VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 1

VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 1

An Institution Can Only Set the Frame

The last chapter left a question a good many readers have been holding in. All these chapters on the heart, the hands, the handing down, and yet, can a good institution, a strict law, really not govern torment? Why go all the way around through culture and character? This chapter answers that head on, across three sections. This first one makes clear just how far an institution can reach, and where it cannot. The second brings in Confucius and Laozi, and how the two of them saw the tie between an institution and the human heart. The third sets this whole volume back in its place in the larger set, and makes clear why culture is the root of the other three institutions. Today, the first. An institution can only set the frame.

Start by making the word institution plain. An institution is a set of written rules, that everyone has to follow, laid down by a group of people so they can live together in some peace. A law is an institution. A workplace's regulations are an institution. A procedure for getting a thing done is an institution. This set of books covers several of them, a volume each, the institution of law, the institution of the economy, the institution of culture.

What is an institution best at? Drawing a big frame. It takes what absolutely may not be done and frames it in black and white. You may not kill. You may not steal or rob. You may not break your contract. You may not embezzle. These are the big frame. Whoever dares step over it, the institution punishes, with force. This frame matters enormously. Without it, a society comes apart. But hold onto this. However mighty an institution is, it is still only a frame. A frame governs the boundary. It governs whether the line was crossed or not. What a frame cannot govern is the broad open ground inside it, and how, on that ground, one person deals with another.

Now set torment inside that frame and it comes clear at once. Torment happens entirely inside the frame. Not one bit of it crosses the line. Take the five forms from the fourth chapter, one at a time, up to the frame, and measure them. Picking at details. He works the fuzzy patch in your papers and blocks you. Did he cross the line? No. The detail he picked, the rule really does contain it. He stands squarely inside the frame. The runaround. He sends you back for one more document, trip after trip. Did he break a law? No. Every document he asks for, the procedure really can ask for. Still inside the frame. The cold shoulder. He gives you a cold face and a hard word. Which law lays down that a clerk must serve you with a smile? None. He has not crossed a thing. Hoarding information. He does not tell you all the requirements at once. Which rule forces him to say it all in one breath? None. Still inside the frame. Selective enforcement. He is loose with the ones he knows and tight with strangers. But every single requirement he lays on you, taken alone, is compliant. He is inside the frame all the same.

Not one of the five forms steps over the big frame. Every one of them cleverly walks the inner edge of the line. The frame is like a wall. The evil outside the wall, it can hold. But these five torments all take place inside the wall, and over what happens inside it, the wall can do nothing. This is the root reason this whole volume, on the institution of culture, has to exist at all. Torment is the vast stretch of ground the frame cannot hold. It is too small, too small for any law to bother writing down or to be able to. And it is too common, common enough to be woven right into the fabric of ordinary life. This vast stretch that no frame can govern, what tends it? Only one other thing. Culture.

A reader may not be satisfied. Then can we not just write the institution finer? Fine enough to put must serve with a smile and must state every requirement at once right into it? Then would it not be governed? It is a natural thought, and it does not work, for two reasons. The first. The finer you draw the frame, the more power to interpret it ends up in the hand of the one who enforces it. Write in must serve with a smile, and now, what counts as a smile? How many degrees up at the corner of the mouth? Let him just tug one corner, a smile with no warmth in it, and can you say he did not smile? The finer you try to govern, the more cracks he has to slip through, the more room he has to interpret. In the end those fine, dense rules become fresh tools of torment in his hand. The denser the rules, the more he can hold the rules up to block you. And that circles straight back to the picking at details of the fourth chapter.

The second reason runs deeper. Some things, by their nature, are simply not what a frame can hold. Whether one person is warm or cold to another, sincere or just going through the motions, treats you as a person or as a nuisance, these are matters of the heart. And the heart is a living thing, a soft thing, a flowing thing. Take a hard, dead frame and try to hold a living heart in it, and it will not hold. You can rule that he take your materials. You cannot rule whether, as he takes them, there is a grain of respect in his eyes for you as a person. The first is behavior, and the frame can hold it. The second is what is in the heart, and the frame cannot reach it. And torment is exactly half behavior and half heart. The behavior half hugs the line and never crosses the frame. The heart half, the frame cannot reach at all.

Bring that down to the most concrete picture there is. The same government hall, the same procedure, the same book of regulations, two different people behind the same window, and what you feel going to each is worlds apart. Behind the window is the first person. The institution says he take your materials, check them, hand you a receipt, and he does every bit of it. But the whole time he does not look at you, his face is cold, and when you ask one more question he snorts down his nose. Your materials are short one thing, and he pushes them back out, incomplete, come back, four words, and his eyes are already on the next person behind you. You walk out of the hall with your chest tight. And yet you go back and check the institution, and he broke not one clause of it. He stood squarely inside the frame.

Change the second person into that same window, the same task, the same institution. Your materials are short one thing, and he too has to send you back to fix it, because that the institution cannot bend. But he lifts his head, looks at you, and says, you are just short one certificate, you can get it on the third floor, it is quick. Would you rather make the trip again today, or shall I get everything else done first and you fix this one another day when it suits you? The same errand undone, and you walk out of the hall with your chest warm.

See it clearly. The institution is one and the same. Neither of the two broke it, and neither got you one thing more done than the other. What is it they differ in? The one thing the frame cannot hold, that heart, warm or cold toward the person in front of it. And where does that heart come from? It is not laid down by the institution. It is culture, dyed in year after year. The first person soaked in a cold vat. The second in a warm one. The institution cannot govern that vat. The only thing that can is culture. Which is why a good institution alone is not enough. Whether the people who do a society's business are warm or cold, in the end its culture has the last word.

So here is where this section leaves us. How far an institution reaches, made clear. An institution is a big frame. It frames in black and white what absolutely may not be done, and punishes whoever crosses. That frame matters enormously, and without it a society falls apart. But the frame governs only the boundary, and cannot govern how people get along on the open ground inside it. And torment's five forms all cleverly walk the inner edge of the line, inside the frame, not one of them crossing. Draw the frame finer and it still will not do, because the finer the frame the more power to interpret it hands the enforcer, and the dense rules turn into fresh tools of torment, and besides, some things, like a heart that is warm or cold, are by their nature not what a dead frame can hold. That is the first half of the eighth stake this chapter drives. An institution can only set the frame, torment happens entirely inside the frame, and the frame by its nature cannot govern it. So is an institution that cannot govern the heart inside it good for nothing? Of course not. What, then, is the tie between an institution and the heart? Can harsh law and heavy punishment alone bring the heart to order? Twenty five centuries ago, Confucius and Laozi had already crossed swords over exactly that. The next section brings the two ancestors out, and looks, inside governing by virtue and inside the multiplying laws, for the place an institution cannot reach. See you there.

Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.

SECTION 2  Confucius on governing by virtue, Laozi on the multiplying laws