VOLUME III, SEMESTER 1, CHAPTER 5
Sima Qian and the Cold Eyes That Watch Gain
Start before the sky is light, at a market. Already there are people setting up stalls, carriers with poles, drivers of carts, men with sacks on their backs, hagglers, one pressed against the next. Why do they rise so early, why do they crush in here. For gain. Pull the lens back and the same thing is happening in the court where an official contends for a place, on the frontier where a general contends for a war record, in the academy where a student contends for a degree, only there the gain has changed its name. That press of people is where this chapter begins, because Sima Qian began there too. Guanzi and Mencius told us to settle people first. Sima Qian asks the next question. Once a person is settled, where does he go. And he answers it with a pair of very cold eyes.
The chapter comes in three sections.
The first section watches how Sima Qian wrote his Accounts of the Money-Makers, and finds his method is the book’s own. He puts up no formula and hands down no definition, he beds every observation in a real person, Fan Li who built a fortune three times and scattered it three times, Zigong who traded well enough to clear the road for his teacher’s name, Bai Gui who bought what others dumped and sold what others snatched, and lets the rule of gain stand up out of the men themselves. Then he throws down his two lines, all the world comes crowding and all of it for gain, all the world goes streaming and all of it for gain, and the fierce thing is that they cut through every rank, king and peddler alike. This is not a proposition to argue but ground to build on, first own what a person is and then speak of what to do. His eyes are cold, and it is because they are cold that they can see the person, since to curse a man as greedy is to lose the living man. Nineteen centuries later Adam Smith built the same shape, the supper on the table coming not from the butcher’s kindness but from his self-interest, and the volume names Smith’s real work of wringing that observation into a system while holding it as one position two men each felt a corner of. And it sets down a root of the book, that to seek gain is instinct and duty, not evil, though instinct is no license, since water running downhill is nature and water drowning a village still must be managed.
The second section takes Sima Qian’s next line, that to be rich is human temperament, wanted without learning, and watches it seal off a road. The road it seals is the one that hopes to scrub desire out of the heart by teaching, the tempting notion that if only people were taught selfless enough, distribution would solve itself. Wanted without learning means it grows in the bone and cannot be unteaught, and the third semester at distribution by need will meet this nail again, that a wholly single communist society is a false proposition because private want is a rule at the level of life itself. The ancestors did not scrub the desire out, they nourished it, and Sima Qian ranked the five stances a ruler can take toward the people’s gain, from going along with it down to setting himself against it, which he puts last not as most wicked but as most useless, a man quarreling with a river. Then he gets the words exact. Wanting to be rich is nature and without right or wrong, but how one gets rich is conduct and has right or wrong, and to mix them is either false virtue or playing the rogue. The section closes up close, on an old woman who guards her money to her death and, seen near, is not a miser but a woman guarding the one who saved it and died, sitting in the slave’s position with a love she cannot set down for her master.
The third section asks the hard question, a thing before you and its value, who made it. Sima Qian answers in sixteen characters, it waits on the farmer to be eaten, on the ranger to be brought out, on the craftsman to be made, on the trader to be moved along, four positions passing the baton, and a bowl of rice needing all four to reach your mouth. This is the threshold of a whole semester, because a famous equation gets stuck here, that the worker made the product so the value belongs to the worker, and the two lines look alike but a deep ditch runs between whose hand moved and on whose account the thing is set, and the equation strides across the ditch in one step. Value is not made by one position, it is passed down baton by baton through four, and Sima Qian ranks none of them, setting the trader openly in the same row as the farmer in an age that pressed the trader down. The extra stretch of price along the chain did not grow from thin air or get seized in one grab, it divides down the links into shares, and the second semester will count it into seven, on the line that exploitation is a moral verdict while distribution is a fact of position, and this volume sets out positions and does not hand down verdicts. The chain has only grown longer, until the miner cannot see what he dug become and you cannot see whose hand first touched what you hold, and not seen is taken for not there, one more skin wei has changed into.
That is the method this chapter hands you. Do not curse the person for chasing gain, and do not read the extra stretch of value as one hand’s theft. What you carry away is the cold eye that can see, and the sixteen-character lamp on the ditch, so that when you hold a thing and someone tells you one position made its worth, you can name the four, and the dozens, whose hands passed it down to you.
SECTIONS:
SECTION 1. All the World Comes Crowding, and All of It for Gain
SECTION 2. To Be Rich Is Human Temperament, Wanted Without Learning
SECTION 3. It Waits on the Farmer to Be Eaten, Value Is Passed Down Through Four Positions
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
SECTION 1. All the World Comes Crowding, and All of It for Gain