VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 10, SECTION 3
The Base Color Is Hard, Hard Enough to Be Invisible
This chapter has been about culture as the hard bedrock. The first section pulled the word soft power straight. The second brought in Guanzi, and showed culture to be the root of the economy. This section is the close of the chapter, and it takes up this bedrock's strangest trait. It is hard, and it is hard to the very point that you cannot see it. Understand this trait, and you understand why culture, for all its importance, gets neglected, and why it has to be tended with special care.
The strangest thing about culture is this. The harder it is, and the deeper its roots, the more invisible it becomes. A thing that is shallow, laid on from outside, you see easily. Learn some foreign etiquette and practice it on purpose, and you know perfectly well that you are doing a thing that is not quite your own. But your own culture, the deepest thing in you, that you cannot really feel at all. Because it is not a thing you do. It is the thing you are. A person born to a language does not feel its grammar governing him. He just, naturally, speaks this way. A person raised inside a culture does not feel its values steering his choices. He just, naturally, takes this as right and that as wrong. The deepest culture becomes a person's instinct, his self-evident, his born-this-way. And the moment a thing becomes self-evident, it becomes invisible.
There is a metaphor that fits it exactly. A fish cannot see the water. A fish lives its whole life in water, and yet most likely never sees the water, because water is the environment of its every moment, too familiar, too all-surrounding, and so it becomes nothing at all. The fish comes to know that water is even there only when it has left the water. And a person, toward his own culture, is exactly the fish toward water. You live inside your culture, and it is the air and the water of your every moment, so familiar and so all-around that you feel it is nothing. You feel that your way of thinking, your way of doing things, your way of treating people, is naturally so, is how everyone is. Only when you leave the culture you know, and go to one that is truly different, do you suddenly and sharply feel that your own culture is even there. A great many people, going abroad, in the shock of a wholly different culture, see their own for the first time. It turns out my naturally so was never natural at all. It was my culture, shaping me. That is the fish leaving the water and seeing the water for the first time.
This invisible quality brings a danger with it. Because you cannot see it, you easily neglect it, and can even ruin it without knowing. A thing you can see, you know to protect. A thing you cannot see, you easily feel has always been there and always will be, until one day it is gone or in trouble, and only then do you know how important it was. And the danger to culture is exactly there. Because it is too familiar and too self-evident, people easily suppose it needs no tending, that it will always be the way it is. And then, in a fast-moving age, when new things sweep in, this culture no one has tended, that everyone took for granted, can be washed thin and changed without anyone noticing. By the time you feel it, the water has already changed, changed into a water you no longer know. Torment, in truth, is this bedrock coming loose, cracking, showing through. When the do not torment people and the respect everyone of a culture get quietly worn thin, torment sprouts up. And often it is only when torment is everywhere that people wake to the fact that this bedrock is already in trouble.
So the invisible quality of this bedrock tells us one thing that matters most of all. The more invisible it is, the more it has to be tended, and tended with the whole heart. You cannot let its being invisible make you feel it needs no care. Just the opposite. Precisely because it is invisible, and the most fundamental, and the most decisive, it needs all the more to be protected and tended on purpose, with open eyes. And how is it tended? That runs back to the weight of the earlier chapters of this volume. Nurturing the soil, breaking the chain, each person tending his own small patch. And the deepest tending of this bedrock is education, the handing down. How to hand a good culture, on purpose, to the next generation, is the great subject of the second semester. Here, one line planted. Seeing this bedrock that is hard to the point of invisibility is the whole landing point of the first semester. The first semester talked about torment, and talked about the hard bedrock, all of it so that you could see this water you are soaking in, this air you are breathing, this culture too familiar to be felt. To see it is where the tending of it begins.
That closes the tenth chapter. Pull together what it has set down. Culture is the hard bedrock. The first section, the word soft power is misplaced, and culture is the hardest bedrock working in a soft way, on which a nation without its land can be born again. The second, Guanzi, the economy is water and culture is the vat, and culture is the root that lets the economy hold. The third, this bedrock is hard to the point of being invisible, like a fish that cannot see the water, and the more invisible it is the more it must be tended. That is the tenth stake this chapter drives. Culture is not soft, it is the hardest bedrock, and because it is hard to invisibility it is easily neglected and needs all the more to be tended on purpose.
So this bedrock, where exactly is it hard? This chapter has said it is invisible, but it has not yet said, in concrete terms, what it actually is. The next chapter takes this hard bedrock apart, layer by layer, from the most everyday, language and food, down to the deepest, the who am I, and looks clearly at what, exactly, is the hard thing. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.