VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 7, SECTION 1
The Craft Hammered In, the Heart Steeped In
Six chapters have looked at torment from head to foot. What it is, how it happens, its root in the heart, its forms in the hands, its two directions, outward and inward, and the pen that sees all of it. But one question, the heaviest of them, is still unanswered. Torment is a thing every single person suffers under. So why does it go on being handed down, one generation to the next, as though the chain could never be broken? This chapter opens the secret hidden inside that handing down. And this first section looks, before anything else, at how, exactly, torment gets passed from one person to the next.
To see it clearly, two things have to be pulled apart first. One is the craft. The other is the heart. The craft is what the fourth chapter laid out, the five forms, picking at details, the runaround, the cold shoulder, the hoarding of information, selective enforcement. These are the moves you can see and learn, torment's skill of the hands. The heart is what the third chapter laid out, resenting those who have more and scorning those who have less. This you cannot see and cannot say, the lining of torment. And these two get handed down in two different ways. The craft is hammered in. The heart is steeped in. This section takes the two words one at a time.
Start with the craft, and how it gets hammered into a child. A child's first sight of the craft of torment is mostly not in a book. It is a grown person doing it, live, in front of him. A parent takes the child along to get something done, and the one behind the window is cold faced, materials incomplete, come back. The child stands to the side and watches his own mother and father put on a smile, nod their heads, and run the trip again, and again. That scene, the child files away. And what he files away is not only that being tormented feels terrible. He files away something deeper. So. The one inside the window is allowed to treat the one outside it this way.
Later the child grows a little, and comes into a scrap of small power of his own. Maybe he is made monitor of his class, with a few classmates to manage. Maybe in a game he is made leader of a squad, with a few teammates under him. And now the scene he watched as a child comes back up. Without being taught, he copies, as if by nature, that clerk's cold face and hard word, and lays them on the few people he can manage. That is the craft hammered in. No one sat him down and taught it. He learned the craft in scene after scene of being tormented and watching others be tormented, and the day he came into a position, he put it to use. And here is a point that matters greatly. The craft of torment is learned in being tormented. The person who has been tormented the most is often the one most familiar with every move of it. He hates the moves, and he is the most fluent in them. The day he sits down in the seat, he runs them more smoothly than anyone. The bullied learned to bully. The blocked learned to block. That is the coldest link in the whole chain of handing down.
The craft is hammered in, and it can at least be seen. But the heart, resenting those who have more and scorning those who have less, how does that get passed on? This one runs deeper. It is steeped in. No one formally teaches a child, you are to hate the rich, you are to look down on the poor. No parent teaches a thing so plainly. And yet this heart still steeps into the child, drop by drop. How?
It is steeped in at the dinner table. The family is eating, and the grown ups get to talking about how the neighbors have gone and bought yet another new car, and in the tone there is a thin thread of a sourness no one could name, and the child, listening, takes a drop of that sourness in. It is steeped in front of the television. A well dressed person comes on the screen, and a grown up says, offhand, a person like that, you can be sure his money is dirty, and the child, listening, takes a drop of that why should he have it better than me into himself. It is steeped in on the street. They pass a person sleeping rough, and a grown up pulls the child's hand in tight and drops his voice, stay away from him, he is filthy, and the child, listening, takes a drop of that scorn for the poor into himself. Once, twice, one year, two years, these attitudes and looks and tones that were never once spoken out loud steep into the child's body, drop by drop. By the time the child is grown, he resents those who have more and scorns those who have less, and he does not even know where the heart came from. He thinks it is the person he was born as. But it is not inborn. It was steeped in, year by year, out of the grown ups around him and into him.
Remember the four layers from the second section of the fifth chapter? Knowledge, belief, habit, and the reaction of the body. The craft that gets hammered in stops at the layer of habit. But the heart that gets steeped in steeps all the way down to the deepest layer, the reaction of the body. And that is why the heart is harder to break than the craft. The craft, you can put up some guard against, with an I will not learn that from him. The heart, you cannot even feel the moment it steeped into you.
And that lets one plain thing be said out loud. The handing down of a culture never runs on telling. It runs on soaking. We are used to thinking of raising a child as a matter of reasoning with him, telling him things. Parents reason with their children, teachers reason with their students. But the thing that actually shapes a person into who he later becomes is mostly not the reasoning said out loud. It is what kind of surroundings he soaked in from the time he was small. You may tell a child every day, you must respect every person, and every day he watches you bark at the guard in your building and knit your brow at a worker with dirt on his hands. What he learns is never the respect your mouth spoke. It is the disrespect your body did. Because telling works at the shallowest two layers, and soaking steeps into the deepest two. And the deep always covers the shallow. So the line planted back in the fifth chapter can be picked up here. Culture bores into the body not by telling but by soaking, year after year in the surroundings, slowly dyed in. A child who soaks in surroundings that love to torment gets dyed into a person who torments, no matter how hard you tell him, do not torment people. That is the plainest, and the deepest, machinery of handing down.
So here is where this section leaves us. Torment passes down in two ways. The craft is hammered in, learned in scene after scene of being tormented and watching others be tormented, the bullied learning to bully. The heart is steeped in, out of the dinner table and the television and the street, out of attitudes and tones that are never once spoken, down into the deepest layer of the body. And the handing down of a culture never runs on telling, it runs on soaking, and what surroundings you soak in are the person you get dyed into. So this soaking, this dyeing, has an ancestor who took it to the root long ago. The next section brings in Mozi, and the line he spoke twenty three centuries ago, standing in front of a dye vat, that carries how a person gets dyed by his surroundings all the way down. See you there.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.