VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 11, SECTION 2
How You React to People, and How You Feel Time
The last section took apart language and food, culture's first hardness. This section goes deeper, into two layers harder to perceive. How you react to other people, and how you feel time. These two are more invisible than language and food, and they govern you deeper still. And then it brings in Confucius, without learning ritual you have no way to stand, to set the root of this layer.
Start with how you react to people. Meet a person, and that first, unthinking reaction is one of the deepest things a culture carves into you. Two strangers meet, and in one culture the instinct is to bow, in another to shake hands, in another to embrace, in another to nod. That first reaction has no thinking in it at all. The body does it on its own. And it is exactly that unthinking half-second that is the most honest, that shows what a culture has carved deepest into you. Take the greeting. Chinese, meeting someone they know, may ask, have you eaten. It is a greeting, not really a question about a meal. Behind it is a culture where food is the first of all concerns and warmth is shown through care. A Westerner may open with the weather, or how are you. Different doors into a greeting, different cultures soaked in. Take distance. When two people talk, how far apart they stand to feel comfortable is a deep matter of culture. In some cultures, standing close to talk is normal and warm. In others, it feels like being crowded. That comfortable distance is a thing no one ever taught you, and your body knows it, because the culture carved it in. Take a collision. Someone bumps into you, and in some cultures the instinct is to say sorry, and in others the instinct is to glare. That instinct was drilled into you by a culture over a long time. So how you react to people, and above all the unthinking, instinctive reactions, is culture carved into the deepest layer of the body. You take it for my own temperament, my own instinct, and in truth it is your culture reacting for you. In the four layers of the fifth chapter, this is culture bored all the way down to the layer of the body's reaction, the deepest one.
Now the second, and more invisible still. The sense of time. You think time is an objective thing, ticking away the same for everyone. But how a people feels time, and uses it, is deeply shaped by culture. There are two broad ways of feeling time. One is linear. Time is a straight line, running one way from past to present to future, and once it is gone it does not come back, and so the stress falls on efficiency, on punctuality, on planning, on seizing every minute. The other is cyclical. Time is a circle, the seasons coming round again, spring and summer and autumn and winter turning and returning, and so there is more patience in it, a stress on waiting for the thing to ripen, on following the way of nature. Behind these two senses of time are two different cultures. Take being on time. In some cultures time is held extremely strictly, and an appointment at three means three o'clock sharp, and to be late is a discourtesy. In others it runs looser, and an appointment at three, arrived at a quarter or half past, is fine, and everyone is used to it. This is not a matter of who is civilized and who is not. It is two cultures with two different understandings of time. The Chinese tradition of heaven and humankind as one leans more toward the cyclical, toward a sense of moving with the season. Modern industrial society brought in a strong linear time. A person in China today has both senses of time mixed in him, sometimes stressing efficiency and punctuality, sometimes carrying the patience of everything in its own time. That mixing is itself a culture. The sense of time is more invisible than language or food, because you feel it, wholly, to be natural, and never once think that how I feel time is a thing a culture taught me. And yet it governs, at a depth, the rhythm of your life, the way you work, even your whole attitude toward living.
These reactions between people, these deep matters of culture, the ancients had one word that gathered them all up. Ritual. Confucius, in the Analects, said to his son, without learning ritual, you have no way to stand. What is ritual? It is not only ceremony, the bowing and the forms. Confucius's ritual is a whole code of how to treat people and things rightly. Whom to show respect to and when, and how to show it. What attitude suits what occasion. How to keep the right distance and the right warmth between one person and another. That whole code of ritual is exactly the reactions between people this section has been describing. And Confucius's without learning ritual, you have no way to stand means that a person who has not grasped this code of culture has no way to stand properly in the world of other people. Mark his word, stand. He did not say that without learning ritual you are impolite. He said you have no way to stand. That is a heavy weight to give it. Ritual, this code of conduct between people, is the very ground a person stands on among others. Grasp the code, and you know how to get along rightly, and others take you in, and you truly stand inside that culture. Fail to grasp it, and you bump into walls everywhere, and cannot stand at all. So the reactions between people that this section is about are, in Confucius, ritual, a person's footing to stand in the world. The credit is Confucius's. But mark one thing. Confucius's ritual is not a dead and rigid rule. Its core is a heart of respect and consideration for others. The form of ritual can change with the age, the kneeling of old times is not kept now, but the core of respect and consideration does not change. To learn ritual is not to learn a dead form, but to grasp, through the form, that warm and respectful heart. And this ties back to the care of the whole book. Ritual done alive is warmth. Ritual done dead is exactly the propriety-detail that turns into a tool of torment. The same ritual, done with a warm heart, is ritual, and done with a cold heart, becomes torment. So the key is never the form. It is the heart underneath it.
So here is where this section leaves us. It has taken apart two deeper layers. How you react to people, where the unthinking half-second is the most honest, culture carved into the deepest layer of the body, taken by you for temperament when it is your culture reacting for you. And the sense of time, more invisible still, linear against cyclical, the measure of being on time, shaping the rhythm of a life at a depth. And Confucius, without learning ritual you have no way to stand, where this code between people is ritual, a person's footing in the world, its core a heart of respect and consideration. That carries the eleventh stake deeper. Culture's hardness runs from the perceivable, language and food, to the harder to perceive, the reactions between people and the sense of time, a layer deeper. But these are still about how you treat the world outside you. The deepest layer, and the hardest, is how you see yourself, that who am I. The next section takes up the deepest one, and brings in Xunzi, man can form a group, the root of the Chinese relational self. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.