VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 10, SECTION 2
Guanzi, Full Granaries, Read Against the Grain
The last section said culture is not soft but the hardest bedrock. And that raises a natural question. But surely a full belly comes before culture? Is the economy not the more fundamental thing? More than twenty six centuries ago, Guanzi spoke a famous line that gets used, again and again, to prove that the economy comes first. This section reads that line against the grain, and looks at the true tie between culture and the economy.
Here is the line that gets quoted. Guanzi, or Guan Zhong, was the great statesman who, more than twenty six centuries ago, helped the Duke of Qi become the first among the lords. In the book that carries his name it is written, when the granaries are full, the people then know propriety, and when clothing and food are enough, they then know honor and shame. Plainly put, fill the granaries and people come to know how to conduct themselves, give them enough to wear and to eat and they come to know honor from shame. This line gets quoted to prove one thing. The economy is the ground floor, and culture is the story built on top. Fill the belly first, and only then talk about culture and morals and propriety. It sounds reasonable. A person poor and starving is hard to hold to any refinement. And so a great many take the line as proof that the economy settles the culture, that the economy comes first and culture second.
But read it with care, against the grain, and Guanzi's meaning is not so simple. He said the granaries full, and then they know propriety. Mark that word, then. Full granaries are only the condition for knowing propriety. They are not the guarantee of it. Full granaries make it possible for a person to know propriety. They do not make sure that he will. And the counter-examples are everywhere. There are those whose granaries are more than full, who are rich enough to drip oil, and who do not know propriety at all, but instead grow more arrogant, more lawless, quicker to torment. The full granaries did not bring them to propriety. They made them worse. So granaries full, and then they know propriety is not the same thing as granaries full, and propriety for certain. Between the full and the knowing of propriety there is a crucial gap. And what fills that gap? Culture. Full granaries and a good culture, and then people know propriety. Full granaries and a bad culture, and the richer they get the meaner they grow. So Guanzi's line, read with care, does not prove that the economy settles the culture. It shows that the economy is only a condition, and culture is the thing that decides which way it goes. The economy hands you the material. Whether that material is put to good use or to ill is decided by culture.
Take a picture to see the tie. The economy is like water, and culture is like the vat that holds the water. Water is crucial, and without it nothing lives. But water needs a vat to hold it, or it scatters, or it even floods. A good vat holds the water into a thing you can use, to water the fields and to nourish life. A cracked vat, and the more water you pour in, the bigger the flood. Full granaries are the water grown plentiful. But whether that water turns into a blessing or a disaster depends on the vat, on the culture, on whether it is whole or cracked. And this answers, too, the question from the last section, why culture is harder than the economy. Water can dry up and be filled again. But a vat, once it has been shaped, is very hard to change. A society's economy can rise and fall, can boom and go bust. But its culture, that vat, once shaped, is remarkably steady, and changes very slowly. So the deeper foundation is not the flowing water, the economy. It is the shaped vat, the culture.
Someone might think this is reading too much into Guanzi. Not at all. Guanzi himself gave culture great weight. In the same book there is a heavier line still. If the four bonds are not upheld, the nation perishes. And what are the four bonds? Guanzi named them, propriety, righteousness, integrity, and shame, the four great cords that bind a nation together, and every one of them a thing of culture. He said that if these four bonds are not held up, the nation comes to its end. Weigh how heavy that is. Culture, the four bonds, is lifted to the height of a nation's very survival. A nation with full granaries and a strong army, but with the four bonds of its culture fallen, perishes all the same. So Guanzi never took culture for the secondary thing. He knew that full granaries were only the beginning, and that whether a nation truly stands is settled, in the end, by whether the four cords of its culture hold. When later people quote only granaries full and then they know propriety and read it as the economy comes first, they are reading half of Guanzi's sentence and missing the whole of his weight. The complete Guanzi runs like this. The economy is the necessary beginning, and culture is the deciding root. The credit is Guanzi's.
So here is where this section leaves us. Through Guanzi, the tie between culture and economy made clear. Granaries full and then they know propriety, read against the grain, and full granaries are only the condition for propriety and not its guarantee, and the gap between them is filled by culture. The economy is water and culture is the vat, and the water matters, but it is the vat that decides blessing or disaster, and the vat is harder to change than the water. Guanzi himself, with if the four bonds are not upheld the nation perishes, lifts culture to the height of a nation's survival, and later people read only the half. That is the tenth stake carried deeper. The economy is the condition, culture decides the direction, and culture is the root that lets the economy hold. So this hardest and most fundamental culture, why do so few people feel that it is even there? Because it has a strange temper. It is hard to the point of being invisible. The next section takes up this bedrock's strangest trait of all. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 3 The base color is hard, hard enough to be invisible