VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 11
Where Culture Is Hard
The last chapter said culture is the hard bedrock, hard to the point of being invisible, but it did not yet say, in concrete terms, what the thing is. This chapter takes the bedrock apart, layer by layer, from the most everyday down to the deepest, and looks at where exactly it is hard.
The first section takes the two most everyday layers, language and food. Language is the house that thought lives in, for you think with it, and it governs not only how you speak but how you think. Chinese splits into separate words the kin that English gathers under one uncle, carrying a whole set of relational coordinates a child learns along with speech, and Chinese writes from the big unit down to the small where English runs the other way, two habits of seeing the whole and the part. It is a hardness deep enough that you dream in your mother tongue. And food is a whole culture on one table, the round table and the shared dish of a culture of together against the separate plates of a culture of the individual, the seating that orders age and rank, eaten so deep into the body that a person abroad for decades, his language grown foreign, still has a stomach that wants the taste of childhood. These two, met from birth and soaked in longest, are the first coat of dye, the water you feel the least.
The second section takes two deeper and less perceptible layers, how you react to people and how you feel time. The unthinking half-second when you meet someone, the bow or the handshake, the have you eaten or the weather, the comfortable distance, the instinct to say sorry or to glare, is the most honest thing there is, culture carved into the body's deepest reflex and taken by you for your own temperament. And the sense of time, more invisible still, linear where every minute is seized against cyclical where a thing is waited on to ripen, the strict three o'clock against the loose one, shapes the rhythm of a whole life. The ancients gathered these between-people matters into one word, ritual, and Confucius, without learning ritual you have no way to stand, made it a person's very footing in the world, though its core is not the dead form but a heart of respect and consideration, so that ritual done warm is ritual and ritual done cold becomes the propriety-detail that turns into a tool of torment.
The third section takes the deepest and hardest layer, the who am I into which all the others run. One culture answers, I am an independent individual, self-contained and my own, and another answers, I am a point in a web of relationships, my parents' child and my hometown's native son, defined inside my relations. The Chinese relational self has a warm side, a web that holds and warms you so you are never alone, and a heavy side, the expectations you carry for others until you are short of breath. Its root is Xunzi, who asked why a man weaker than an ox and slower than a horse can make them serve, and answered, man can group, and then asked how a man can group, and answered, on ritual and righteousness that divide each person's position, so that the backbone is a relational self living inside a group held in order by ritual and righteousness. Neither self is higher, each with its freedom or its warmth and its own weakness, and to see your own base color is not to deny it but to live, on seeing it, a little freer.
That is the eleventh stake. Culture's hard bedrock runs from language and food, through the reactions between people and the sense of time, down to the who am I, layer over layer building one complete cultural person. What this chapter has not said is how this bedrock gets handed to the next generation, and how deep it goes. The next chapter brings in Xunzi's wei and the handing down unbroken from one generation to the next, and looks at how the bedrock is hard all the way into the cells.
SECTION
SECTION 2 How you react to people, and how you feel time
SECTION 3 The understanding of yourself
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.