VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 1

VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 1, SECTION 1

The Slaveholder Who Could Not Cook

At the end of the last volume a line was left standing. The economy is not a second thing set beside culture. The economy is a tree that grows out of culture. This volume is about the economic institution, and it starts at the lowest length of that tree, down at the root. This section will not hand you a definition of the economy. First it will show you one man. It will show you how he passes a day, and it will show you whose hand his life sits in.

First, look at one day of this man

Morning, and he is not awake yet, and already there are people up in the house. The fire on the stove, another hand laid it. The water, another hand hauled it. The rice, another hand washed it. He opens his eyes, and the clothes come to his hand already pressed flat. He sits down to breakfast, and another hand cooked the breakfast.

He cannot cook. In his whole life he has not cooked one meal. He cannot haul water either, cannot lay a fire, cannot weave cloth, cannot patch a roof, cannot shoe a horse, cannot take a pig from the living animal to the meat on the table. Not one of these can he do. What he can do is another set of things. He keeps the accounts, he works the room at the gatherings, he stands up and speaks at the assembly in town, he reckons the coming season, he decides who goes to which task. These are work too, these are skill too, only they are not the same thing as the work at the stove.

By the law, this man is the master of the house. The people in the house are his property. Roman law set it down plainly. The slave falls in the column of things, in with the ox, the horse, the house, the field, all under one heading. The master may sell them, may pledge them against a debt, may give them away as a gift.

Athens did the same. In the fifth century before our era, at the height of the city, Athens held something like three to four hundred thousand people, and of these perhaps a hundred thousand to a hundred and fifty thousand were slaves. One in three. The citizen of Athens had the free hours to go and vote in the assembly, the free hours to train his body at the ground, the free hours to sit down and talk philosophy, because someone tilled his field, someone dug his silver, and someone in his house cooked.

Rome went further. A rich Roman household might keep several hundred slaves at once, into the thousands, and no one thought it strange. They served as cooks, gardeners, teachers, doctors, clerks, musicians, tailors, craftsmen of every kind. Read that list once more. Teachers. Doctors. How this master’s children learn their letters, who tends him when he falls ill, that is on the list too. His whole life in that house, from the breakfast to the children’s lessons, from the stable to the sickbed, was held up by these several hundred people, one pair of hands at a time.

Now move your eye down one inch

Look at the one who cooks for him. Three meals a day, and every single thing that goes into this master’s mouth has passed through this one person’s hands. Which pot the rice goes in, how high the fire burns, how much salt, how long the soup sits on the heat, all of it is in this one person’s hands. This person also knows which day the master’s stomach is off, knows he likes it salty or likes it plain, knows what bowl he wants before he sleeps.

Say it another way. The master’s stomach, his body, his sleep, his very life, one whole set of them, is handed over into the hands of the one who cooks. And if the master is hard on the people who cook, if he grinds them, if he presses them too far.

A pinch of something, dropped into that pot. And he is finished. This move needs no strength. It needs no numbers, no crowd, no one who stands up and dares. It needs one person, at one pot, standing in the place he was already standing in.

This is not talk meant to frighten you. Open the histories, and a master dead in his own house, dead at the hand of the person closest to him, was never a rare thing. The Romans knew it best of all in their own hearts. They had a line that passed among the nobility, and it ran, as many slaves as a man keeps, so many enemies he keeps. That line is not pity. It is fear. And the fear came from this, that he too knew the two doors swing both ways.

Who holds whom in check

Stop here and ask one thing. What does the master hold. He holds this person’s bond, holds his coming and going, holds the day’s grain for his whole household, old and young. That is one check, laid from the master’s end onto the one who cooks. And what does the one who cooks hold. He holds this master’s three meals, holds his stomach, holds his life. That is a second check, laid from the cook’s end onto the master.

Two checks, running opposite ways, each with its teeth in the other. Let one side slacken by a hair, the other draws a hair tighter.

The usual telling of slavery tells one check, the one that runs top down. This volume is going to tell two. Miss the second, and everything built below in this volume will come out crooked.

Take off the glasses of pity first

By now most readers are already aching in their hearts for the one who cooks. What a pitiable thing, a whole life at the stove, not even his own to own.

The heart behind that is a good heart. But those glasses are the first pair this volume means to take off you. Look through pity, and you will always see two things and only two. A pitiable person, and a hateful one. The pitiable one below, the hateful one above. Put the glasses on, and the positions go invisible, and all that is left is feeling. And feeling is the least durable thing there is. It makes the heart comfortable, and it explains nothing.

Take them off, and what do you see. Two positions, and two checks that run opposite ways. The one who cooks is locked by a bond. The master is locked by his own stomach. Whose lock is looser, whose is tighter, is not a thing you can see at one glance. To walk in close is not to crouch down and hurt for him. To walk in close is to see what locks him, and see whom he locks.

Go one layer deeper. Inside slavery there is no such idea as poor. That sounds strange, and it is exact. Poor is measured with money. Much money is rich, little money is poor. But the one who cooks is not on that ruler at all. He draws no wage, and he has food, has a place to sleep, and when he falls ill the master must send for someone to tend him, because if he sickens and dies the loss is the master’s own property. He has not one coin in his hand. He also lacks for nothing.

Turn it around and look at the master. His goods are heaped to the roof beam, and not one of those goods will move on its own. The rice will not walk into the pot, the fire will not light itself, the horse will not shoe its own hoof. He cannot do without this houseful of people, not for one day. His wealth is a wealth held up by this houseful of hands.

So inside this relation there is no rich and poor, no high and low, no noble and base. Only a difference of position. Only a difference in the division of the work.

Fen, the word Xunzi set down long ago

The ancestors set this position out earlier than anyone. Xunzi, in the Regulations of a King, asks a question about as plain as they come. A man’s strength is less than an ox’s, he cannot outrun a horse, so how is it the ox and the horse are the ones put to work under him. He answers it himself. Man can group. And what lets a man group is one word, fen.

This fen is not the fen that ranks the high above the low. It is the fen of dividing the work. One man tills, one weaves, one cooks, one keeps the accounts, one runs the affairs. A crowd of people each holding one position, each at one kind of work, and only then does the crowd stand up, only then does it have the strength to do what no single man could ever do. One man, bare handed, is no match for an ox. A crowd with the work divided, and the ox is pulling their plow for them.

Xunzi carries it on. A crowd with no fen will fight, and fighting brings disorder, and disorder scatters the crowd, and scattered it is weak, and weak it cannot so much as put an ox to work. So for Xunzi fen is not a thing that presses men down. Fen is the thing that gathers a crowd together and lets it stay alive.

Mark where his fen comes to rest. It rests on function, not on rank. Between one position and another there is a difference in the division of work, not a difference of higher and lower. The one who cooks and the one who keeps the accounts are two kinds of work, not two grades of person.

Then where do high and low, noble and base, come from. They are added on afterward. Someone stands above the division of work and pastes on one more layer of reason. Because I am in this position, it is only right that I take more. This pasted-on layer, the ancestors gave it one word, wei. Wei is what is done by human effort. It is neutral. Ritual, writing, the codes, the whole of culture, all of it is wei, all of it made by human hands. And the same hands that can make ritual and culture can turn around and argue the bare fact of taking more into a thing that is only right, and then, layer by layer, fix it into an institution. That word gets a chapter of its own, the next one.

One line, set here for now

The position this whole semester means to set up runs like this. The one who takes the constraint is the slave. The one who lays the constraint is the master.

Slave and master, in that line, are not identities. They are positions. The line will not be opened up yet. It will not come clear until the last chapter of this semester. But its shape has already shown itself in this section. That master, standing before the one who cooks, sits in the master’s position. And in the moment he hands his life across, he has sat down into the slave’s position. The same man, the same house, the same one breakfast, two positions, held at once.

What this section set up, and the turn to the next

This section did one thing. It set a picture in front of you, a master who could not cook, and a cook who held his life. Out of that picture three things stand up.

The first. The check runs both ways. The master locks the slave, and the slave locks the master. Miss one direction and nothing comes clear.

The second. Between positions there is only a difference in the division of work, no high and low, no noble and base. The high and low are pasted on afterward, and the pasted-on layer is called wei.

The third. Do not look at a person from far off. From far off the master is only a hateful shadow, the cook only a pitiable shadow, and you slap on the labels and are done. Walk in a little closer, look down under them, and what you see is two living men, each locked by something, each locking someone.

Then what is the economy. Is it money, is it buying and selling, is it those numbers in the ledger. The next section is about exactly this. The answer will not be the one many people take for granted.

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

SECTION 2. Economy Is Not Money, It Is How People Settle One Another