VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 13, SECTION 1
Hard to the Institution Layer, Economy, Politics, and Law All Lean on Culture
This is the last chapter of the first semester. Across the twelve chapters behind it, from torment to the hard bedrock, from the sickness to the root, we have looked at the tree of cultural institution over and over. This chapter has three sections. The first pulls the eye up from one person to a whole society, and sees how culture goes hard all the way to the institution layer. The second brings in several of the modern West's great minds, and sees how they arrived, by different roads, at the same place. The third gathers these thirteen chapters into a picture of one tree, then talks about how to live the hard bedrock into every day, and then crosses the bridge into the second semester. Today, hard to the institution layer.
The chapters before this mostly talked about the hardness of culture on one person, the language, the food, the who am I. This section pulls the eye up, from one person to a whole society, and looks at how culture goes hard to the largest layer of all, the layer of institutions. The eighth chapter said that culture is the root of the three hard institutions, that the institution is the seed and culture is the soil. This section joins onto that, and looks, in concrete terms, at how economy and politics and law, those three hard institutions, all lean on the soil of culture.
Start with the economy, which looks like the purest hard thing there is, all numbers and money and markets, and yet whose running rests, at a depth, on culture. The heart of a market economy is the transaction, and the premise of a transaction is trust. You dare to buy a stranger's goods, dare to sign a contract with a company you have never met, because you trust that he will not cheat you, that he will honor the contract, that the law will protect you. And where does that trust come from? In part from the institution, the law. But deeper down, from culture. In a society where everyone keeps faith and carries a sense of shame, the cost of a transaction is very low, and the economy runs smooth. In a society where everyone cheats and no one trusts, the cost of a transaction is very high, and the economy can barely run at all. So the ground floor of the economy is a culture of trust. Recall the tenth chapter, Guanzi, and the economy is water and culture is the vat. Now you can see what that vat is made of. It is made of trust, that thing of culture. Take the plainest example. The great old merchant communities that traveled the length of the whole country and did their business everywhere, what did they travel on? Not cleverness alone. They traveled on a culture of keeping faith held within the community, on a promise worth a thousand pieces of gold. That culture of faith kept was the true root of their economy.
Now politics, which looks like the pure parceling out of power, and yet whose running also leans on culture. However well a political institution is designed, it has in the end to rest on people to carry it out, and the character of those people decides how the institution actually runs. The same institution runs one way in a society with a culture of public-mindedness and rule-keeping, and runs another way, bent and distorted, in a society with a culture of connections and privilege. The same bureaucratic system, in a culture of serving the public, gives officials who serve in earnest, and in a culture of serving oneself, gives officials who work their power for private gain, and turns into a machine that manufactures torment. So the ground floor of politics is a culture about how power ought to be used. Recall the torment of the earlier chapters, a little power pushed to its limit. That is exactly a problem of culture, showing up at the far tip of the political institution. Whether a society's political culture is any good, you do not measure by how beautiful its constitution reads. You look at how the smallest clerk at the very bottom uses the little scrap of power in his hand. And that comes back, once again, to the thing this whole volume has been watching.
And law, which looks like the hardest thing of all, black characters on white paper, and yet, as the eighth chapter said through, is only the big frame, and inside the frame it is all culture. A law's true effect comes not from the clauses themselves but from the culture of the ones who enforce it and the ones who live under it. The same law, in a culture of equal treatment under the rules, gets enforced fairly, and in a culture where connections outweigh rules, becomes the selective enforcement of the fourth chapter. The same contract law, in a society that keeps faith, means that what is signed is kept, and in a society where people welsh whenever they can, becomes waste paper. So the ground floor of law, too, is culture. Whether a society's rule of law is any good, you do not measure by how strict its laws are. You look at whether, in people's hearts, there is that culture of a sense that the rules bind everyone, and of keeping faith.
Gather the three. Economy, politics, law, three seemingly hard institutions, and every one of them leans on culture. The economy leans on a culture of trust. Politics leans on a culture of how power is used. Law leans on a culture of a sense that rules bind. They are like three trees, and culture is the soil. The trees look taller than the soil, harder than the soil, more striking than the soil, and yet the roots of the trees are all sunk into the soil, and the make of the soil decides whether the trees grow well. This is why this set of books puts the volume on cultural institution before the volumes on economy, on politics, and on law. Because culture is the shared root, the shared soil, of all three of those trees.
So here is where this section leaves us. From one person to a whole society, culture seen to be hard all the way to the institution layer. Economy and politics and law, the three hard institutions, all lean on culture, the economy on a culture of trust, politics on a culture of how power is used, law on a culture of a sense that rules bind. Three trees, and culture the soil, the roots of the trees all in the soil, the soil deciding the trees. That is why the volume on culture comes before the other three. That is the start of the thirteenth stake this chapter drives. Culture is hard all the way to the institution layer, and is the shared root of economy, politics, and law. So this view, that culture is the root, is it only the private saying of the Chinese ancestors? It is not. The modern West arrived at this same place too, by other roads. The next section brings in Weber, Boas, and Huntington, and sees how they came, by different roads, to the same place. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 2 Culture's place in the modern world, Weber, Boas, Huntington