VOLUME III, SEMESTER 2, CHAPTER 22
The Old Bind This Force Loosed
Start by setting down a world you carry without noticing, the world of going to work and changing trades and jumping jobs, because two hundred years ago those words all but did not exist. The last chapter ended by saying this force loosened an old bind that had roped people for thousands of years, and this chapter is about that bind and what came after the loosing. It is a chapter built on a single refusal to flinch: it will name the good the force did in full, and name the cost in full, and insist they are two faces of one thing rather than two things to be weighed against each other and one of them dismissed.
The first section sees the old bind clear. Born into a farming house you farm at twenty and forty and sixty, born into a smith’s house you are at the forge a whole life, born a boatman’s son you are a boatman, and the question of whether you were willing to change had almost no meaning because changing was not in your imagining, the one craft taught by your father the only thing between you and nothing to eat. The root of the bind is one character, vessel, an implement with one use only, a hammer that cannot be a bowl, and that world took a person as a vessel, one craft one position from birth to death, no one’s malice but the way of living of a time when work leaned on the hand alone and a life was too short to drill more than one craft to mastery. Confucius set the counter-position more than twenty-five hundred years ago in three characters, the gentleman is not a vessel, meaning not that a person should learn no craft but that he should not be welded dead by one use, should be alive to a matter unseen and a road unwalked, and yet he set it out and the great majority stayed vessels, because in that time nothing could take a person out of the one craft. That thing came two hundred years ago, the machine, which took away on purpose the repeated single fixed-pattern work, the loom taking the weaving and the pump the carrying of water, precisely the craft that welds a person dead, and the person pried loose went to do what the machine cannot, make decisions, deal with people, think up what was never had, set a rule where there is none, the great majority of today’s kinds of work not existing two hundred years ago not because people could not do them but because they were roped and could not pull free. And the section holds the words right where they sound like pure good news, with the line the next section will use throughout: every liberation has its cost.
The second section spreads that line open on one person, the weaver who wove a whole life, forty years old, at the loom since eight, his hand the steadiest in the village, his cloth carried three villages off to sell. The machine came and wove more in a day than he in a year at half the price, and he did nothing wrong, his hand not clumsy and his cloth not worse and not one day idled, yet no one bought his cloth anymore. He was liberated, and the word tastes of the ground going empty under his feet, because that craft was a lock that held him at the loom for life but was at the same time a floor he stood on knowing what tomorrow held and that next month there was food and that his son too would have a craft, and the lock gone the floor is gone and at forty he can do nothing else. The most crucial line of the chapter lands here: the machine takes charge only of taking away the old position, it does not take charge of sending a person onto a new one, it did not arrange his next work or teach him a new craft or owe him an apology it does not know the meaning of, without feeling when it took him off as when the force knows only the differential. So a gap stands empty between the old position and the new, and the one who takes it up is not the machine and not the force but people, the school, the relearning, the townsmen’s help, the family’s saved food, the whole set of arrangements that let a person stand again, and this gap is the most painful place in the bind, where in two hundred years many fell, the sixteen-hour day and the child down the shaft of last semester being the people who fell through it. And the section moves the layer onto today, where a craft drilled ten years is suddenly matched in a day, and sends the reader back to chapter seventeen, adding the other half to scarce enough the position turns over: what the machine takes is the work writable into a rule and repeatable, what it cannot take is Cook Ding’s seam and Zi Qing’s stand, the layer called the Way and not craft.
The third section looks at the first of humankind’s two great uses of the force, whose core is five characters, loosed to the freest, landing on four concrete things: property guarded most strict against all including the government, doing what you would without begging a nod, a road in the law to begin again after losing all rather than carry lifelong debt, and the price handed to the market’s rule with the government doing its utmost not to touch it. It sets out the merit in five lines, making new things because the daring are many and a notion can find money willing to risk, doing business to the whole world on a frame of sea routes and ports and contracts, money finding its road by gathering from ten million pockets onto a good notion, the days growing rich first to a height not had in thousands of years, and trying and erring fast because the market reads the error and people change roads without waiting for a nod, and it owns without discount that a great part of the last chapter’s numbers and living children and readers are what this force ran out inside this frame, refusing to wipe merit away because a thing has a cost. Then it turns to the back and shows the cost growing from the very same core, six lines: the early accumulation with its great block of overseas plunder and people carried as goods, the environment whose fifty-year account is not on the differential table, the one head grown too big into a monster none can rein, the people not taken up of whom the weaver was one, the hair grown thicker than the hide of chapter eighteen, and the deepest, the splitting of rich and poor. Laozi digs that root to the bottom, the way of Heaven taking from excess to fill the short and the way of man taking from the short to serve the excess, not a cursing but a setting out of position: money bears money, the million putting out fifty thousand more a year and the thousand fifty, two people equally diligent and the gap widening of itself with no hand lifted, the differential forever moving things toward excess, which Laozi names the way of man.
What you carry out of this chapter is one line held against two temptations. The merit and the cost are two faces of one thing and grow from one core, so you cannot keep the making of new things and the rich first days while discarding the plunder and the fallen weaver and the splitting of rich and poor, and you cannot point at the cost to strike the merit off either, would you have its merit then you take up its cost. And the last line is the one the chapter most wants left standing: loosed to the freest is a use, not the only use, and still less capital as an institution itself, the confusion that takes this one set for the whole of capital being the easiest and most consequential to make. Just after this set ran a century or two first, another use rose on the other side of the earth, later and lower, walking another road, and the next chapter goes to look at it.
SECTIONS
Section 1 The Gentleman Is Not a Vessel, a Person Is No Longer an Implement
Section 2 Every Liberation Has Its Cost
Section 3 The Western Frame, Loosed to the Freest
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.
Section 1 The Gentleman Is Not a Vessel, a Person Is No Longer an Implement