VOLUME III, SEMESTER 3, CHAPTER 37
How this one thing came to walk here
Start with a fire in the middle of a small crowd of the earliest men, the thing that warms them and roasts their food and scares the beasts from the dark. Ask one plain question of it: is it divided by labor, or by need. It cannot be divided by labor, for you cannot tell the man who gathered less wood to warm himself less, and once the fire is up it is warmed at by all who ring it, the sick man who gathered nothing warming there too and the babe who can do nothing set nearest of all. It is by birth divided by need, whoever is cold drawing near, whoever is weakest set in the warmest place. Hold that fire, because the whole chapter grows from it. The last chapters spoke the by need very warm, and this one steps back to ask its other side, whether so warm a thing has a history of its own, and finds it is no notion a clever man thought up but an old thing that came the moment man gathered into a body.
Section one finds the by need’s road of coming in the most ancient place. Beside the fire stands the quarry hunted back, and there the two rules first appear at once: the valiant hunter gets a little more, which even the earliest men knew as by labor, and the old who stayed at camp and the babe at the breast and the man lying sick have a share all the same, which is by need. From the first day man gathered it was never pure by labor, which would starve the old and small and break the line, nor pure by need, which would leave the valiant unwilling to risk his life and the crowd unfed, so the two rules used together is no deep abstruse thing but the plainest way of living man felt his way to. And the guide digs the deepest reason: the more ancient and hard the time, the less the by need can be spared, because none can be sure he is forever strong, and today’s best hunter is tomorrow’s weakest old man by the fire, so the by need is a guarantee a crowd sets up for one another, and dividing a mouthful to the sick man today leaves a road of life for the you who will one day be old. The Book of Rites pushes this into its highest form, the world of great togetherness where none holds only his own kin as kin, the old have their ending and the young their growing and the widowed and orphaned and maimed and sick all their nourishing, the earliest fireside heart written into the ideal of every man caught and not one cast off.
Section two walks the history forward and watches the fire grow into four larger bodies. The charitable estate, a clan putting the field of the too much to the common and locking it so none may take it private, on purpose relieving the poor and old and sick and those who cannot afford to read or marry, which is the reasoning of belonging to the common made into solid field, since once it could be divided private it would become one man’s goods to give or stop at will. The mutual aid within a trade, leaning not on blood kin but on the bond of fellows of one calling, pushing the by need onto the ring of the same trade as the neighbor ring leaned on living near. The union, a crowd of working men who alone are slight gathering into a body to contend for the member hurt or laid off, what one cannot bear borne together. And the cooperative, a crowd of small stakes gathered into one large force that buys and sells and divides together and lends a hand when one cannot turn his money round. Mencius sets the root with a picture of an ideal countryside, out and in as friends, on watch helping each other, in sickness holding each other up, and above all the word each other, which is mutual and two directioned and joins the health of the by need set in chapter thirty six, that it leans on you help me and I help you and scatters the moment it becomes a one directioned taking.
Section three walks the fire to the present as welfare, a state taking up the take from the too much and make up the not enough with nationwide rules, the money to nourish the old and the cover to treat the sick and the relief for the one who lost work all the fireside reasoning burned to the scale of a state, no outland thing any one ism owns but man’s most ancient by need heart grown large as a matter of course, so that to force it onto one ism is again to drag a thing held in common to one side and paste a label. But welfare is the largest and so the most apt to go wrong, since by the fire the feigner could not hide from all their eyes while welfare over tens of millions leans on cold rules that always have a hole, barring the truly needy and letting the cheap wormer in, and worse can turn the fireside’s temporary catching into a lasting leaning, a trouble the next chapter takes apart. And the fire is changing to new firewood today, the technical community that gives its software free burning each man’s heart’s blood to warm all who use it, the strangers pooling money on the net to catch one stranger’s trouble, distribution by need never once broken and growing new looks before our eyes, the most solid proof of the opening line that communism is an element that lives and grows all along. The Book of Songs closes it, Zhou is an old realm yet its charge is ever new, a thing both old and new, its root as ancient as man and its charge ever renewed, which will not die of age because its root is in the deepest of human nature and will not stiffen because every age it grows a new look.
Here is the method, and here is what you carry out. The method is to test a warm claim by asking for its history, to see whether the thing truly walked the earth or is only a fair wish, and to trace it from its crudest first form to its largest present one so its continuity and its changes both show. What you carry out is two things. First, a settled sense that the by need is not a modern ism’s invention nor a dream still to arrive but a thing as old as the first fire and alive in the newest forms on the net, so you need neither credit it to one side nor dismiss it as fantasy. Second, an early warning that its good and its sickness are joined, that the largest and warmest form, welfare, is exactly the one most apt to be wormed into and to turn a temporary catch into a lasting lean, so that the larger the scale the more a check cannot be spared. The chapter has given the by need its history and run straight into the thing there is no going around, that the warmer the thing the greater the sickness beneath, and the next chapter turns to its other side, its bound and how it comes to be used badly.
SECTIONS
Section 1, That fire in the earliest tribe
Section 2, The clan, the charitable estate, the union, the cooperative
Section 3, The welfare state, and today’s new forms
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.