VOLUME III, SEMESTER 3, CHAPTER 32
The labors that cannot be weighed out
Start with a child of three at the dinner table. Take the six rules from the chapter before and weigh him. By time, he does not work. By the piece, he makes nothing. By result, nothing. By scarcity, children who cry are all over the ground. By charge, no load. By contribution, a zero or a minus, he only spends. Weighed down, his labor comes to zero. And yet he eats the most carefully tended food in the house, and the whole house turns about him, and when he cries at midnight the grown ones climb from bed. A man who weighs to zero by labor gets the most care in the house. That single strange fact is the door this chapter opens, because it means the house is dividing by some rule that is not the by labor at all. The chapters before were all about labor that can be weighed and can flow. This chapter walks into the other heaven and earth, the labor that cannot be weighed, and the people the by labor cannot reach.
Section one takes up an old and tempting telling, that distribution by labor is the rule of life itself, and holds it in. A cell does look like it: wherever the body works hardest the blood sends the most oxygen and nourishment, so the muscle in the running leg and the head in thought draw more, and the resource flows toward the hard driving place. A tree looks half like it: the sunward boughs that do the work of the light are sent water and grow full, the shaded boughs wither and are cast off. But a pride of lions turns the taste off: the lioness who drove the quarry down spends the most force, yet the male who scarcely lifted a paw eats first and best, by his position and his strength, not his labor. So down the line the three are not more and more like the by labor, they are less and less, most like at the cell, half at the tree, and plainly by position at the lions. The half that is right is that the by labor has a natural root, no invention forced on the world. The half to be careful of matters more: the cell has no heart, it does not scheme or shirk or grab, and man does, so you cannot lay the cell’s unselfish automatic sending straight onto man, and the higher the life the less it divides by labor alone. It is a lead in, not a proof. Laozi breaks open the deepest pit: heaven and earth are not kind, they take the ten thousand things for straw dogs, treating all alike and unmoved, letting the shaded bough wither and minding not that the lioness who spent force did not eat first. That by labor of nature is cold, without feeling. But man has kind, feels it wrong for the one who spent force and got nothing, sees to the old man who can work no more, and so the dividing of the human world must exactly not throw away that kind which heaven and earth have not.
Section two walks near the people the by labor cannot weigh. The child of three, weighed to zero, gets the best of the house. The old man of eighty, who once raised a household and now cannot work, is nourished and kept in peace, though the six rules weigh him near zero too. Put the old and the small together and the point is plain: were a house divided by the pure by labor these two would be the first starved dead, and no house in its right mind does this, because beside the rule of labor there runs another rule that weighs need and tenderness. And then the stretch most often let slip, a mother busy from dawn to dark, minding the child, cooking, washing, seeing to the old, whose labor is the root by which a house turns, and which has no price because the market can weigh only what can be carried out and sold, and hers has nowhere to be sold. Some of the most needful labors in the world are exactly the ones with the least price. Mencius gives the reasoning at root, treat my old as old and reach it to the old of others, treat my young as young and reach it to the young of others, a rule that asks not how much labor you put out but whether you need to be nourished and held dear, and that pushes the heart from your own house onto others. More than two thousand years ago he set the rule that weighs need beside the rule that weighs labor, and a society worth the name has always used the two at once.
Section three asks how the human world actually sends its things to the people it cannot weigh, and whether it is only pity and random alms. Laozi tells the root: the Way of heaven takes from the too much and makes up the not enough, the exact reverse of more labor more gain, evening a little off the end that has much to make up the end that is short. He does not say the by labor is wrong, he says both reasonings must be there at once, since with the by labor alone the weak are thrown off and with making up alone the strong will not work. And he tells the aching lower half, the way of man is not so, it takes from the not enough to serve the too much, scraping the already short to serve the already full, so that making up the not enough never drops from heaven of itself and man must set out on purpose the workings to right it. Three workings, each a wider ring. The house, most ancient, evening what the earners bring in to make up the old and small and the priceless housework, leaning on the love of blood kin with no condition and no account, but reaching only its own kin. Mutual aid, wider, a village or trade or clan helping its own, the charitable estates and common fields of old and the mutual aid societies today, leaning on the bond of neighbor and fellow, but ending at the edge of the group. Public keeping, largest, a whole society gathering the things of all to make up everyone who falls to the not enough end, the old nourished, the sick cured, the destitute held by a mouthful of rice, leaning not on kin or village feeling but on a set of fixed rules, reaching furthest but most apt to go wrong and be wormed into and misused, a matter for a whole chapter in the back half. The three do one same thing, take from the too much and make up the not enough, catching one by one the people the by labor let slip, and they are already not much like distribution by labor because what they weigh is need, and they stand at the very door of the back half of the term.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to take a rule you have watched work everywhere, the by labor, and walk deliberately to its edge, to the child and the old man and the mother where the six rules all read zero, and there to find the second rule that was running beside it all along. And it is to keep the balance of the book with every likeness and every ancestor, owning that the by labor has a natural root while refusing to let nature’s cold stand as a moral standard for men. What you carry out is two things you can hold against your own life. First, an eye for the priceless labor around you, the mother’s day, the care of the old and the small, work without which a house scatters and which the market cannot see, so that you stop mistaking no price for no worth. Second, a frame for the giving that every society does, not as pity but as three widening workings, house and mutual aid and public keeping, each catching who the last could not reach, each weighing need rather than labor. The chapter has walked you to the very door of the thing the back half will call by name, distribution by need, and before it opens that door it leaves one root question standing: one same share of labor, why alive in this hand and dead in that. That is the next chapter, living labor, which closes a floor under the whole front half.
SECTIONS
Section 1, A cell, a tree, a pride of lions
Section 2, A child of three, an old man of eighty, and the labors with no price
Section 3, Take from the too much and make up the not enough, three workings past the by labor
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.