VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 13
One Tree
This is the last chapter of the first semester. Across twelve chapters, from torment to the hard bedrock, it has looked at the tree of cultural institution over and over, and now it draws the whole tree complete, joins it to the modern world, and crosses the bridge into the second semester.
The first section pulls the eye up from one person to a whole society and finds culture hard all the way to the institution layer. The economy, all numbers and markets, rests on a culture of trust, since a transaction runs on the faith that the other will not cheat, and where that faith is thick the cost of a transaction is low and the economy runs smooth. Politics rests on a culture of how power is used, since the same institution gives officials who serve the public in one culture and officials who work their power for private gain in another. And law, the hardest-looking thing of all, is only the big frame, and inside the frame the same law is fairly enforced in a culture of equal rules and becomes selective enforcement in a culture of connections. Three seemingly hard institutions, economy and politics and law, are three trees, and culture is the soil their roots are sunk in, which is why the volume on culture comes before the other three.
The second section shows that culture is the root is no private saying of the Chinese ancestors, by bringing in three of the modern West's great minds who arrived by other roads at the same place. Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, found that a religious culture shaped the rise of capitalism, so the economy is not purely economic. Franz Boas, with cultural relativism, held that no culture is higher or lower and each must be understood from within rather than judged by an outside ruler, which is the Western root of this volume's no-verdict stance. And Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations, held that the deepest fault line between peoples is cultural, not political or economic, a judgment this volume leaves contested and passes no verdict on, while noting that it too puts culture as the deepest layer. Two thousand years and half a world from Confucius and Xunzi, the three arrive at culture is the root, which shows the point is shared across cultures and ages, and shows what this set means to do, not to praise Chinese culture but to borrow the ancestors' ruler for a truth anyone can use.
The third section gathers the semester into a picture of one tree. The root, deepest and unseen, is the hard bedrock and the who am I. The trunk is the food and reactions and ritual you can feel. The branches, highest and most visible, are economy and politics and law, which people argue over while forgetting they are fed by the root. The seed that threads from root to branch is consider others and do not torment, and torment is the yellow leaf-spot seen first when the root goes wrong. To live this tree is not to hang it on a wall but to be, yourself, one small length of it, feeding or poisoning the patch of soil around you, so that living the hard bedrock comes down to being, from today, a warm vat and a good seed on the small patch you can reach, in the seconds you want to torment seeing clearly and pausing and choosing another way, on which one second the whole first semester comes to rest. And the bridge into the second semester is that the first road of handing the bedrock down is education, and the semester of putting to use is about education and tools.
That is the closing stake of the first semester. Culture is one tree, its branches economy and politics and law, its root and trunk culture itself, the seed of do not torment threaded through, and living it is to be a warm vat on your own small patch of soil from today. The root is laid. The second semester puts it to use, beginning from the true place of education.
SECTION
SECTION 1 Hard to the institution layer, economy, politics, and law all lean on culture
SECTION 2 Culture's place in the modern world, Weber, Boas, Huntington
SECTION 3 The picture of one tree, living the hard bedrock, crossing into the second semester
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1 Hard to the institution layer, economy, politics, and law all lean on culture