VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 10, SECTION 1
Nye's Soft Power, and Where It Belongs
The first nine chapters of this first semester were about torment, the crooked sprout that comes up when the soil of culture has gone wrong. From this chapter on, we turn the other way around, and look at what a culture is when it goes hard. Across three sections. This first one pulls a badly used word back straight. Culture is not soft. It is the hard bedrock, the thing a civilization that has lost even its land can be reborn upon. The second brings in Guanzi, and a line of his read against the grain, to show that culture is the root that lets an economy hold. The third takes up this bedrock's strangest trait, that it is hard to the very point of being invisible, like a fish that cannot see the water, and that the more invisible it is the more it has to be tended with care. Today, pulling the word soft back straight.
Most people, hearing the word culture, feel it is a soft sort of thing. Poetry, music, film, festivals, food, all lovely, and none of it quite of consequence. A country's real strength, people feel, is the hard stuff. The army. The money. The technology. This feeling that culture is soft is not baseless. It has a source, and a famous one. At the end of the 1980s, the American scholar Joseph Nye put forward the idea of soft power. He split a nation's power into two. There is hard power, the military and the economic, force you can lay a hand on. And there is soft power, culture, values, the pull of a way of doing things, the power to make others willing to follow you, not by force but by drawing them near. Nye's idea has its uses, above all in international relations, where it explains how a country can, without firing a single shot, get others to admire its way of life and copy it. But that one word, soft, once it was in use, planted an enormous misunderstanding in everyone's mind. It made people take culture for the soft, the secondary, the icing on the cake, and take the army and the money and the technology for the hard, the primary, the matter of life and death.
This chapter says, head on, that this understanding runs backwards. Culture is not soft. It is the hardest thing there is. And the army, the money, the technology, the things that look so hard, are in fact the soft things, the ones that break most easily. That sounds startling, but hold one fact up and it comes clear. Look down the line of history's civilizations. A nation's army can be wiped out in a single night. A nation's wealth can vanish in one war, one crash. A nation's technology can fall behind and be overtaken. In the long river of history, these hard things are astonishingly fragile. But a culture, a nation's language and its written characters, its ways of thinking and its values, its way of doing things soaked all the way into daily life, this thing can, with the army destroyed and the land lost and the people scattered, still hold on and live, and one day let that nation be born again.
Take the most striking example there is. The Jewish people, for close to two thousand years, had no land to call their own. They were scattered across the whole earth, driven from place to place, persecuted, and at times slaughtered. By any measure of hard power, this people should long since have disappeared. And they did not. Why not? Because they held onto their culture. Their faith, their language, their books, their ways, handed down from one generation to the next. That culture was their true homeland, a homeland no army could destroy and no expulsion could take away. And two thousand years on, upon that foundation of culture, they could build a nation again. See it plainly. The army, the money, the land, all of it can be destroyed. Only culture, if it is held, can keep a people from dying, and can even raise again what was destroyed. So which is the soft one, and which the hard? That seemingly softest thing, culture, is the hardest bedrock of all. And those seemingly hardest things, the army and the money, turn out to be the surface that breaks most easily.
Come back now to Nye's soft power. His idea is not wrong, and in its own field, international relations, it is quite sharp. But its soft is easy to misread. What Nye called soft points to the way culture works, and not to its rank. Culture does work in a soft way, not by force but by drawing you near, willing, on your own feet. But that soft way of working does not mean its power is small or its rank second. Just the opposite. It is exactly because culture works soft, and seeps into you without your noticing, that its force runs deeper and lasts longer than the hard force of army and money. An army can make you submit, and the moment it pulls back you rise against it. A culture can make you belong, and once you belong, no force is needed at all, for you have willingly become part of it. Which of the two is the stronger? Plainly the second. So here is the more exact way to hold it. Culture is not soft power. It is the hardest power there is, working in a soft way. Its way is soft, and its bones are hard. Straighten that one word out, and you can throw off the bias that culture is secondary, and see, truly, how much culture weighs.
Someone may ask, all this fuss over one word, soft or hard, does it matter? It matters greatly. Because where that word is put decides how a person, and a nation, treats culture. Take culture for the soft, secondary, icing-on-the-cake thing, and you will pour your real care into the hard army and money and technology, and treat culture as an ornament, put on a few shows, hold a few festivals, and call culture done. But understand that culture is the hardest bedrock, and you treat it in a wholly different way. You know that the deepest contest between nations comes down, in the end, not to army or money, but to whose culture lasts longer, holds people together more tightly, and does the better job of raising people who do not torment, who have real skill in their hands, who can trust one another. And that is exactly what this whole volume, and in truth this whole set, is trying to say. Which is why, at the very outset, that word soft has to be pulled straight. Culture is not soft. It is the hardest bedrock a nation, a whole civilization, stands on.
So here is where this section leaves us. The word soft power, pulled straight. Nye put soft power forward at the end of the 1980s, and it is useful in international relations, but the word soft planted a misunderstanding, and made people take culture for the soft and the secondary. The truth runs the other way. The army, the money, the technology look hard and are fragile. Culture looks soft and is the hardest bedrock, on which a nation that has lost its land can be built again. Nye's soft points to culture's soft way of working, not to a low rank. Soft in its way, hard in its bones. That is the start of the tenth stake this chapter drives. Culture is not soft. It is the hardest bedrock, working in a soft way. So how does this hardness show itself in concrete fact? And in particular, what is the tie between culture and the hard economy? The next section brings in Guanzi, granaries full and then they know propriety, and a common misreading of it, to see how culture and economy hold each other up. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.