VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 21, SECTION 3
This Force, What It Made in Two Hundred Years
The last section saw clear how this force gathers. This section looks at what it made after gathering. Speaking of this matter, two mistakes are easiest to make: one is to puff, to give all the good to one doctrine, the other is to disown, to see the cost and strike the merit off with one stroke. Here neither is made, one thing only is done: set out numbers. The numbers set out, ask Sima Qian to come and put these things back in the position they belong.
One. The first item, how long one lives
The most fundamental item is how long a person can live. Before the industrial system was reset, across several thousand years, the average lifespan of people the world over stayed around thirty, and across several thousand years this number scarcely moved. Today, the average lifespan of people the world over is seventy and more, more than doubled.
Look at the children too. Before the industrial system was reset, of the children one mother bore, on average three or four of every ten did not live to five. Read this line slower: it means nearly every mother had sent off a child of her own, and this is not one line in a history book, it is the daily life of every village, every lane, across several thousand years. Today, of every hundred children, those who do not live to five have dropped to a single digit.
Two. How this number was made to change
Do not think this number changed of itself. It was this force, gathered up, put into one concrete direction after another, made little by little. It gathered out vaccines, and those plagues that carried children off by the swathe vanished one by one. It gathered out antibiotics, and a small wound gone septic no longer took a life. It gathered out modern obstetrics, and bearing a child was no longer a pass between life and death. It gathered out running water and drains, and a city was no longer swept by plague every few years.
Behind every one of these things is one person after another who would not have lived, living, one mother after another who would have wept holding her child, raising the child grown. What pushed the human lifespan from a thirty unmoved for thousands of years to seventy and more is not the merit of any one person, it is what this force made after it was organized and turned toward the direction of letting people live longer.
Three. The second item, eating full
The second item is eating full. Before the industrial system was reset, famine was the ordinary state, every few years some place broke out in it, people dying off by the swathe, and this is no exaggeration of literature, it is line after line of record in the history books. Today, famine in most of the world has turned from the ordinary state into a rare thing, the grain threshed out on the earth is in total enough to feed all, and what is left is the matter of how it is divided, no longer the matter of whether it is enough.
Look at a more direct number. Before the industrial system was reset, about nine in ten of the world lived below what today is called the line of extreme poverty, not eating full, not clothed warm, a small illness or a poor harvest and they might not live. Today, this share has dropped below one in ten. Set these two numbers side by side and look slow: across thousands of years, nine in ten struggled on the line of survival, and across two hundred years, it dropped below one in ten. This thing has never been in the history of humankind.
Four. The third item, reading letters
The third item is the thing being done this very moment: reading letters. Before the industrial system was reset, of the world about one in ten could read, and the great majority, a whole life, could not read, could not write, the knowledge locked in the hands of a very few, locked with the nobles, the clergy, the scholar-officials. Today, of the world those who can read reach more than eight in ten.
Think how heavy this matter is. In former days to copy one book took months, and one book cost more than an ox, and today a book is a few dollars, and that machine in your pocket holds more books than the largest royal library of ancient times. That you can sit here today and read this page, this thing itself is the fruit borne of this change. A few hundred years ago, one who could get to read a book was a luck of one in ten thousand, and today it is not one in ten thousand, and this, precisely, is the most magnificent place.
Five. The fourth item, strength, the fifth, far and near
The fourth item is how great a force one person can rouse. Before the industrial system was reset, the force a person could use was this frame of muscle of his own, plus ox and horse, plus a little water and wind power, and how much a person could do in a day scarcely changed across thousands of years. Today, an ordinary person presses a switch and the force he rouses is a match for hundreds, for a thousand strong men.
The fifth item is how far one person can travel. Before the industrial system was reset, the circle a person moved in a lifetime for the most part did not pass a few dozen li around his birthplace, crossing one ocean took months, and meeting wind and wave or an illness on the road, a person never came back, and many never left their village a whole life. Today, an ordinary person can within a day fly to the other side of the earth, and within a second speak with a person in any corner of it. The force enlarged hundreds and thousands of times, the far and near compressed, these too are all what this force made after being turned toward energy, transport, communication.
Six. Set these onto one ordinary person
The numbers are set out, now set them onto one person. You rise in the morning, turn the tap, and there is clean water, and this water two hundred years ago was a luxury that could kill, drunk wrong and you took dysentery. You open the refrigerator, and inside are things unbroken through the four seasons, from every part of the world, and this thing a king of two hundred years ago could not do.
You fall ill, and there is anesthesia, there is surgery, there are antibiotics, and an appendicitis that in ancient times was enough to take a life is handled today in half a day. You wish to see family a thousand li off, and you draw out that machine and speak face to face, where the ancient had to lean on a letter that walked months and was often lost. Your whole life, in all likelihood you will not meet a famine that drives a whole village to death, will not watch half your children die young, will not, over one decayed tooth, hurt to the edge of death with nothing to be done. Remember: these dailinesses taken as a matter of course, even felt to be dull, two hundred years ago were what the great majority dared not dream of. This share of taken-for-granted is this force’s greatest merit.
Seven. What this section set, crossing to the next chapter
The numbers set out, ask Sima Qian to come and put these things back in the position they belong.
Propriety is born of having and falls away in the wanting, runs the line in the Records of the Grand Historian, in the Account of the Money-Makers. Propriety grows out of having, and once there is wanting, propriety falls away. This line is hard, and honest: a person must first have to eat, have to wear, before there is speaking of decency, of refinement, of cultivation. Last semester spoke that line of Guanzi’s: when the granaries are full they know propriety, and today this line is the same position, set out a second time.
So the numbers this whole section set out are not to sing anyone’s praise, what they set out is that base board, and the decency of a person, the cultivation of a person, the ease of a person, all tread on this base board. There is one thing, and not to own it is dishonest: this force in two hundred years and more made things humankind did not make in several thousand. Yet to look at this one face only is also incomplete. This force loosened an old bind that had roped people thousands of years, and in the loosening, it loosened other things too. The next chapter goes to look at that old bind, and at what people fell into once it was loosened.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.