VOLUME IV, AFTERWORD
Afterword
The book is done. Let me set down the lecturer's voice here at the end, and say a few plain words to you, the one holding this book in your hands.
This volume, Political Institutions, is the heaviest in the whole of The Justice Way, and the one whose words go wrong most easily, the one most likely to give offense. The two words political institutions, and someone frowns, someone's temper rises, someone wants at once to know which side you are on. But this whole volume, from beginning to end, wanted to do only one thing: to take those four frightening words, political institutions, and return them to the plainest reasoning, so that an ordinary person who has never studied politics can read them, page by page, and understand, and come away holding a ruler, able to measure the world for themselves, rather than led along by anyone's talk.
This volume covered enfeoffment, the examination, centralized authority, expansion, and where this work stands. But if you close the whole volume and ask what it was really trying to say, there are only two sentences. The first: a position is lifted up, from below, by the group, so that anyone sitting in a position, however they got there, survives only on one thing, whether they truly work for the people beneath their feet, and to leave the people is to perish. The second: for every institution, every civilization, every way of living, lay out both sides, see the good and see the cost, do not rush to reach a verdict for others, hand the judgment to the reader. The first sentence is for the one sitting in a position. The second is for the one reading this book.
The hardest part of writing this volume was not the big ideas. It was the sense of proportion. Speak of China, and fear falling into boasting. Speak of America, and fear falling into a sneer. Speak of colonization, of expansion, of fallen regimes, and fear that a loose tongue would pass judgment on people who lived centuries ago and thousands of miles away. So in this volume, wherever the ground was hottest, the hand was pulled back on purpose, and only the facts and the regularities were set out, both sides laid out, for you to see, and think, and judge for yourself. If, reading, you felt some places were too mild, too temperate, too unwilling to say it outright, that is not the absence of a view. It is a view handed to you on purpose. This is the deepest piece of patient, unglamorous work in the whole of this book, and the thing it most wants to hold to.
One important word is left for any lecturer who one day takes this book into a classroom. This book was written on the rhythm of fourteen weeks, three sessions a week, a chapter in three sections, a section to about one class. But how many paragraphs to teach in each section and how many to leave for the students to read on their own is not fixed, and you need not read it out line by line. Judge it yourself in the room. The material is laid thick so that you have room to choose, not so that you read every line aloud. The skeleton of this book is in that closing line at the end of each section, the position this section lays down. Catch that line, and the soul of the section is yours.
Last of all, everything in this volume that stands up belongs to the ancestors. The centralized authority built by Han Feizi, Li Si, and the First Emperor. The will of the people taught by Guanzi, Mencius, and Xunzi. Governing through virtue, from Confucius. Governing a great state like cooking a small fish, from Laozi. Raising up the able, from Mozi. The heart's blood of the countless scholars across the thirteen centuries of the examination. These are the true authors of this book. What was done here is only to carry them back, a little at a time, out of the old texts and out from under the insults, and to say them again in the plain language of today. The credit is theirs, all of it.
As for the errors, wherever something was said too shallowly, too crookedly, or plainly wrong, that is all the doing of the one who held the pen, whose learning fell short, and has nothing to do with the ancestors, and nothing to do with those who carry the teaching forward after. Wherever you read something that is not right, mark it, correct it, and go on teaching. This book has never feared being corrected. It fears only that no one will carry it forward.
The book is not for sale. It is free, forever. How far it can travel is not decided by the one who wrote it. It is decided by one generation after another willing to read it, willing to teach it, willing to go on thinking from where it left off. Thank you for reading this far.
Credit to the ancestors; the mistakes are mine: Tiger Lyon.