layer by layer, from language and food down to the who am I.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Nye's soft power, and where it belongs
SECTION 2 Guanzi, full granaries, read against the grain
SECTION 3 The base color is hard, hard enough to be invisible
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.