VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 2

VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 2

Confucius on Governing by Virtue, Laozi on the Multiplying Laws

The last section made one thing clear. An institution can only set the frame, and torment happens entirely inside the frame. And that raises a natural question. Since the frame cannot govern the heart inside it, can we not press that heart into order by binding the frame ever tighter and setting the punishments ever heavier? Twenty five centuries ago, Confucius and Laozi already answered that, head on. This section brings the two ancestors out, and lets them carry the tie between an institution and the human heart down to the root.

Confucius first. In the Analects he set down a passage that matters greatly. Lead the people with orders and bring them into line with punishments, he said, and they will stay clear of trouble but keep no sense of shame. Lead them with virtue and bring them into line with ritual, and they will have a sense of shame, and set themselves right. Take it apart, plainly. Lead them with orders and bring them into line with punishments is governing by the institution's frame alone, by force alone. And the result? The people stay clear of trouble, but keep no sense of shame. Weigh those words. Press on people with punishment alone, and they do not turn good. They turn shrewder, better at working the cracks. It is not that a man stops doing the wrong thing. It is that he learns to do the wrong thing without getting caught at it.

Is that not the very tormentor from the last section? He makes every move of torment seamless, hugs the line, never crosses the frame, and leaves you with nothing you could even take to a complaint desk. He is exactly the master of staying clear of trouble with no shame that being brought into line with punishments turns out. So what is Confucius's remedy? Lead them with virtue and bring them into line with ritual, and they will have a sense of shame, and set themselves right. Led by virtue, brought into line by ritual, a person comes to have that sense of shame, a scale of right and wrong inside him, and more, he sets himself right, straightens up from within. Twenty five centuries ago Confucius saw this all the way through. The institution's frame can make a person not dare. Only culture and character can make a person not want. Not dare is a block set on the outside, and the moment there is a crack the person slips out through it. Not want is rooted on the inside, so that the thought never even stirs in that direction to begin with. For torment truly to grow less, what is needed is not to make people not dare to torment. It is to make them, from the heart, not want to. The first is the institution's business. The second is culture's.

Now Laozi, from the other side, with a line more unsettling still. In the Dao De Jing he said, the more the laws and edicts are put on display, the more thieves and robbers there are. Heard the first time, it sounds simply backwards. Are not stricter, denser laws better at keeping the bad ones out? How do you get more thieves? Tie it back to the last section and it comes clear. The finer the frame, the more power to interpret it lands in the enforcer's hand, and the dense rules become fresh tools of torment. Laozi's the more the laws, the more the thieves is saying that same thing, and carrying it one layer deeper.

Why do more laws bring more thieves? There are two layers. The first. The denser the laws, the more cracks there are to work. A simple law leaves few gaps. A law thick with clauses that quarrel with one another, and the clever spend their days slipping through the seams between the clauses. Every step of the way is legal, and the thing they are doing is to harm others for their own gain. The denser the law, the more of these people who do wrong by the letter of the law. And that, again, is the tormentor. The second layer runs deeper. That the laws have to grow so dense is itself a sign that, in this society, the thing that once held people together by the heart, by trust, by culture, has grown unreliable. A society where people keep their word and carry a sense of shame has no need of so many laws. It is precisely because the line of defense in the heart has fallen that denser and denser laws have to be brought up to plug the gap by main force. So the laws put on display are less the solving of a problem than a symptom that a society's culture has gone wrong. The denser the laws, the thinner the hearts they lay bare. Twenty five centuries ago Laozi had already seen through it. You cannot patch a hole in the heart with an ever-denser institution. The hole is in the heart, and the patching, too, has to start from the heart, which is to say, from culture.

Confucius, governing by virtue, from the front, and Laozi, the laws multiplying, from the back, point to one and the same place. Confucius from the front. Punishment alone only teaches people to dodge, and it takes virtue and ritual to set a person right from within. Laozi from the back. Denser laws only bring more trouble, because the real root is not in the laws but in the heart. Put together, the two lay the tie between institution and culture out plainly. An institution is necessary. The big frame absolutely has to be there, and without it a society comes apart. No one denies that. But an institution has its bounds. It can set the frame, and it cannot govern the heart inside. The harder you try to govern that heart with an institution, the more you find the institution either cannot reach it, or gets worked around and grows fresh torment. The heart inside the frame can only be nurtured by culture. And this must not be misread into institutions are useless, culture is all. That is not it. Neither ancestor ever denied the institution. Confucius himself held office and drew up rules of ritual. Laozi never called for laws to be abolished. What they are speaking of is a matter of which comes first and which weighs more. The institution is the bottom line, the big frame that must exist. Culture is the wider and deeper heart that the frame cannot hold. A good society walks on two legs. The institution draws the line that must not be crossed, and culture nurtures the heart that does not want to cross it. Take either leg away, and it cannot stand. And that answers the question the last chapter left. Why, in talking about torment, go all the way around through culture and character? Because torment is exactly the heart inside the frame that the institution cannot govern. Leave culture out, and you never reach the root of torment.

Someone may feel that Confucius and Laozi are speaking of old, far off things. In fact the same wall gets hit every day, now. Take the most common example. A company finds its people are poor with customers, cold at the counter. What does the boss do? For most, the first thought is, set up an institution. And so the targets come down. Answer within three rings. You must say hello. Wait for the customer to hang up first. Finer and finer. And the result? The staff hit the targets. The phone is answered inside three rings, and the hello is said. But that hello comes squeezed out through the teeth, cold, strictly business, and the customer can hear, plainly, that there is no heart in it. The genuine warmth toward the customer that the boss actually wanted, no target on any sheet can bring out. Is that not Confucius's staying clear of trouble with no shame? The staff have learned to hit the target, and the thing of truly taking the customer to heart has not grown by a hair. The finer the targets, the more the staff simply do the minimum the targets ask, and the places the targets do not cover get less minded than ever. And that, again, is Laozi's laws on display. What do the companies with genuinely good service run on, then? Look at the shops with the best name, and they may not have the thickest book of rules. What they run on is a climate no one wrote down and no rule could capture, that everyone lives by all the same, a culture of we simply treat the guest well, and mean it. That culture is worth a hundred targets. Because a target governs not dare, and a culture nurtures not want. This layer, the second semester of this volume, on education and how a person is nurtured, and on tools and the new thing of our own day, will come back to again and again. From Confucius and Laozi twenty five centuries ago to a company's target sheet today, this wall, that an institution cannot govern the heart, has always stood. And the one thing that passes through it has always been culture.

So here is where this section leaves us. The two ancestors, and the tie between institution and heart made clear. Confucius, lead the people with orders and bring them into line with punishments and they stay clear of trouble but keep no shame, cut to the bone. Punishment alone only teaches people to dodge, to stay clear with no shame, which is exactly the line-hugging tormentor, and it takes leading with virtue and ritual to make a person, from the heart, not want to torment. Laozi, the more the laws on display the more the thieves, from the back. The denser the laws, the more the cracks, and it lays bare only how thin the hearts have grown. The hole is in the heart, and the patch starts from culture. The two, front and back, point to one place. The institution draws lines, culture nurtures the heart, two legs, and neither can be spared. And that brings out the most crucial claim of this whole volume, and of the whole set. Between an institution and a culture, which of the two is the root of the other? Why is culture said to be the root of law, of the economy, of the other institutions? The next section, the last of the eighth chapter, sets this volume back in its place in the whole set, and answers that biggest question of all. See you there.

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

SECTION 3  Culture is the root of the other three institutions