VOLUME II, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 8, SECTION 3
Culture Is the Root of the Other Three Institutions
This chapter has been about the boundary between torment and the institution. The first section, an institution can only set the frame. The second, Confucius and Laozi, that an institution alone cannot govern the heart. This section is the close of the chapter, and it pulls the view back to its widest, sets this whole volume, on the institution of culture, back into its place in the larger set, and answers the biggest question of all. Between an institution and a culture, which is the root of the other? Why is culture said to be the root of law, of the economy, of the other institutions? This section sets this volume where it belongs.
First lay out the skeleton of the set. This whole set holds that human society is held up by a few large institutions. Split roughly, there are four. There is the political institution, which governs how power is parceled out and run. There is the legal institution, which governs behavior, what may and may not be done, and how a crossing is punished. There is the economic institution, which governs how wealth is produced, parceled out, and exchanged. And there is the one this volume is about, the cultural institution, which governs the heart, the climate and the custom and the character that are written down nowhere and yet followed by everyone.
The first three, the political, the legal, the economic, share one thing. They are all hard. They can be seen, and touched, and written into clauses. Power has its charts of organization. Law has its written codes. The economy has its ledgers and its figures. They are all the big frame of the last section. Only culture is soft. It has no text, no clauses, and no office set up to govern it. It hangs diffused in the air, and soaks into every person's words and deeds, into the lift of a brow and the turn of a smile. So how can a thing soft enough to have not even a clause be the root of those three hard institutions?
Take the one phenomenon that shows it best. The same institution, the very same clauses of law, the very same policy for the economy, moved from one place and set down in another, can grow, once it lands, into things worlds apart. The same law laying out a procedure. Set down in one place, business gets done clean and clear, and takes the days it ought to take. Moved and set down in another, the same law grows a thicket of palms held out and hoops to jump through, torment layered on torment. The same policy meant to encourage people to do business. In one place, people build honest trades on it and grow them large. Moved to another, it becomes the tool people use to work the loopholes and cheat. The clauses are one and the same set. Why is the fruit not the same?
Because the soil that the seed of the institution falls into and takes root in is not the same. And that soil is culture. The institution is the seed. Culture is the soil. The same seed, put into soil that is rich and clean, comes up a good sprout. Put into soil that is thin and poisoned, it comes up a crooked one. Look at the seed alone, and you cannot tell what fruit it will bear. You have to look at the soil. So why is culture the root of the other institutions? Because any institution at all, however well and however tightly it is written, has in the end to come down onto one actual person after another to be carried out. And whether these people are warm or cold, whether they act for the public or for themselves, whether they take the institution as a tool to serve the many or as capital to torment the many, is decided, all of it, by the soil of culture they have soaked in. Whatever the make of that soil of culture, that is the fruit the seed of the institution will bear.
Now set torment back into this seed and soil, and the whole thing comes clear. What is torment? Torment is a seed of an institution, one that was neutral to begin with, even good to begin with, fallen into a troubled soil of culture and come up a crooked sprout. The materials must be complete is, in itself, a good rule, there to get the thing done right. But drop it into a soil of culture where a scrap of power is to be used to the full and people are sorted into higher and lower ranks, and it grows into the torment of picking at details and the runaround. Torment is never the institution itself being bad. The seed of the institution is mostly a good one. Torment is that the soil went wrong. So to hope to root torment out by changing the institution, by swapping the seed, is to hope in vain. Swap in a hundred new seeds, and as long as the soil is the same poisoned soil, what comes up is still the crooked sprout. To root torment out for real, you have to change the soil. You have to nurture the culture. That is why this set gives a whole volume to the institution of culture, and puts torment in this volume's very first chapter. Because torment, when the soil of culture goes wrong, is the most common, the most everyday, the most touchable-by-anyone of all the crooked sprouts. See torment clearly, and you have seen the make of the soil under your own feet.
Someone will ask, since the root is in the soil, how does one actually nurture this soil? You cannot just shout nurture the culture into the air. A fair question. Here is a plain direction, with the details left to the volumes that follow. The first thing in nurturing the soil is not to go governing others. It is to nurture first your own small patch of it. The seventh chapter spoke of breaking the chain. A person sees clearly, and in the second he would have tormented, he pauses, and does not dye the color on down. That is nurturing the soil. Once your own small patch is clean, the people around you, soaking in the air off your patch, change too, bit by bit. A warm person warms the small circle around him. Soil is joined, one small patch to the next, into a wide field. The second thing in nurturing the soil is that the people who sit in positions matter most of all. The head of an outfit, whether he himself is warm or cold to people, is the main color of that outfit, that patch of soil. Whether he respects the lowest clerk or barks at him, the ones below all watch, and copy it down, layer by layer. The higher the position, the larger the patch of soil under your feet, and the more you have to mind what color you are dyeing it. And that circles straight back to Mozi, one cannot but be careful what one is dyed by. The third thing in nurturing the soil is what one generation hands to the next. And that is education. How do you hand a good soil into a child's keeping, so that he need not start over from a poisoned one? That is the great subject the second semester of this volume is for. Here, one line planted. The deepest way to nurture the soil of a culture is education. So nurturing the soil is no empty phrase. It is one actual person after another, starting with nurturing himself. It is the people in positions minding what they dye. It is one generation handing well to the next. All three are hard to do. But every one of them lands in a place a hand can reach.
And now this whole volume, and the eight chapters behind it, can be set back where they belong. Why start from a line off the internet, and talk about torment? Because torment is the most everyday cut into the soil of culture. Why talk about a little power, about resenting those who have more and scorning those who have less? Because that is the root from which the crooked sprouts grow in this soil. Why the five forms, and the handing down? Because that is the real story of how the crooked sprout grows, and passes on, one crop after another. Why lay out positions and pass no verdict? Because that is the eye that sees this soil, instead of rushing out to tear up the people. Why this chapter on the boundary of the institution? Because only once you have seen that the seed of the institution cannot reach the soil do you truly understand why you have to come back and nurture the culture. Walk the eight chapters through, and they are all, in truth, saying one thing. Culture is the root. And torment is the one yellow spot on the leaf that you see first, when that root has gone wrong.
That is the eighth stake this chapter drives home at last. Culture is the root of the three hard institutions, the political, the legal, the economic. The institution is the seed and culture is the soil, and the same seed in a different soil bears a different fruit. Torment is a good seed fallen into bad soil and come up crooked. To root out torment, you cannot only swap the seed. You have to nurture the soil.
So, eight chapters of principle, and in the end it has to come down to how you get through your own each day. This whole clear seeing about torment, what does it let you hold onto? The next chapter, the last on the great line of torment, gathers these eight chapters into a single word. Live. It looks at how a person who has seen torment clearly lives that clear seeing into every day, and every second, of his own life. See you in the next chapter.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.